Professional Christians.

• Author: Pepus, Chris
• Position: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America - Book review

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges Free Press. 272 pages. $25.

Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction by David Kuo Free Press. 304 pages. $25.

Two recent books analyze the explosive mixture of politics and religion that governs American conservatism. In Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, David Kuo reports his experiences as an evangelical Christian and Bush White House staffer responsible for faith-based charity initiatives. Chris Hedges, a former New York Times journalist, finds totalitarianism under the banner of faith in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

Tempting Faith has received a great deal of attention due to Kuo's argument that cynicism marks the Bush Administration's relationship with evangelical Christians. A born-again evangelical, Kuo worked for a number of conservative groups in the 1990s. By the end of that decade, he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with partisan politics and desired a better, more Christian policy for the poor. In 1998, Governor George W. Bush interviewed him for a speechwriting job. The governor spoke so passionately about fighting poverty that Kuo was bowled over like "a 1960s girl who had just seen the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show," as he puts it.

In 2001, Kuo became an assistant in the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. That's when nothing happened--except for the staffer's gradual realization that the other Administration officials never intended to meet candidate Bush's promise of $8 billion per year in faith-based anti-poverty funding. By Kuo's second year on the job, less than 0.5 percent of the promised money was forthcoming. The only initiatives that sparked the interest of senior figures in the Administration were "faith-based conferences" with charity groups around the country. Those took place in key Congressional districts and served mainly to improve the GOP's image and electoral prospects. Kuo finally gave up and resigned in disgust in 2003.

He attended a speech by the President a few months later. Bush announced $1.1 billion in federal money for faith-based organizations, but Kuo points out that the number was the result of an accounting trick. Even at that late date, he had expected better from George W. Bush: "I was surprised by the brazen deception, and I was crushed by it, too. That same passion for the poor I first heard in Austin was in [Bush's] voice and in his eyes."

Tempting Faith is a useful expose of the GOP's deceit, but it illustrates the credulity of the faithful even more clearly, and Kuo himself is the prime example. Even as he criticizes the Bush White House, he desperately searches the upper echelons of the religious right for authentic heroes, who either keep their integrity in the face of...