Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction

In his first presidential campaign George W. Bush promised to spend $8 billion per year in new money to help the poor through faith-based initiatives. As an earnest and talented evangelical Christian, David Kuo was euphoric, and in 2001 he joined the White House staff as a Special Assistant to Bush to help manage the new effort. At long last, he thought, he had found a way to use political means to further Gospel ends. Much to his credit, two years later he resigned when he realized that the Bush administration had done "less than nothing" to fulfill their promises. It was all "a farce, a brazen deception, smear tactics, a mirage." The grant application process was a sham and probably illegal and unconstitutional. Worst of all, he saw how instead of using politics to further the Gospel, his Bush colleagues played right wing evangelicals like a cheap violin to further their political ends, and in private derided them as dupes, nuts, and crazies. Evangelicals, Kuo discovered, were used and abused as an incredibly gullible gold mine of voters (over 80% of them voted for Bush), nothing more and nothing less. "We were good people," he concluded, "forced to run a sad charade, to provide political cover to a White House that needed compassion and religion as political tools." Kuo has been hammered by Dobson, Colson and other conservative ideologues who cannot bear to admit what he has documented based upon extensive personal experience. I found him evenhanded in his treatment. He calls a spade a spade, gives people the benefit of the doubt, and tends not to judge their motives. He does a good job, for example, showing the flagrant disregard, derision, and breathtaking ignorance on the part of Democrats for people of faith and their concerns (all to their political loss, of course). Talk about out of touch--is it really possible that Terry McAuliffe, former head of the DNC, had no idea who Rick Warren was when he met him at a National Prayer Breakfast (p. 256: "Was it any wonder evangelicals preferred hanging out with Republicans?"). Kuo is hardest on himself. "I let the passion of politics distract me from what matters most in life." In fact, most of his book is a personal memoir about his own awakening to the corrosive environment of political power in which manipulation, fragile egos, broken marriages, propagandistic lies, and partisan ideology are the order of the day. Principled purists with a genuine conscience will pay a heavy price to play this game of pragmatists. For Kuo, a divorce, disillusionment, remarriage, and surgery for a massive brain tumor at the age of thirty-four changed all that, as did his growing realization that for Christians the Gospel should subvert political power, and not vice versa.

Kuo writes as a conservative evangelical who was deputy director of GWB's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001-2003, with a longstanding interest in the politics of compassion/caring for the poor. His pedigree as a compassionate conservative is both unusual and impressive - he writes of growing up Methodist, having a born-again experience in high school; being spurred into Christian political engagement, as a liberal Democrat, by Chuck Colson; working on the Dukakis '88 presidential campaign and interning with Ted Kennedy, before becoming pro-life after his girlfriend's abortion. He joined the Natl Right to Life Committee in 1990, then worked for Bill Bennett, wrote speeches for Ralph Reed and Bob Dole, and drafted Charitable Choice legislation for Sen. Ashcroft as the religious/social conservatives were taking over Congress. Bush asked him to become his speechwriter during the 2000 campaign, and then brought him into his administration in the Faith-Based Initiatives Office. If you think he has interesting stories to tell in this book, you are correct. A lot of noise has been made about Kuo's description of epithets and derogatory references to evangelicals and the faith-based initiative by Rove, Card and the White House staff at-large ("the nuts," "ridiculous," "out of control," and my personal favorite, "the f***ing faith-based initiative"), but that's relatively peripheral. Kuo's thesis is that conservative evangelicals have been coopted by the Republican party (similarly, as an aside, to how the NAACP - once a powerful force for social and political change - has been coopted by the Democratic party) - have become identified with / defined by a particular political agenda, and are so captive to the owners of that agenda as to have lost real influence, or even an appropriate sense of themselves. He calls for a two-year "fast" from conservative religious political activism, as a time to get back to basics with God, to reorient our priorities, and to wean ourselves from the patronage of our Republican overlords. He describes how enamored he was of Bush, as a Republican who talked freely about social and economic justice and compassion for the poor, promising $8 billion a year in compassion funding - $6 billion in tax credits for charitable donations to encourage giving, and $2 billion in new funding for specific poverty programs, and $500 million annually for the Compassion Capital Fund, to help small, local, faith-based and community organizations. He makes clear that, to this day, he respects and admires GWB the man as a person of sincere faith and unquestionable compassion, but GWB the president did not have the political will to actually implement the initiatives. After the first year and a half of the Bush administration, the heart and soul of compassionate conservatism - viz., the charitable giving tax credit - had been replaced by the estate tax cut, and only $30 million of compassion funding had actually made

Reviewer disclosure: A review by a who/what? Five stars? Yes, and an explanation is in order. I don't ordinarily read, much less, review current conservative authors. Like everyone else, I see the daily barrage of political scandal, deceit, hypocrisy, ad infinitum- ad nauseam on the daily news and the patterns are clear: the faith-based amongst us are constantly being prevailed upon to support whatever political schemes and candidates the GOP is promoting. The platitudes and biblical one-liners/phrases are tossed around like candy to attract favor in the single-minded effort to get that precious vote. So blather the "wolves in sheep's clothing", me thinks and gag me with spoon. So how could so many good God-loving, faith-based, well intentioned people be taken-in in light of these obvious blatant scams, nonsense and unfulfilled promises? What's the psychology here? Are the faith-based blind, naive? You know: lights on, but nobody is home. I really wanted to know just exactly what goes on in the noggin of the average faith-based that would have them routinely casting their vote for the GOP/Corporate ticket. So when I first heard that David Kuo's book "Temping Faith" was reportedly suggesting that the Bush admin and the GOP in general was taking advantage of the faith-based for their votes while not following through with promises, my interest was piqued. This "revelation", while an obvious no-brainer to anyone even partly paying attention to politics, is potentially huge. And to boot, this from a Bush admin insider! Hmmm. My first reaction was Hallelujah! A good standing member of the flock finally wakes up and gets it! Considering what the conservative vote has inadvertently wrought on this country and the world: the GOP blessed de-regulating of polluting/predator corporations, war, poverty, a trashed economy (except for the rich and Wall Street), denial of global warming- again, ad infinitum- ad nauseam- well, I just had to find out what David Kuo has to say. The Book David Kuo`s "Tempting Faith" is for the most part, autobiographical: his upbringing, coming to the Christian faith, family, education, trials and tribulations, aspirations, politics, etc. I found his writing style flowing, informing and at times, heart wrenching- he has been through some rough rows in life- the kind that would test anyone's faith. Overall, I was left with the impression that he is candid, honest, decent and sincere, albeit, somewhat naive or at least overly trusting. Although many of his political views differ from mine, he seems like the kind of person who could easily take part in a civil, non-confrontational political debate. His political "insider" experiences include working for Ted Kennedy, being a policy advisor to John Ashcroft, speechwriter for amongst others, Ralf Reed, Pat Robertson, and Bob Dole, et al. Kuo eventually became second-in-command in the Bush admin's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives committee. It was in this role that he wa

I know the author and the book have been all over the media, but I wanted to share that I think the books overall message is worth reading. Bottom line is the fact that politics and religion make strange bedfellows and both tend to get used by the other, which in the end isn't good for the citizens. One might even suggest that the book could have been about any special interest group that has/had close ties with any administration. But the fact that neo conservative ultra conservative Christians were getting so much access yet make up such a small number of citizens is what concerns me. There didn't seem to be much 'big picture' concern about how foisting their rigid views on all Americans was scary and like it or note brings to mind brown shirt, jack boots of an era past. The refreshing part is that the author, a conservative, Christian, dared to speak out about his concerns. The fact the author has photos of him with those who now attack him, suggests to me that what he writes is true. The question is, whether either side will listen and change their ways. One doubts it. And nowhere does the author question GW Bush's personal faith. The book is about politics and religion and the pitfalls that are there.

Kuo was a special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003, deputy director of the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Kuo writes with great clarity and sincerity. Many will read this book for its "Gotchas" about the Bush adminstration, but it's also an excellent portrait of a life: a life devoted to serving Christ through serving fellow citizens, and attempting to serve them both through directly and through politics (yeah, yeah, render unto Caesar etc). Kuo lives his life in the question of how to best serve, and this book combines his history and his ruminations on the mixture of politics and Christianity. I should point out that Kuo is not the first person to leave Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives in disgust. That honor belongs to John J. DiIulio Jr., who described his tenure in the Whitehouse in a Jan. 2003 Esquire article famous for the phrase "It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis". I have only skimmed this book so far, but I was struck by the passage where Kuo meets Hillary Clinton in a receiving line and takes the opportunity to apologize to her (earlier in the book, in order to grease the skids of fellowship, Kuo agrees with a rural sheriff that Hillary is "the AntiChrist"). he apologizes to her for his attacks: not for attacking her policies, but for "personal attacks." Hillary is taken aback, but manages to stutter out an "Okay, Okay, thank you," and later mentions Kuo's apology in a speech. Kuo is afraid his career in conservative politics is ruined, until he learns that Hillary didn't mention him by name. Kuo started in politics working for William Bennett, and then moved to the senatorial offices of John Ashcroft. He writes his disenchantment with politics, of the damage to his first marriage during that time, and his resignation from Ashcroft's office to try to repair his marriage and spend time with his daughter. Eventually he re-enters politics for a second round, and works for Bush in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. One of Kuo's biggest disenchantments in his second round of politics relates to Bush's "Compassion" speech. Kuo regards the speech as an $8 billion per year promise, and writes that they were $7,969,000,000 short on the promise, in the first year alone. He writes that that made him perhaps worse than the Democrats, because at least (in Kuo's eyes) the Democrats didn't raise false hopes. All in all I recommend this book for its sincerity, fine writing, and its utterly truthful insider gotchas about the Bush administration.