It appears to be about 13 minutes and counting for David Kuo's 15 minutes of fame, which makes now as good a time as ever to weigh in on his book, the already-disappeared-from-the-best-seller-lists Tempting Faith.
If you've heard Kuo's name at all, chances are it was back before Election Day -- when "journalists" the likes of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann were gleefully reporting how Kuo claimed to have heard high-level White House staffers disparage Christian conservatives as "nuts" and "kooks." Those comments got a lot of media play as the election approached; clearly, Olbermann, et al, saw reporting the story as a way of angering and possibly suppressing turnout among values voters.
But the "nuts" and "kooks" stuff is really just a small part of Kuo's book (and not even a terribly surprising part. I mean, look what the power-brokers of His time did to Jesus. Being called names behind your back is just a small sampling of the kind of persecution Christians should expect when they take a public stand for their faith.) The balance of Tempting Faith is a memoir of his experiences in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, the outreach to religious charities President Bush established soon after taking office in 2001. Kuo, a Christian, comes to the office driven by his desire to help the homeless and the hungry -- and leaves it embittered by what he sees as the administration's failure to put any monetary muscle behind the lip service it's paid to "compassionate conservatism."
Kuo's frustration is understandable. It is disheartening to engage the public-policy process on an issue you care about and to come away feeling as though the elected officials you trusted let you down -- or, worse, manipulated and used you. Many values voters who delivered both houses of Congress to Republicans in 2004 have felt that way for a couple of years now; the things they care about -- defending marriage, restricting or banning abortion, protecting unborn human life from the suspect science of embryonic stem-cell research -- were in large part ignored by the 109th Congress. That's one of the reasons why Democrats will wield the gavels in the 110th Congress.
But Kuo lets his bitterness take him down a pair of unfortunate roads. The first leads him to attack fellow believers whose policy-advocacy priorities differ from his. The chip on his shoulder seems to stem from the belief that anyone who works within the system to end the evil of abortion is somehow not interested in easing homelessness and hunger. That is ludicrous on its face, of course; if you care about protecting unborn babies, how can you not care about starving babies? Both are sanctity of human life issues -- the difference is some groups and individuals advocate for one more strongly than the other as a matter of calling or vocation. That is not a crime, or a sin -- or something that justifies a fellow believers' derision.
Yet Kuo has derision in abundance, even dismissing the National Day of Prayer as "another one of the eye-rolling Christian events on the president's calendar" -- calling it a meaningless exercise except for its ability to "placate Christian leadership." What he doesn't seem to understand is that the National Day of Prayer is not about White House recognition -- it's about mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Christians nationwide to pray for our country not just one day of the year, but every day of the year. How can anyone who calls himself a follower of Christ think such an undertaking is meaningless?
The second bad place Kuo allows his bitterness to take him is concluding that Christians should take a two-year "fast" from political intervention -- it's OK to vote, but writing Congress, working for campaigns, lobbying for policy goals, etc., should be abandoned so we can focus more on intimacy with Jesus. The implicit notion here is Christians can't seek Jesus and seek righteousness in the public square at the same time. Again, ludicrous on its face.
Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson -- who Kuo called a political "whore" in one of the TV interviews he's done about Tempting Faith -- had a great answer for the author on the Nov. 22 edition of Larry King Live.
"He says that values voters should take two years off," Dobson told King. "To whom would you say that, other than evangelicals? Would you say that to homosexuals? Would you say that to feminists? Would you say that to Jews? Would you say that to African-Americans? Just don't care about your issues for the next two years? That is nonsense."
Indeed it is. But at least there's only about 90 seconds of it left for us to endure.
