Faith-based confidential
By Bill Berkowitz
Created Oct 28 2006 - 9:37am
David Kuo's new book 'Tempting Faith' confirms that the faith-based
initiative is little more than part of a political-religious patronage
system
David Kuo may have lost his faith in the Bush Administration, but he has not
lost his faith. These days, Kuo is at once profoundly disappointed and yet
still extremely hopeful. He is disappointed that President Bush has not kept
his promise to fully fund faith-based programs aimed at helping the poor. He
is hopeful that conservative evangelical Christians will consider taking a
time-out from politics and reconsider their involvement in partisan
politics.
Although under attack by Team Bush and its surrogates -- some in the
administration have called him naive and one movement conservative branded
him an "addition to the axis of evil" -- Kuo has a lot more on his plate
than merely responding to his critics; although to his credit he has
responded to them with remarkable clarity.
During a recent interview with PBS's Tavis Smiley, Kuo pled guilty to being
an "optimist." However, in response to charges that he is naive, he pointed
out that given that he had worked with such conservative mega-stars as
former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bill Bennett, for Christian Coalition
executive director Ralph Reed and the C.I.A., he could "be accused of being
a lot of things... [but] I am not really naive."
Kuo, the former second-in-command at the White House Office on Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives, and a true believer in the power of faith-based
organizations to help the poor, has written a new and controversial book
titled "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." He comes to
this task from the vantage point of having served in the White House Office
for three years (he resigned in December 2003 after being diagnosed with a
malignant brain tumor that is still growing slowly, giving him, by his own
account, perhaps five or 10 years to live) and having been fully involved in
the evolution of the faith-based initiative from its inception as the highly
touted compassionate conservative centerpiece of the president's domestic
agenda to its current status as under-funded afterthought.
"Tempting Faith" is full of provocative revelations; from how the Bush White
House took every opportunity to politicize the initiative to how
ideologically-minded officials frequently rejected applications for federal
faith-based funds because they came from non-Christian applicants; from
revealing how administration operatives mocked and ridiculed leaders of the
Christian Right to how the very essence of the initiative's charge to help
the poor was reduced to platitudes.
Although his critics have raised questions about the timing of the book's
release (a few weeks before the critical mid-term election), those same
naysayers cannot question Kuo's conservative credentials. That's because
Kuo's resume includes working for the National Right to Life Committee and
the CIA, writing speeches for Reed and the Rev. Pat Robertson and stints
with such top-shelf conservatives as Bennett, Ashcroft, Bob Dole, and
Congressman J.C. Watts.
Kuo's book is far more than inside baseball, although there is enough inside
stuff to satisfy any outsider.
For example, Kuo, who is currently the Washington editor of the
religion-focused website, Beliefnet, recently told Leslie Stahl of "60
Minutes" that words like "nuts" and "goofy" was thrown around by White House
staffers when talking about evangelicals: They referred to Pat Robertson as
"insane," Jerry Falwell as "ridiculous," and James Dobson as having "to be
controlled."
Kuo argued that the GOP has convinced Christian leaders "that Jesus came
primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing
political agenda -- as if this culture war is a war for God. And it's not a
war for God, it's a war for politics. And that's a huge difference."
Kuo pointed out that "God and politics had become very much fused together
into a sort of a single entity. Where, in a way, politics was the fourth
part of the trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and
God the politician."
"I feel like it was more spiritually wrong. You're taking the sacred and
you're making it profane. You're taking Jesus and reducing him to some
precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy." Kuo added, "[T]he name of
God is just being destroyed in the name of politics."
But, as Kuo told Tavis Smiley, his book is also "an intensely personal
political and spiritual memoir. This is a deeply personal book about my own
experience. About finding God, right? About growing up in a home where my
mom, who is a descendent of Jefferson Davis, worked on an interracial
Christian commune in the 1950s. I grew up with the passion in my heart for
the poor and for civil rights."
While his conservative critics and Bush Administration surrogates are these
days otherwise occupied doing back flips over, and moon walking through a
series of past and ongoing political missteps and scandals, and the debacle
that is Iraq, Kuo reviewed the past and is focusing on the future.
"I feel a pressing spiritual need to say what I think is important," Kuo
told the Washington Post. "And I really think that what is important is to
be able to warn Christians about politics, that they should not throw so
much at politics, because they're being used, and it will not answer the
problems, and it corrupts the name of the God we're trying to serve."
Therefore, Kuo is suggesting that conservative evangelical Christians
consider taking a two-year time-out from politics; he calls it taking a
"fast" from politics. "For two years, instead of giving $200 million to the
RNC, let's give it to those charities that the Bush Administration was
supposed to be supporting," Kuo told Smiley. "Let's spends more time with
our families. Let's love more. â? Because what is it that Jesus told us to
do? He didn't tell us to go out and court precinct captains. He didn't tell
us to fight for abortion or against abortion, nor for or against
homosexuality.
"He said love your neighbor. He said serve those who are in need... What did
he say is the criteria for entering the kingdom of God? It's did you visit
me in prison? It's hard stuff; it's bracing stuff. Politics is easy,
Following God is hard. Let's try that following God thing."
Although Kuo's book details his disappointment with the president's
faith-based initiative, it should be noted that the initiative has taken
hold in nearly a dozen government agencies, is rapidly spreading its
tentacles to state governments, and although it hasn't fulfilled its
financial promises, it has handed out several billion dollars to religious
organizations.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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