Time Magazine has an article by David Kuo reporting on how the White House has used religion as a political tool.
For Republicans who fear that the Foley scandal might keep Evangelicals away from the polls in November, here comes another challenge–in hardcover format. A new memoir by David Kuo, former second-in-command of President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has the White House on the defensive with its account of an Administration that mocked Evangelicals in private while using them at election time to bolster its support. In this exclusive adaptation from the book, Kuo writes about how his White House experiences left him disillusioned about the role religion can play in politics.
. . .
I never doubted the President’s own faith or desire to help those who, like him, had once been lost in a world of alcohol or, unlike him, had struggled with poverty or drugs. Because I shared his faith and his vision of compassionate conservatism, I had been a very good soldier. When members of his senior staff mocked the plan as the “f___ing faith-based initiative,” I didn’t say a word. When his legislative-affairs team summarily dismissed our attempts to shoehorn our funding into the budget, I smiled and continued trying to work neatly within the system. When I heard staff privately deriding evangelical Christians because they were so easily seduced by White House power, I raised an eyebrow but not a ruckus. Like everyone else in the small faith-based office, I didn’t speak too loudly or thunder too much. We were the nice guys.Today, however, I decided to choose honesty over niceness. Two months earlier, I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that required intensive surgery and rehabilitation. This was my first meeting with the President and Karl Rove since my return. Something about undergoing brain surgery had made me reflect about whether I had really been doing a public service by pretending that our office had been living up to its commitments.
I glanced over at Karl and turned to look the President in the eye. “Sir, we’ve given them virtually nothing,” I said, “because we have had virtually nothing new to give.”
The President had been looking down at some papers about the event, but his head jerked up. “Nothing? What do you mean we’ve given them nothing?” He glared. “Don’t we have new money in programs like the Compassion Fund thing?”
I looked again at Karl. He seemed stunned at what I was saying. “No, sir,” I told the President. “In the past two years we’ve gotten less than $80 million in new grant dollars.” The number fell shockingly short of the $8 billion he had vowed to deliver in the first year alone.
The President’s staff didn’t just bad-mouth the faith-based office behind closed doors. Their political indifference also kept us from getting the funding we needed so badly. No episode captured that more clearly than the 2001 negotiations over the President’s $1.7 trillion tax cut. In those final negotiations with the Senate and House, the White House voluntarily dropped a centerpiece of the President’s compassion promise: a provision to allow 80% of Americans to get credit for their charitable contributions.
Now the President seemed shocked at the news that the Compassion Fund was a pittance. “What?! What do you mean?” he asked. Karl, still caught off guard, protested. “But what about the other money? You know, the money we’ve opened up to new charities.”
. . .
After two years in the White House, I had come to realize that regardless of where the President’s heart lay on the matter, the back-office Republican political machine was able to take Evangelicals for granted–indeed, often viewed them with undisguised contempt–and still get their votes. G.O.P. operatives trusted that Christian conservatives would see the President more as their Pastor in Chief than anything else. Bush had long used the podium as a pulpit, telling voters that above all he was an evangelical Christian who had been saved from his drinking by Jesus and rebuilt his life around his faith. That inspirational story was carried throughout the country by a network of prominent evangelical pastors who had been quietly working since 1998 to recruit thousands of other pastors to join the Bush team. After the election, however, those same pastors became accomplices in their own deception by not demanding that the President’s actions in office match their electoral fervor.This White House is certainly not the first Administration to milk religious groups for votes and then boot them unceremoniously back out to pasture. In his days as a notorious “hatchet man” for President Richard M. Nixon, before he had allowed Jesus to transform his life, Chuck Colson used to oversee outreach to the religious community. “I arranged special briefings in the Roosevelt Room for religious leaders, ushered wide-eyed denominational leaders into the Oval Office for private sessions with the President,” Colson later wrote. “Of all the groups I dealt with, I found religious leaders the most naive about politics. Maybe that is because so many come from sheltered backgrounds, or perhaps it is the result of a mistaken perception of the demands of Christian charity … Or, most worrisome of all, they may simply like to be around power.”
I finished the briefing. Yes, I told the President, because of new regulations there was technically about $8 billion in existing funding that was now more accessible to faith-based groups. But, I assured him, those organizations had been getting money from those programs for years and it wasn’t that big a deal.
“Eight billion in new dollars?” he asked.
“No, sir. Eight billion in existing dollars where groups will find it technically easier to apply for grants. But faith-based groups have been getting that money for years.”
“Eight billion,” he said. “That’s what we’ll tell them. Eight billion in new funds for faith-based groups. O.K., let’s go.”
We headed out of the Oval Office, down a flight of stairs and over to the Old Executive Office Building, where the pastors awaited us. The President walked into the room, traded a few jokes and told the group that because of the faith-based initiative, billions of dollars in new funds were now available to faith-based groups like theirs. The pastors listened respectfully. Before the President left, they prayed for him.
Karl stayed behind to share some thoughts and answer questions. “Before I get started, I want to say something. This initiative isn’t political,” he told them. “If I walked into the Oval Office and said it was going to be political, the President would bash my head in.”
Then the questions began. “Since the President brought up money, where, exactly is that money?” asked one pastor. “We’ve talked to the Cabinet Secretaries, and they say there isn’t any new money.” They peppered him with questions for several minutes. Finally he smiled at them and said, “Tell you what, I’m going to get those guys in a room and bash some heads together and get to the bottom of this. I’ll be back in touch with you.” He left confidently.
At the meeting’s end, several of the pastors said they wanted to pray for my healing. They placed their hands on my shoulder and called on God to hear their prayers on my behalf. I listened and loved it and said a prayer of my own: that I would have the courage to tell them what was really going on at the White House.
That was more than three years ago. Their prayers have worked on my body. I am still here and very much alive. Now I am finding the courage to speak out about God and politics and their dangerous dance. George W. Bush, the man, is a person of profound faith and deep compassion for those who suffer. But President George W. Bush is a politician and is ultimately no different from any other politician, content to use religion for electoral gain more than for good works. Millions of Evangelicals may share Bush’s faith, but they would protect themselves–and their interests–better if they looked at him through the same coldly political lens with which he views them.
I am not sure what annoys me more about this article: the White House that deceptively uses religion as a political device to maintain the loyalty of religious voters or the inept Christian religious leaders that buy the White House’s line. The Republican party is made up of a number of coalitions, but right now the three biggest coalition partners are probably economic interests, national defense interests, and religious interests. Each member of the coalition brings something important to the coalition. The economics interests bring large political contributions to the Republican Party. The national defense interests are successful at bringing moderate voters into the party that are concerned about defense issues. The religious interests make up the largest voting bloc in the Republican party. When some liberal Republicans lament about how the party has been taken over by religious voters, they fail to realize that the Republican Party would literally not exist without religious voters. It would be a statistical impossibility.
The problem right now is that the elites in the Republican Party only truly care about the economic and defense elements of the coalition. This is self-evident from the fact that those are the only issues that Republicans ever talk about. The issues of importance to religious voters are almost never a central element of Republican discourse. The elites in the Republican Party talk mainly about defense and economic issues while giving just enough lip service to religious voters to ensure that evangelicals continue to loyally show up to vote for the indefinite future. Has George Bush even once ever championed an issue that religious voters care about in the same way that he has championed issues like tax cuts, Iraq, and social security reform? How seriously does the Republican Party take a member of its coalition when it almost never seriously advocates the issues of that coalition, and the interests of that coalition only come up coveniently a few months before the election with no serious lobbying effort on behalf of the issue by the party?
While the elites in the Republican Party do not take the issues of religious voters seriously, there is something even worst, which is that many evangelical leaders have been duped by the Republican elites. Many leaders in the evangelical community have completely sold out to the Bush Administration and the Republican Party to the extent that they are completely unwilling to turn a critical eye toward the Republican Party because of their own personal selfishness. These evangelical leaders have been corrupted by power. They love the fact that they regularly get to talk to high ranking people at the White House, and they know that their regular contact with the White House will cease the second that they begin to openly criticize the Republican Party. Beyond the desire for power, there is also just an amazing level of blindness to reality within the evangelical community. It is like they have come to the conclusion that the sin condition applies to everyone in the world but a person who claims to be a Christian leader. The Christian community should be most skeptical of a political leader who claims to be a Christian because of the disrepute that can come to the Christian faith through a leader that misuses the Christian faith for their own ends.
It is amazing to me how much the Republican Party blatantly neglects the issues that are most important to its largest voting bloc to the extent that one generally is unaware of the existence of those issues except around election time. It is also even more amazing to me how easily evangelical voters have been duped by Republican lip service. What is the solution to this problem? Religious voters must hold the Republican Party accountable. The Republican Party loves to talk about the terrorist threat abroad. We have a terrorist threat in the United States that annually dwarfs the number of deaths caused by Islamic terrorists. Domestic terrorists in the United States torture and murder about 1.3 million unborn persons annually. This is the equivalent of 433 9/11 style terrorist attacks every year. Yet, all the Republican Party and even many evangelical voters seem to focus on is a hunting down a bunch of Islamic nut cases. Christian voters have to demand results from the Republican Party.
(Posted by Trask)
