[THS] !! A Golden Age Of Credulity, In Politics And In Religion

[Peter Webster]

  http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061106&s=wolfe110606

A Golden Age Of Credulity, In Politics And In Religion
The God That Never Failed
by Alan Wolfe

Post date: 10.30.06
Issue date: 11.06.06


Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
By David Kuo
(Free Press, 283 pp., $25)
Click here to purchase the book.

I.

Tempting Faith is the story of how David Kuo, an 
unassuming if ambitious young man, discovered the 
wonder-filled joy flowing from devotion to a 
force more powerful than himself. I don't mean 
that he found God, although Kuo, by his own 
account, first encountered Jesus in high school. 
When Kuo tells us how he got "hooked," the object 
of his reverence lived not in Nazareth, but in 
Austin. "He seemed not just charming, but 
weighty, seductive yet pure, likeable but 
mysterious," he writes of his first meeting with 
then-governor George W. Bush. "I couldn't tell 
whether his disclosures were private revelations 
to someone he liked or just part of a pitch to 
someone he might need. I didn't much care. I loved him."

Neither theological brilliance nor grace-earning 
humility on the governor's part caused Kuo to 
succumb. It was all about the bottle. "Watching 
him, I couldn't miss the evidence of the former 
drunk, the lost soul who had fallen to his knees 
sobbing before God; the sinner who had become 
God's own." For Kuo, being a Christian means 
sharing your journey. "When Christians like me 
share the stories of how we came to believe in 
Jesus and what his presence means in our lives," 
he writes, "it is called a testimony. It is 
deeply personal, deeply intimate, and shared with 
fellow Christians as well as with those we hope 
are open to accepting Jesus." Bush's 
testimony--how he lost his way, how Billy Graham 
pointed him in the right direction--established 
his sincerity. My goodness, Kuo goes on, you just 
had to see the man when his path crossed with 
that of an addict. "Any swagger disappeared. 
Something softer and perhaps more genuine took 
its place. He listened to each story and nodded. 
He seemed more like a counselor than a 
politician. When this happened--just a few times 
I was around--he didn't hurry and didn't rush. It 
was one of the more Christ-like things I have 
ever seen a powerful man do." This is Noonanism 
with a born-again face. For Kuo, Karl Rove is 
"nice" and has "a soft heart," Karen Hughes is 
filled with "sensitivity," and even Dick Cheney 
has "a surprising jocularity." Surprising, indeed.



The hoopla surrounding Kuo's book focuses on his 
tell-all tidbits about what the insiders in the 
Bush administration really thought about all 
those crazy Christians who happened to make Bush 
president. These believers, Kuo tells us, were 
seduced by power. They put aside their religious 
ideals--especially the elusive truth that Jesus 
speaks to deeper and more permanent things than 
tax cuts and tariffs--in return for trinkets: 
presidential paperweights that they could show 
their friends, or, for the most influential 
souls, private meetings in the Oval Office. In so 
doing, says the penitent Kuo, they got their 
priorities all wrong. They should have ranked 
spirit and family over political power. Because 
they did not, they alienated themselves from 
others who shared their faith in Christ but not their political agenda.

Yet Kuo's story of political seduction is, in the 
final analysis, a story about himself. Even after 
he left the White House, where he served as 
deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and 
Community Initiatives, his God never failed. 
Invited back to Washington to attend the first 
National Faith-Based Conference, Kuo listened as 
Bush lied through his teeth, claiming credit for 
making faith-based initiatives central to his 
presidency (when the subject had been relegated 
to the back burner for fear of offending 
moderates) and citing wildly inflated figures for 
how much the administration was spending on the 
poor (when Kuo had told Bush that spending on 
faith-based initiatives had actually declined 
since the days of Clinton and Gore). But none of 
this shook Kuo's faith in the man. Although 
claiming to have been "crushed" by Bush's 
"deception," Kuo quickly brushes aside such 
disturbing thoughts. "Did he ever care about his 
antipoverty agenda?" he writes of Bush. 
"Personally, I doubt he could have cared more. 
His empathy couldn't be faked." He was, after 
all, a recovering alcoholic. "George W. Bush loves Jesus. He is a good man."

Tempting Faith is in its way a significant book, 
not for what it teaches about the Machiavellians 
in the White House--surely there are no longer 
any surprises to be had on that front--but for 
what we learn about young, idealistic, and 
phenomenally naïve Christians such as David Kuo. 
It is not an analysis of a mentality, but a 
documentation of it. To be sure, there is no 
doubting Kuo's sincerity. His faith in God is 
unwavering. He is truly committed to good work on 
behalf of the poor. He did eventually leave the 
White House, and with the publication of this 
book he testifies to the cynicism that he found 
there. But his recovered righteousness is itself 
a kind of alibi. For people like him served as 
enablers for one of the most immoral presidencies 
Americans have ever endured. If we are to know 
what makes Bush so bad, we need to know more 
about why people who are so good could ever have been seduced by him.

And not just seduced. Kuo, whose goodness is as 
self-evident as it is a tad creepy, continues to 
defend Bush after this most self-professed of 
Christian presidents robbed the poor to pay the 
rich, broke his covenant with the Framers who 
wrote the Constitution of the United States, 
launched the first war of choice in our history 
since Polk attacked Mexico or McKinley attacked 
Spain, justified torture without a qualm of 
conscience, and, to top it all off, wound up 
treating his Christian supporters with a contempt 
that would put the most determined secular humanist to shame.



II.

So much has been written about the role that 
religion plays in politics that we tend to forget 
that there is no such thing as "religion." There 
are, rather, religions, each of which has its own 
god or gods, prophets, holy texts, commandments, 
ways of worship, theories of interpretation, 
inventories of sins, and conceptions of the 
afterlife. Kuo's religion is of a very particular 
kind. Born-again Christians tend not to be 
liturgical in their religious practices; 
spontaneity of expression takes priority over 
never-changing ritual. They are not given to 
excessive theological exegesis; the text of the 
Bible tells them all they need to know. They 
generally prefer their rock music to Bach and 
Handel. Compared with Catholics, they are 
distrustful of hierarchy. Compared with Jews, 
they emphasize belief over observance. Compared 
with their mainline Protestant brethren, they 
worship with enthusiasm. And compared with every 
other religion on the face of the earth, they 
judge sincerity by the power of the stories that they tell each other.

Early in his career, Kuo found himself in the 
presence of John Ashcroft, who had been elected a 
senator from Missouri and needed people to work 
on his staff. During the interview, Kuo told 
Ashcroft how his father, an immigrant from China, 
was twice rejected for a visa to enter the United 
States. On his third attempt, a man came out of a 
side office and whispered something into the ear 
of the consular official who decided these 
things, and suddenly his dad was approved for 
entry. "My father never saw the man's name, never 
saw him again," Kuo informed the senator. "He 
believed it was an angel. I told Ashcroft I 
believed it, too." And Ashcroft replied, "How could you not?"

Then Ashcroft offered a testimony of his own. His 
father, a minister in an Assemblies of God 
church, came to see his son sworn in as a 
senator. The idea was proposed that for an event 
as solemn as this one, Ashcroft should be 
anointed with oil. Some Crisco was found, and 
Ashcroft's father, ailing heart and all, tried to 
rise from his sofa to conduct the ceremony. "You 
don't need to stand," Ashcroft told him. "John," 
his father replied, "I am not struggling to 
stand. I am struggling to kneel." Kneel he did, 
and, having anointed his son, he flew back to 
Missouri and died the very next day.

One of the most interesting aspects of these 
stories is that they are not true. As it happens, 
Kuo knew full well that no angel had intervened 
on behalf of his father; the elder Kuo had made a 
friend during World War II whose wife was a rich 
and powerful heiress, and it was through her 
connections that Kuo's father got his visa. 
Ashcroft is a bit more truthful: he was sworn 
into the Senate on January 3, 1995, and his 
father died on January 5--two days later, not 
one. But why obsess about the details? The point 
of testimony is to wonder about the wonder of it 
all. You are not supposed to interrupt Kuo's 
narrative to ask if human beings have more 
influence than angels. Telling a few pious white 
lies is fine so long as the larger truth about 
God's power to direct our lives is made.



Kuo's book concerns the way religious leaders 
were seduced by power, but it is clear from the 
stories he tells that evangelicals, given the 
role testimony plays in their lives, are far more 
seducible than most. John DiIulio, the political 
scientist who served as Kuo's first boss in the 
White House, provides an interesting contrast. To 
be sure, DiIulio, after leaving the White House 
and saying the first truly damning things about 
the Bush administration, soon thereafter praised 
the president as "a highly admirable person of 
enormous personal decency"; but this resembled a 
Rubashov-like recantation more than it did Kuo's 
wide-eyed innocence. Naïveté is just not 
something we associate with the streetwise 
Catholicism in which DiIulio was raised. 
Catholics have had seventeen hundred years of 
direct involvement with government: they are not 
easily surprised by political power and how it 
works. A realist if there ever was one, DiIulio 
allowed himself to be recruited by Bush, worked 
on his plan for faith-based initiatives for six 
months, correctly read the less-than-enthusiastic 
handwriting on the wall, and returned to 
academia. He never lost his innocence, because he had no innocence to lose.

Kuo, on the other hand, stayed on in the White 
House long after DiIulio left, repeatedly 
insisting to himself that he was not going to 
fall for the tricks being played on him every 
day--and then fell for all of them, one after 
another. Even after a car crash nearly cost him 
his life and led to the discovery of a brain 
tumor, Kuo remained sweetly on the job, only to 
be used again. The Bushies, now interested in 
mobilizing their base, wanted proof that 
religious groups were being treated unfairly 
because they were not allowed to discriminate in 
hiring. Kuo dutifully carried out the research, 
only to discover that almost no one ever sued a 
religious organization on grounds of 
discrimination. "Honey," a female black minister 
told one of Kuo's colleagues, "if you can't 
figure out someone's religion without asking them 
the question, well, then you just stupid." 
(Evidently, streetwise African American 
Protestants are just as practical in affairs of 
state as world-weary Catholics). Finally Kuo, 
exhausted and dispirited, turned in his 
resignation. His wife "was waiting for me in the 
West Wing lobby. I took her hand, left the 
building, looked back at the beautiful place 
where I had been blessed to work, gave her a 
kiss, and we walked through the gates back into life."


Unlike people from religious traditions with long 
histories of involvement with politics, 
evangelicals have no firm foundation in history, 
theology, or experience against which they can 
judge the words that so easily come out of the 
mouths of politicians. Sincerity, for them, is 
everything, which is another way of saying that 
facts are nothing. The proof of their faith is 
its credulity. After he went to work for 
Ashcroft--yes, he got the job--Kuo, like many 
young evangelicals recruited by Republican 
conservatives, began to hear about that governor 
down in Texas with the famous first and last 
names. Bush, these enthusiastic idealists told 
each other, was born-again just like they were. 
Kuo relates a story about how, on a visit to a 
prison, Governor Bush had heard some of the 
inmates singing "Amazing Grace" and immediately 
joined in, swaying arm-in-arm with a convicted 
murderer. Lo and behold, six years later the 
convict, now a janitor in a Houston church, shows 
up at the White House to meet the president. Once 
he has found Jesus, Kuo preaches, "even the most 
'hopeless' person could be forever changed."

Skeptical people will read this tale and wonder 
how a convicted murderer found himself released 
from prison in hard-nosed Texas. They might also 
ask why Bush never met with another Texas 
inmate--the axe-wielding Karla Faye Tucker, who 
had been changed forever by her born-again 
conversion--or showed even the slightest interest 
in her redemption; if anything, Bush, according 
to Tucker Carlson, mocked her pleas for mercy. 
But these are not matters that Kuo, the puerile 
anti-skeptic, addresses. Bush begins and ends his 
day with prayer, and that, for Kuo, settles the 
matter. "As a professing fellow believer in 
Jesus," he writes of Bush, "I trusted him." A 
majority of Americans no longer do, but then a 
majority of Americans are not evangelicals.

"Everyone comes to politics," Kuo remarks, "with 
a particular set of spiritual or philosophical 
beliefs motivating them--beliefs about the nature 
of man and the nature of government, whether 
derived from Jesus or David Hume, Moses or 
Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Camus, or Homer Simpson." 
This is nonsense. Hume--or, for that matter, 
Homer Simpson--demanded proof. Kuo never does. A 
lying Christian? It is just not possible. A man 
who oozes sincerity but is about as insincere as 
a man can be? The ironic stuff of literature, 
perhaps; but such complications, such truths, 
play no role in Kuo's happy imagination. 
Born-again Christians are not merely biblical 
literalists. If Kuo is any example, they are 
existential literalists, too--so totally lacking 
in irony that not to hoodwink them would be to leave them disappointed.



Without foundations for making judgments, 
evangelicals such as Kuo can persuade themselves 
about matters of significance that cannot pass 
even the most basic historical or philosophical 
tests. Kuo's "patron saint" is William 
Wilberforce, the evangelical leader of the 
Clapham sect who did so much to bring about the 
abolition of the British slave trade. "If slavery 
had been the moral issue for Christians in the 
nineteenth century," he writes, "abortion was the 
same for many late twentieth-century Christians." 
Abortion was the issue that brought about Kuo's 
political awakening. While studying at Tufts 
University, Kuo had helped his girlfriend obtain 
one, only to feel so guilty that he helped create 
a pro-life group at the school. Even as he 
accepted an internship with Senator Edward 
Kennedy--"I loved him," Kuo characteristically 
gushes--he started moving to the right. "Just 
like William Wilberforce, I became an advocate 
for the ultimately forgotten, in this case, the unborn."

The fact that Kuo saw an equivalence between 
opposition to slavery and opposition to abortion 
says volumes about the difficulty that so many 
evangelicals have in making sharp distinctions. 
Many evangelicals insist to this day that their 
campaign against abortion is the moral equivalent 
of the abolitionist campaign against slavery. 
Those leaders were evangelicals, too; they point 
to such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 
father was indeed the leading evangelical 
preacher of his era. They also sided with the 
weak against the powerful. They were as 
uncompromising with respect to their principles 
as leaders of the religious right are today. 
Regrettably, some anti-abortion activists resort 
to violence, but so, after all, did John Brown. 
Right-wing Republicans today are finishing the 
business begun by yesterday's social reformers.

Are they really? Equating abortion and slavery is 
the kind of analogy that appeals to people who 
prefer sincerity to reality. Let us grant that 
today's anti-abortion activists are as sincere in 
their desire to prevent the destruction of 
fetuses as William Lloyd Garrison was in his 
desire to abolish the South's peculiar 
institution. But everything else about the 
analogy falls apart. Slavery was a social system 
that trapped its victims through coercion and 
custom; abortion is the result of a decision made 
by an individual. People argue about whether a 
fetus is a full human being; but no one, as 
Abraham Lincoln liked to point out, disputed 
whether a slave was. Abortion represents a clash 
between two goods, the right of personal autonomy 
and the potential birth of a human being; slavery 
was evil and represented no good at all. Pro-life 
activists have every right to mobilize themselves 
on behalf of their political beliefs, but they do 
not have the right to claim historical 
predecessors so different from themselves. True 
of any contemporary group in general, this is 
especially true of evangelicals in particular. 
White Southerners whose favorite politicians 
appeal to latent Confederate sensibilities are 
not exactly in the best position to claim the 
moral mantle of those who understood, quite 
correctly, that the existence of slavery in the 
Southern states was a rebuke to every principle for which America stood.

Eventually Kuo would realize that the analogy 
that inspired his right-wing activism was 
inappropriate. "I suppose that as much as I 
wanted to be an American Wilberforce by ending 
abortion, I couldn't equate abortion and 
slavery," he writes. "Yes, I was still pro-life. 
But abortion wasn't slavery and it certainly 
wasn't, as some suggested, like the Holocaust. It 
simply wasn't murder." Kuo's account of his 
transformation on this issue is drearily 
matter-of-fact. There is no sudden moment of 
revelation, no blinding new insight, no shedding 
of the old ideas to take on the new. This is not 
the way Catholics break with their church, or 
communists with their party. One day Kuo believed 
one thing about a potent moral issue, and the 
next day he believed something else. One day he 
worked for Teddy Kennedy, the next day he found a 
position with John Ashcroft. One day he believed 
that Christians should jump into politics, the 
next day he did not. "It is easy to say that I 
became a Republican because I went through a 
religious conversion, felt guilty about an 
abortion, or just needed a job," he writes. 
"These things are all true." Kuo is above all 
else an evangelical, and he feels no obligation 
to explain why he changed his mind in any way 
that relies on logic, fact, or analysis. His testimony alone should suffice.



III.

In the concluding chapter of his unwittingly 
revealing book, Kuo proposes that Christians 
should engage in a "fast" from politics. Fasting, 
he points out, has long been associated with the 
life of the spirit. Christians should simply take 
a break from political involvement; two years--no 
more, no less--will do. While fasting, they can 
rediscover that "Christ alone is the answer and 
our desire." America will not lose its soul while 
they are going hungry, and once the fast is over 
they can return to public life with a better 
sense of how to balance the spiritual and the political.

The idea of a two-year fast from politics is pure 
Kuoism. By proposing it, Kuo need never address 
the intellectually challenging question of 
whether politics and religion corrupt each other 
in some ultimate sense. His fast simply 
represents a temporary leave of absence from the 
already low level of thinking that evangelicals 
such as himself have given to the dance of 
politics and religion. Two years is perfect in 
this regard--long enough to seem sacrificial, 
short enough to guarantee that no serious 
reflection will take place (and that one can 
still get back in the game). If further proof 
were required that Kuo lacks the mental gravity 
to deal with the profound questions stemming from 
his own experience, this stunt should furnish it.

Before he wrote Tempting Faith, Kuo should have 
read Darryl Hart's recently published book 
Secular Faith. Hart is an evangelical scholar who 
thinks seriously and eloquently about the 
dilemmas that Kuo glibly avoids. His book offers 
the single best critique of the religious right's 
involvement in politics that I have read, at 
least in part because it comes from a man whose 
credentials as a conservative Christian are 
impeccable. Yes, evangelicals were deeply 
involved in social reform in the nineteenth 
century, as Hart acknowledges--but then he brings 
to life the ideas of Stuart Robinson (1814-1881), 
a Presbyterian from Kentucky who argued that they 
should not be so involved, and that politics and 
religion should be kept apart for their mutual benefit.

Hart's book reminds us of the extent to which 
evangelical Protestants, despite their current 
alliance with Catholics in opposition to 
abortion, once denounced Catholicism for its 
clericalist proclivities, just as it warns that 
the enthusiasm with which so many Protestant 
sects welcomed democracy in the nineteenth 
century came at the cost of confusing the 
authority of God with the authority of the 
people. "The state's purpose," writes Hart, 
summarizing the ideas of past Christian thinkers 
who have all but been forgotten, "is justice.... 
The church's purpose is mercy.... To confuse the 
two is to misconstrue the bad cop (the state) and 
the good cop (the church). The difference is 
really not that hard to grasp, except perhaps for 
those believers who would like the church to have 
the trappings of the state and for citizens who 
would like politics to fill a spiritual void."

Hart may not be correct that the distinction 
between the one realm and the other is easy to 
grasp. David Kuo certainly fails to grasp it, as 
do all those political opportunists masquerading 
as religious leaders with whom he broke. Unlike 
Pat Robertson and James Dobson, Kuo has parted 
ways with the Bush administration. But just like 
them, he confuses the realm of God with the realm 
of politics. "History, mystique, and the palpable 
sense of power are inspiring, surreal, and wonder 
filled," he writes upon entering not a church, 
but the White House. "Everything felt different. 
The carpet felt plusher and the couches softer. I 
watched serious staffers stride purposefully 
through the doors and tried to imagine what 
important things they were doing." Stuart 
Robinson, J. Gresham Machen, and all the other 
conservative Christians about whom Hart writes 
would have been appalled. Idolatry, for a 
believer, is a grave sin. Worshipping secular symbols is surely an idolatry.



Kuo's book does make one important contribution 
to America's current debate over evangelicalism's 
involvement in politics. Most warnings against 
the blending of religion and politics these days 
come not from Hart's position on the right, but 
from left-wing writers such as Michelle Goldberg 
(Kingdom Coming), Kevin Phillips (American 
Theocracy), and Rabbi James Rudin (The Baptizing 
of America). The general theme of those books is 
that evangelicals are dangerous because of their 
sectarianism. They sneak stealthily into 
America's liberal democratic institutions with a 
determination to overturn them in favor of a 
Christian republic. Spewers of hate, they will, 
if given the chance, not only abolish America's 
commitment to separation of church and state--in 
some accounts, this is something they have 
already achieved--but will use every legal power 
at their command to suppress the rights of 
non-Christians, especially non-believers. When 
conservative religion swamps liberal democracy, 
fair play and pluralism yield to extremism and intolerance.

No doubt there are conservative Christians active 
in the Republican Party who could rightfully be 
called theocrats. Still, I have never been 
convinced of the danger they represent, at least 
in part because the more exposure they receive, 
the more likely most Americans are to dismiss 
them as cranks. (Pat Robertson is one of the most 
unpopular public figures in this country.) 
Evangelicalism in politics, far from threatening 
the future of American democracy, seems already 
to have peaked. Whatever is stirring voters in 
2006, it is not the issues dear to the religious 
right. Karl Rove may get out the base, but when 
you come right down to it, the base is just not 
big enough to govern the country.

If theocracy is not a looming danger to our 
democracy, bathos might be. For every evangelical 
leader spewing hate, there are ten evangelical 
followers who believe that all you need is love. 
David Kuo is one of them. He brought to the White 
House neither money nor mission, but only mush. 
No matter how much he came to disagree with the 
ruthless operatives with whom he was working, he 
writes, "I couldn't dislike them." After all, 
Harriet Miers, then White House counsel, had 
responded to his hospitalization by writing him a 
note offering love and prayers; and this, for 
him, counted far more than her--or anyone 
else's--position on anything involving actual 
policy. "From the moment I found Jesus--or Jesus 
found me--in high school, it was his peace I 
longed for. I didn't know what it meant or what 
it felt like. But wanting Jesus' peace made me 
ache." Most people seeking peace would not march 
willingly into the middle of a culture war. But 
Kuo, the kind of person who could actually be 
moved by one of Harriet Miers's treacly notes, 
did. His intentions were not malevolent. They 
were oblivious, which may be worse.

The last thing America needs now is more 
innocence. Most Americans have wildly unrealistic 
expectations of what politics can do, and, 
expecting too much, they settle for too little. 
We need leaders who can level with voters, 
offering good news when there is good news, but 
not afraid to share bad news when necessary. 
Religion may or may not help in cultivating such 
leaders, but evangelical religion offers 
precisely the wrong ingredients to make such 
leadership possible. Testimonialism simply does 
not make for serious politics (or serious 
religion). It is not enough for us to absolve 
presidents for today's mistakes because they have 
confessed to yesterday's sins. The one skill that 
policy-makers ought to possess is the willingness 
to look beyond personal feelings in order to 
enact sensible programs. David Kuo's religious 
sensibility never allowed him to do that. His 
book offers an acute warning of the dangers that 
evangelicals pose to democracy, not because they 
are too Machiavellian, but because they are not Machiavellian enough.

Alan Wolfe is a contributing editor at The New Republic.