As the President announced at the National Prayer Breakfast, Joshua DuBois last Friday stepped down as executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, where he had served since the start of the Obama presidency. DuBois and his long-time aide, Michael Wear, who had earlier left to do religious outreach for the 2012 Obama election campaign and had worked for the 2013 Obama inauguration committee will, according to the New York Times, “create an organization to help government, nonprofit and private institutions develop partnerships with religious groups to solve social problems.” DuBois also will teach and write a book of devotionals for public leaders, based on the scriptural passages he daily sent to President Obama.

The Christian Post wrote that “[s]ome Democrats reportedly think the White House should now choose a more senior person to head the office.”

Joshua Good, who has worked for a contractor that helped the Obama Department of Labor engage with faith-based organizations, has noted how the federal faith-based initiative under President Obama and Joshua DuBois has stressed mobilizing faith groups in support of administration policy, in comparison with the Bush initiative’s stress on equipping faith-based organizations to better carry out their works of service to their communities. Joshua Good writes:

“In my view, Obama’s second-term faith-based office would be well-served by someone with a more programmatic bent: someone such as Ben Seigel, who previously worked at Seedco in New York City and now directs the Labor Department’s faith-based program. With a decade more experience than Joshua, Seigel understands how the White House’s organizing power could help these groups build their capacities, something that was emphasized during the Bush administration. That happens to be one of the office’s core competencies, given its access to Cabinet-level agencies and the Domestic Policy Council.”

eNews editor Stanley Carlson-Thies has recommended that in its second term the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships should explicitly and strongly take on the task of upholding the religious freedom of faith-based service organizations:

“[T]he President now supports gay marriage. And yet everyone knows that redefining marriage results in a long list of religious freedom conflicts. So the President, I suggest, could speak up for practical solutions to those otherwise inevitable pressures that can undermine faith-based foster care and adoption services, faith-based counseling programs, and religious organizations that have conduct standards for staff and a religiously based conviction about spousal benefits. . . .

“In the same way the White House faith-based office and the agency faith-based Centers would get abundant publicity and also do much good for the flourishing of faith-based services if they make it a top priority to fight inside the government and to the public to strengthen religious freedom rights whenever the administration pushes ahead to advance reproductive, LGBT, and other freedoms.

“Whatever you think about those advances, surely it is the case that to make progress in addressing poverty, sickness, and injustice in our sown society and around the world, the government must collaborate with faith-based as well as secular organizations. That means that in the second four years of the Obama faith-based initiative, special attentions needs to be paid to appropriately protecting the religious freedom of faith-based services.”

To play that vital role, the White House office needs an executive director not only deeply informed about and committed to the wide range of faith-based service organizations and widely schooled and passionate about religious freedom, conscience rights, and pluralism, but also with a strong and positive public image and great heft among the powerful figures and groups of this administration. Who might that be?