Tempting Faith, by David Kuo

Wednesday November 8, 2006

The disillusionment of a young White House evangelical
By Peter Steinfels

The NY Times, 10.31.06

In an election season, how could an ‘’inside story of political seduction,’’ to quote the subtitle of David Kuo’s Tempting Faith, not be mined for every politically explosive example it offers?

And Mr. Kuo, who once wrote speeches for William J. Bennett, Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, Bob Dole and George W. Bush and who served more than two years as second in command at the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, offers plenty.

In his tenure at that office, warm words about compassion, he argues, were belied by meager financing and bureaucratic indifference. Federally financed conferences for religious leaders, he says, were adroitly arranged to benefit threatened Republican incumbents. The conservative Christian leadership that was publicly stroked, he reports, was being privately derided by members of the White House staff.

Naturally, those skeptical of the faith-based initiative are saying, ‘’I told you so,’’ and stalwart defenders of the Bush administration are issuing emphatic denials or even suggesting that Mr. Kuo is either Judas or a fresh candidate for the axis of evil.

But though Tempting Faith (Free Press) is a story about the Bush presidency, it is even more a story about Mr. Kuo. As much as it is a story about politics, it is also a story about faith.

‘’I set out to write a spiritual book,’’ Mr. Kuo insists, and Tempting Faith turns out to be an engrossing piece of religious autobiography and a revealing, sometimes unnerving window into evangelical Christian culture.

There are painful remembrances, like the half-understood decision he and a girlfriend made to seek an abortion, which permanently bumped him off the path of becoming a standard-issue young liberal; and there are painfully comic ones, like the time he felt compelled by Christian faith to blurt out an apology to Hillary Rodham Clinton for all the ugly anti-Hillary jokes he had been slipping into the speeches he wrote.

There is never any suspense about whether the young Christian, lured to Washington to do good, will resist the corrupting temptation to manipulate his faith for political ends.

The book’s plot, after all, is a time-honored one: fall and redemption, and then fall and redemption again. It is classic testimony, and even ends with a kind of altar call summoning ‘’we Christians’’ (he means evangelical Christians) to a two-year fast from all political activities besides voting.

For many readers, the real tension will arise from the question of why this obviously intelligent, alert and devoted young man did not see the train wreck coming. The political shenanigans he chronicles are hardly unprecedented, and he had repeatedly witnessed something less than enthusiasm among Republicans (in fact, among Democrats, too) for helping the needy. If the title were not in use, Mr. Kuo might well have called his book State of Denial.

In elaborating on his case that conservative Christians, himself included, sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, Mr. Kuo mentions perks like presidential attention and conference calls with Karl Rove, symbolic gestures and promises, mostly unfulfilled, of government financing to do good works and combat evil as one sees it.

Those, of course, are the tools put to work with other groups and by every administration. But in Mr. Kuo’s story, are there also not elements specific to evangelical culture at work? Is it too much to see the roots there of Mr. Kuo’s startling switch from voting for Michael S. Dukakis and interning in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy to opposing gay rights, favoring every manner of tax cut and considering liberals the children of darkness.

‘’I made a seamless transition to embrace all of these positions,’’ Mr. Kuo writes. Such quick makeovers are not unknown on the secular left or right. But Mr. Kuo gives a strong impression that his was related to the very idea of rapid conversion, a total turning around of one’s life, combined with the effect of the ideologically monolithic character of the evangelical congregation he joined in Washington.

And what of the surprisingly uncritical trust that the author, like many other conservative Christians, put in George W. Bush? ‘’Christians trust their Christian president,’’ Mr. Kuo writes; for many of them ‘’George W. Bush can really do no wrong.’’ He ‘’loves Jesus’’ and is, therefore, ‘’a good man.’’

In the book and in conversations on the phone and in person, Mr. Kuo is forthright about his own love of Jesus, and he never questions the president’s. But he does recognize the temptation this poses for evangelicals like himself — of substituting for Jesus, whom ‘’you can’t see,’’ someone else identified with him and ready at hand.

Mr. Kuo’s religious forthrightness itself raises another intriguing question about evangelical culture. Evangelicals frequently demonstrate a verbal facility and emotional warmth in articulating their faith — in spontaneous prayer, for example, or in personal testimonies — that other believers envy. But does that put a premium on words and feelings rather than on actions and results?

In 1998, after talking at length with Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, Mr. Kuo was overwhelmed. ‘’Bush was the real deal,’’ he told himself. ‘’He loved Jesus. He wanted to help the poor.’’ Six years and many disappointments later, Mr. Kuo listened to a speech by the president and concluded: ‘’That same passion for the poor I first heard in Austin was in his voice and in his eyes. But the passion was a passion for talking about compassion, not fighting for compassion.’’

Ultimately the lesson Mr. Kuo hopes his fellow evangelicals learn goes far beyond this president and his policies. ‘’At the end of the day,’’ he said, ‘’politics is easy; God is hard.’’ Politics, by setting up very tangible enemies to be defeated, ‘’gives the illusion of a solution,’’ he said, while God demands personal transformation. ‘’What,’’ he asked, ‘’is harder than to be transformed by unconditional love?’’

This very contrast between political change and personal transformation has deep evangelical roots, of course. Secular progressives might counter with the mirror image of his formulation: God is easy; politics is hard.

And then there is another possibility: God is hard, and so is politics — at least the politics practiced with a good deal of skepticism, with an anticipation of compromises and setbacks, and with a recognition of the pride and egoism, as the theologian

Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, that infects even (or perhaps especially) humanity’s most faith-based initiatives.

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