President Obama hits a triple.

Melissa Rogers, a noted consensus-building church-state expert, has been appointed the new director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, succeeding Joshua DuBois, who resigned in February. She was the chair of President Obama’s first Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, where she also directed its taskforce on “Reform of the Office,” which recommended that the President largely maintain the principles of the faith-based initiative as those were developed during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Most recently, Rogers has been the founder and director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

Before her Wake Forest and Advisory Council service, she was the executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and, earlier, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Rogers has been involved in a series of important “common ground” projects designed to foster understanding of and respect for religious freedom across various areas of disagreement. She is notable for advising both government and faith-based organizations, and has been a strong voice reminding faith-based service organizations and churches that religious freedom is intended not narrowly to free them from government accountability but more significantly to enable them to serve God and neighbor with greater faithfulness.

She carries into the White House faith-based office a concern not only with the conditions under which religious organizations can partner with the federal government to provide services but more generally with how the federal government should respect religious freedom when it regulates and legislates in general, including on such matters as the HHS contraceptives mandate, changing definitions of marriage, and reproductive and LGBT rights. It is to the good of society in general, as well as to our nation’s many religious communities and numerous faith-based organizations, and a decision of great credit to President Obama, that he appointed to this strategic office at this time such a stalwart, experienced, and authoritative advocate of religious freedom.

One important caveat: many faith-based organizations will be very uneasy about Rogers’ view that their right to hire on a religious basis should be limited in any program they operate using government funds. Such a universal limit would be unprecedented and would cause many of the government’s current and most-valued service partners to have to walk away. The President, who holds the same position, has refrained so far from making such a drastic and counterproductive change. Here’s praying that an appreciation for the important work of the government’s religious partners will continue to trump abstract separationist impulses.

Further Reading: Melissa Rogers and E. J. Dionne, Serving People in Need, Safeguarding Religious Freedom: Recommendations for the New Administration on Partnerships with Faith-Based Organizations (Brookings Institution, Dec. 2008).