When word came down yesterday, that the United States Supreme Court had reached a decision in Hein vs. Freedom From Religion Foundation, a key case involving the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, my first thought was “does that office still exists?”

The White House came under attack by a coalition of atheists and agnostics, who brought a case against the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives claiming that the office’s sponsorship of certain conferences attended by members of faith-based groups and others constituted a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The group opposed what they saw as the government promoting religion. The ruling, though, was in favor of the administration.

While both President Bush and opponents of the opinion, which held that taxpayers cannot challenge expenditures made via the executive branch to faithbased organizations, maintain that it has broad implications, the court’s decision seems to be limited to the question of who can bring suit to challenge such spending. It is unlikely that the ruling would prevent an aggrieved party from challenging a clear constitutional violation.

The case did not involve a grand expenditure to a religiously-oriented group. Rather, members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the group that brought suit against the officials running the White House’s faith-based initiatives, objected to conferences the White House officials ran in different cities to which members of faith-based charitable groups were invited.

The foundation charged that such conferences gave a leg up to faith-based groups, singling them “out as being particularly worthy of federal funding … and the belief in God is extolled as distinguishing the claimed effectiveness of faith-based social services,” according to the group’s brief. They also charged that the conferences “sent the message to nonbelievers ‘that they are outsiders’ and ‘not full members of the political community.'”

This is a lot of hot air. Attendees at some of the faith-based conferences describe them as relatively mundane affairs with lots of discussions about funding applications with both faith-based and non-faith based groups in attendance.

The focus of those conferences was much more about federal funding authorities than on the language and rhetoric of faith. Concerns about the potential funding recipients related to issues of governance and oversight. Smaller groups don’t always have the infrastructure necessary to watch over the distribution of funds. In some cases, the less formalized structure can lead to misspent funds or worse.

President Bush’s commitment to “charitable choice,” the idea of providing federal funds to grassroots groups, often religious organizations, to address social issues, was an important component of his domestic agenda as a Republican candidate for president in 2000.

Mr. Bush penned a glowing forward to a hotly-discussed book on the subject by Marvin Olasky, “Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America.” He made “compassionate conservatism” a major theme in his speech accepting the Republican National Committee’s nomination in Philadelphia. “On this ground, we will lead our nation,” Mr. Bush orated. “And in the next bold step of welfare reform, we will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food pantry and crisis pregnancy centers, people reclaiming their communities block by block and heart by heart.”

During the speech, Mr. Bush spoke of a Minneapolis-based minister who washed the feet of the homeless and ran a program called “Sharing and Caring Hands” which serve 1,000 meals a week.

Nothing as majestic as Mr. Bush’s lofty goals of compassionate conservatism ever came to pass. To understand the extent to which the administration’s domestic ambitions, and its plans for faith-based initiatives, have shrunk since those days, it is helpful to know what yesterday’s case was actually about.

Yesterday’s ruling was on a narrow question of who can challenge the expenditures of the executive branch. Mr. Olasky, who was previously an informal adviser to then-Governor Bush, said in an e-mail, “It’s a narrowly argued decision about a modest program, interesting in indicating the direction of the Supremes but not a landmark by itself,” Mr. Olasky said.

Anybody playing a helpful role in America’s forgotten urban centers ought to be helped, so long as they comply with the constitution and use monies appropriately.

Had President Bush maintained his zeal for “compassionate conservatism” that dominated his campaign for the presidency, then we might be having a no-holds-barred donnybrook at this point in the administration. The first sign that the so-called faith-based initiative might be something less than promised came in early August 2001, when the office’s head, the passionate academic John DiIulio, stepped down. After that, the office never recaptured the energy it possessed at the start of the administration.

Something else, of course, happened only three weeks after Mr. DiIulio’s resignation: September 11. From that point forward, foreign concerns became paramount.

At some point in the future, the War on Terror may be won or America may decide to devote itself with more rigor to domestic concerns. At that point, there may be a ripe constitutional issue for the Supreme Court to bite into. But yesterday’s decision wasn’t it.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.