-Based:

A Slate article by Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary reports this about a meeting of linguists:

The suffix -based, as in faith-based or reality-based, was widely disliked. “It’s its own opposite,” said Bill Kretzschmar, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of America. “If it’s reality-based, it’s not real.”

But that doesn’t seem quite right to me.

A. As I understand it, “faith-based” is most commonly used to discuss “faith-based initiatives” which really refer to faith-based social service programs and groups. A faith-based program for recovering alcoholics is something that’s aimed at using religion to help people overcome alcoholism: The technique is based on faith, though its goal is to achieve a good result (and a result that has important secular effects). Likewise for faith-based programs for fighting unwed pregnancy and the like. We might also talk of “faith-based decisionmaking,” which would be decisionmaking that’s based in important ways on your religious commitments.

We wouldn’t say “If it’s faith-based, it’s not faith,” partly because “faith-based” is an adjective and “faith” is a noun. We wouldn’t say “If it’s faith-based, it’s not about faith,” because that would be wrong. And we wouldn’t say “If it’s faith-based, it’s not religious worship,” because that’s beside the point: Faith-based programs aren’t supposed to be religious worship for its own sake, but programs that use participants’ faith as a means to achieve goals that are also the goals of other secular programs.

B. “Reality-based,” as I understand it, has three meanings. Meaning 1 is in the phrase “reality-based [television] programming” or “reality-based shows,” such as Survivor and the like. Here, it’s true that “reality-based” isn’t quite “real,” but it’s also beside the point. “Reality-based” conveys well the fact that these shows are unscripted and involve participants’ own real reactions to certain stimuli (not just what the writers told actors to say); but at the same time the stimuli are indeed crafted by the producers of the show, so the program really isn’t real.

Meaning 2, which emerged in late 2004, is exemplified by the term “reality-based community,” which people usually (though not always) use to refer to themselves and their allies as people whose thinking is rooted in reality (usually as opposed to faith, or to folly); and meaning 3, which emerged at the same time, means “based on an unimaginative, static view of reality.”

Here are the earliest uses of these meanings that I could find on NEXIS, both from Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill.:

1. CNN, Oct. 15, 2004: “What we found, and what I found over, really, years of investigating and reporting on George Bush, is a steady progression. He has retreated step by step from the kind of critical analysis upon which presidents have always relied, and ever more embraced faith at the core of his decision-making process. This is something that–I talked to Republicans in this story, and some of them are quite mightily concerned about: Is the president dealing with reality-based issues or is he ever more guided by the faith-based certainties? . . . [T]here will be a civil war in the Republican Party on November 3rd if George Bush wins between the reality-based community and the faith-based community.”
2. N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 2004: “In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

   “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Note, of course, that the term is used differently in these quotes: In the former, it’s used as a normatively positive antonym to “faith-based” (meaning 2). In the latter, it’s used as a pejorative for “tied too much to current reality, and lacking an understanding of how the reality can and will be transformed” (meaning 3) But my sense from looking at subsequent uses is that the subtler, negative meaning 3 (which did mean “not real” in the sense of “not the way the world really works anymore”) has been swamped by the simpler, positive meaning 2. And in this positive usage, “reality-based” is close to “real”; it does mean “based on what we see as reality, not based on your unproven, unprovable faith / myth.”

Now maybe I’m missing something here — but if I’m right, then this suggests that the criticism of “faith-based” is certainly misplaced, and of “reality-based” is mostly misplaced. Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.