Product Description

David Kuo came to Washington wanting to use his Christian faith to end abortion, strengthen marriage, and help the poor. He reached the heights of political power, ultimately serving in the White House under George W. Bush. It was a dream come true: the chance to fuse his politics and his faith, and an opportunity for Christians not just to gain a seat at the proverbial table but also to plan the entire meal.

Yet his experience was deeply troubling. He had been seduced, just as so many evangelical conservatives had been seduced by politics. Tempting Faith is a wrenching personal journey and a heartfelt plea for a Christian reexamination of political and spiritual priorities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #345616 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743287135
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
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Review
Read Tempting Faith, written by a real compassionate conservative, and weep for the loss of what could have been. Then beware of those who would manipulate genuine faith for partisan political purposes."

-- Jim Wallis, bestselling author of God's Politics

"The best kind of sermon, the most revealing and meaningful kind of testimony. At [Kuo's] call for action, you want to give [him] a loud 'amen.'"

-- The Hartford Courant

"Though Tempting Faith is a story about the Bush presidency, it is even more a story about Mr. Kuo. As much as it is a story about politics, it is also a story about faith."

-- The New York Times

"Tempting Faith is one of those rare Washington books that is worth reading -- clearly written, disarmingly honest, thoughtfully introspective, and unusually substantive.... A refreshingly honest account of how politics can seduce the best intentioned and the most naïve."

-- The American Conservative

About the Author
David Kuo served as Special Assistant to the President under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. He has worked for numerous conservative leaders, including John Ashcroft, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, and Ralph Reed. He is the author of the Good Morning America Book Club selection Dot.Bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath. He currently serves as the Washington editor of the Beliefnet Web site.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

God, Politics, and Fishing

I've never known life without God, politics, or fishing. Eventually I would fuse them all.

First came fishing. A mile down the road from our house just north of New York City was a little lake. Hot, humid summer days were spent on a bridge with my father, emaciated earthworms, and an old saltwater reel and pole. Those days were always fishless -- but full. A son loves fishing with his father.

Over time I ventured there alone, discovering holes under a fence that opened up a world that felt like home. To the objective eye it wasn't much: several hundred yards of rocky shoreline, tall weeds, and scrawny trees. For me, though, there was comfort behind the fence and in front of the water. The fence kept out the world and the water held fathomless possibilities.

Fishing was a repeated act of trust. I trusted that there were fish where I was throwing lures and I trusted that I would have the sense to tug at the right time when a fish took the offering. I trusted that the thing at the end of the line was a prized largemouth bass and not some stinky carp or catfish. My trust was rewarded often enough that I believed this cycle would never end. That, I suppose, is similar to faith, and may explain why Jesus loved fishermen so much.

Growing up, I knew Jesus was the Son of God. I just wasn't quite sure what that meant. A picture of him, blond and doe-eyed with long robes and holding a little lamb, hung in my parents' bedroom. I remember lying on their bed one afternoon when I was little, looking up at him. He seemed sweet. He was pretty. That's all I thought about him for the longest time. My mother, a liberal Baptist, talked about him some, but mostly she sang about him. She sang about him when preparing dinner or washing dishes or doing most anything else. She had a high, beautiful voice. The verses got lost in the singing but not the choruses. I still occasionally find myself doing dishes and humming "How great thou art."

My mother's voice was also slightly haunting and sad. She had good reasons -- the Great Depression, World War II, her father's early death. If I had gone through all of that, I might have ditched God altogether. But my mother chose God, again and again. And though there was great sadness to her faith, there was a great richness, too. She knew what suffering was like and knew God was refuge, fortress, sustainer, and comforter.

My father, however, seemed passively hostile to faith. He was born in China in 1922 and grew up there. His mother's feet were bound, his father had a concubine, and he was given opium as medicine. Of course there wasn't really much of a youth. At sixteen he ran away from his home in the middle of the night before the Japanese overran his hometown near Shanghai. For the next eleven years he fought. First there were the Japanese on the Burma Road, in one of the more horrendous theaters of fighting of the war he would know. This was the land of the bridge over the river Kwai and the "forgotten army." Then there were the communists in the north. These were the years that held his life's horrible hidden stories.

To me, as a child, he felt so tough and so strong and so huge that he didn't seem to need God. Of course, he may have questioned whether God even existed. Or his pain may have been so great that he had little place for the Prince of Peace. I didn't know. He didn't talk about it.

Then again, perhaps he just disliked our little United Methodist Church, as did my two older sisters. It had a stereotypically awful Sunday school replete with felt cutouts of famous biblical scenes. Moses was green, David was blue, Goliath was purple, and Jesus was brown. The services were worse, but then again I was a kid. The pastor, large and red-faced in billowing robes, scared me. Years later, when someone said God smiled, I laughed. God frowned.

But there was another side to my childhood faith. There was Mom reading me the Psalms in the evenings. She showed me stories of daring and adventure: a boy taking on a giant with a stone; a man thrown into a den of hungry lions, only to befriend them; three friends thrown into a furnace of fire, yet untouched by the flames. Church was dull but God wasn't.

Throughout my childhood -- until high school at least -- I never heard words like "saved" or "accept Jesus" or "salvation." There was just God and Jesus, somehow one and somehow different.

Then there was politics. Mine came mostly by osmosis. I remember at the age of five charging through the screen door, breathless from my twenty-third game of baseball with neighborhood friends, in desperate need of water. For weeks on end, it seemed to me, the rest of the family had been gathered around our small black-and-white television set watching something riveting. I paused and saw my first-ever congressional hearing. It made no conscious impression; nor did any of the news about this thing called Watergate.

Far more powerful was my mother's own past political activism. In college, in California, she felt God calling her to serve the poor. She studied nursing at Emory University. She hated it. She told us about the discrimination against blacks by whites, the ghetto housing with no running water or electricity, and the regular denial of medical care to even critically ill black patients. Then there were the stories about her summer living in rural southeast Georgia on an interracial Christian commune. It was a farming collective where men and women of different races lived together to prove that such things were possible. There were shotgun blasts in the middle of the night, cross burnings, and racial hatred of the nastiest kind. She left the South and pledged never to return.

Out of these stories I picked up two inviolable truths. Good people fight against poverty. Bad people live in the South. The first lesson has never left me. With regard to the second, it took me years to see that my mother left Georgia with a certain bigotry of her own.

I consolidated all these teachings in my first political letter. It was fall 1976 and I was eight:

Dear President Ford,

I hope you don't lose to Jimmy Carter. He is a peanut farmer from Georgia and he is stupid. You are the President of the United States and you were an Eagle Scout. I know you can beat him.

Love,David Kuo

Ford lost, but I survived and lived to have my revenge with Ronald Reagan in 1980. At the age of twelve, I adored his military buildup. While my mother and sisters all marched together for the nuclear freeze, my father and I made models of fighter jets and bombers, and that was enough for me to support Reagan, at least in the manner of a twelve-year-old. Reagan's social service cuts and seeming indifference to the poor did trouble me, however. So by 1984, when I was still two years shy of voting age, I volunteered for Gary Hart's presidential campaign and genuinely thought Walter Mondale had a shot at becoming president. I was my mother's son, after all.

At no point in my youth did politics impact God, or vice versa. Politics seemed to be about the practical -- keeping America safe, stopping crime, rescuing the needy -- and God seemed to be about the spiritual: love, heaven, felt cutouts. They were complementary, not intertwined; the secure bookends of my childhood.

My sense of God changed in high school. Jeff Brown was the proximate cause.Jeff was in his mid-twenties, thin and mostly nondescript. His brown hair, pale white skin, thin nose, and mustache were standard issue, as was his height, weight, and build. He was nice, moderately funny, moderately serious, and moderately smart. He came from Wisconsin, a perfectly nice state. He wasn't charismatic in an inspiring kind of way. Neither did he possess the kind of indomitable force of will that draws people to a person. He wasn't William Wilberforce. Still, there was something enthralling about him. The Bible says that after Moses had glimpsed just a shadow of God's back, he was radiant and needed to shield his face for days. Jeff had a kind of dim version of that glow. "Dim" might sound derogatory, but in comparison to the other minister in the church, to most of the congregation, to my high school teachers, and to virtually every other grown-up I knew, that dull glow seemed like otherworldly radiance.

He came to our church to start a "youth group." I had never heard of such a thing before but I gave it a shot. The first night he gathered us all together, told us we would do all sorts of fun stuff, and handed us a questionnaire. Most of the questions were pretty basic: "What are your favorite subjects in school?" "What music do you listen to?" "What do you like doing in your free time?" Then there was number 10.

"Question 10. Let's say, God forbid, you were killed in a car crash going home tonight and you ended up at heaven's gate. God asks you why he should let you in. What do you say? (P.S. Drive safely!)"

"Die and go to heaven?" a fellow teenager, named, coincidentally, Christian, mumbled. "Don't we all go to heaven?"

Another girl exclaimed, "Oh! I remember the answer to this one." She turned to our brand-new youth pastor and said, "Is it that thing you said the other day about accepting Jesus or something weird like that?"

Our youth pastor smiled and said, "Yeah, something weird like that."

I laughed. How silly. How do you accept someone? I knew all about accepting. My father was a college professor. Colleges accepted people. People don't "accept" people. Besides, what does accepting Jesus have to do with heaven?

Everyone knew the answer to the heaven question. If I died and had to stand at the pearly gates explaining why I deserved to be admitted, I would have to tell God I had lived a fairly decent life and leave it at that. I wasn't worried. At seventeen I hadn't killed anyone or pillaged any cities. Sure, I bought that Playboy with Madonna in it. But those hairy armpits were punishment enough. I feared Jeff might be nuts.

It says something about either the gentleness or the ineptitude of our church that I knew...

Customer Reviews

Sincerity, fine writing, and insider gotchas about Bush Administration
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.

One Seriously Interesting Read.
This is one seriously interesting commentary that clearly demonstrates that politics and religion do not mix. More importantly, author Kuo alleges that the former White House Director of Political Affairs, Mr. Ken Mehlman, knowingly used his office and government funds to mount a religious voter movement in 20 political races on behalf of the Bush Administration. In essence, by using the White House's Office of Faith Based Initiatives, which President Bush used to assist the poor, as a central point to court and manipulate the religious-right's political machine, Kuo is openly stating that the Bush Administration misused its power and overstepped its authority while betraying one of their grass-root based supporters. Equally important is the shared commentary about how certain administration members viewed the courted far right, going on to label them as the `nuts'. Overall this is a worthwhile read that must be viewed with a certain sense of reader balance and understanding that writers, regardless of the short and narrow, have subjective views that guide objective reporting.

`Tempting Faith' Reveals Cynicism of Bush White House Staffers Toward Faith-Based Initiatives, Dedicated Religious Believers Lik

By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Hinton, WV - In his eye-opening account of a pilgrim's progress - or rather a lack of it - inside the Beltway, David Kuo's "Tempting Faith" (Free Press, $25, 304 pages) confirms to me something that I believe is obvious: Politics and religion shouldn't be mixed.

In fact, at the end of the book, evangelical Christian Kuo seems to come to that conclusion, suggesting a two-year "fast" from engaging in politics for his fellow believers, who should instead support charities that help the poor and the sick. Fasting, he points out, is an integral part of Christianity, it's good for the soul and body and Jesus was a strong believer in fasting.

The book's subtitle - "An Inside Story of Political Seduction" - tells a lot about Kuo's experiences both before and after working for the George W. Bush administration. From 2001 to 2003, he was second in command - deputy director -- at the President's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, working closely with the director of the organization, John DiIulio, and with Dilulio's successor.

As a matter of fact, Dilulio, quoted in a Dec. 4, 2002 Esquire magazine story by Ron Suskind gave more than a hint that the Bush White House was using believing Christians as part of a Karl Rove-designed scheme to secure the voting base of that group. In the article, according to Kuo (Page 219) Dilulio "critiqued the Bush White House for its lack of a serious policy apparatus. Policy wasn't made by philosophy, John said, but by politics. `There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus...'" Kuo said the article went on at "length detailing Karl Rove's perceived power."

The cat wasn't totally out of the bag, but its whiskers were showing in the Suskind article on "Bush's Brain," Karl Rove. Dilulio, whom Kuo describes as being a dead-ringer for the Newman character on "Seinfeld," resigned as director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiative in August 2001, after the six months he had promised to stay were up. He moved back to Philadelphia where he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Kuo worked under Dilulio's successor, Jim Towey, before leaving in 2003. Towey was Mother Teresa's U.S. lawyer (I'm not making this up, it's right there on Page 197!).

"Tempting Faith" is a memoir of the son of a refugee from Communist China, born in 1922, and a devout Christian woman from the Deep South who hated the oppression of minorities of her region. Kuo tells of his brush with death when he discovered he had a brain tumor at the age of 34 - he's 38 now. It occurred while he and his second wife, Kim McGreery Kuo, were driving home from a party on Washington's scenic Rock Creek Parkway. Kim managed to avoid traffic and bring their SUV which Kuo was driving to a crashing halt which didn't harm her. David Kuo was diagnosed with a tumor and was told after surgery that it could reappear at any time.

Second wife for an evangelical Christian? Yes, Kuo says it happens to believing Christians, especially those in workaholic DC. He and his first wife Jerilyn drifted apart and amicably divorced in the late 1990s; but he's close to the two daughters from the marriage. This is a tell-all book about the cynicism of the staffers in the Bush Administration toward believing Christians, but it's also an engaging and readable look at Kuo's life, with only a little about his dot-com interlude (he wrote a book a few years ago called "Dot.Bomb" and is currently the Washington, DC editor of the Beliefnet web site) and his love of fishing, especially professional bass fishing.

He says his father more or less went along with his United Methodist religion, but his Georgia-raised mom was the major influence in making him a devout evangelical. His mother studied nursing at Atlanta's Emory University, where she grew to hate a profession that discriminated against blacks in the segregated South. She met Kuo's dad in California while attending college.

About the seduction of Washington, Kuo says (Pages 250-251) that it's "not just because of the perks, which are nice, but because of the raw power of the place hidden in a true desire to save the world. It is the ring of power from Tolkien's `Lord of the Rings.' The longer anyone holds the ring the more he loves it, the more he hates it, and the more desperate he is to hold onto it. It becomes the most precious thing in his life...The ring owns, it is not owned."

That's one of the most eloquent paragraphs I've ever encountered about the seduction of power and is a useful corollary to Lord Acton's oft-quoted aphorism about the corruption of power ("All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.").

Before joining the White House, Kuo was shaped completely by a faith he rediscovered and completely accepted during his high school years. He tells of attending college and the the pregnancy of a college girlfriend that ended in abortion (didn't I say this is a tell-all book??!!). His acceptance of Jesus as a personal savior led him to the nexus of religion and politics, working with William Bennett, John Ashcroft, Jack Kemp, Bob and Elizabeth Dole and Ralph Reed, among others, as a speech writer and policy wonk.

Kuo met George W. Bush while the future president was governor of Texas and was impressed with Bush's acceptance - at the age of 40 when he was a down-and-out alcoholic -- of Christ. I get the impression that Kuo believes that Bush is not acting in his Christianity, that it is the fault of White House staffers who thought "evangelical leaders were people to be tolerated, not people who were truly welcomed. No group was more eye-rolling about Christians than the political affairs shop. (Page 229). Kuo adds that "Political Affairs was hardly alone. There wasn't a week that went by that I didn't hear someone in middle - to senior-levels making some comment or another about how annoying the Christians were or how tiresome they were...."

Bush doesn't completely get off the hook, to use a fishing image that Kuo might appreciate as he sits on his bass boat. He says (also Page 229) that "George W. Bush loves Jesus. He is a good man. But he is a politician; a very smart and shrewd politician....if the faith-based initiative was teaching me anything, it was the President's capacity to care about perception more than reality. He wanted it to look good. He cared less about it being good."

This combination of staffer cynicism and Bush's wanting "it to look good" led to the activities of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives being blatantly used to elect Republicans in both the mid-term 2002 elections and the 2004 campaign, Kuo charges.

Reviewer disclosure: Like many, if not most journalists, I'm a thoroughgoing secularist, a person who believes religion and politics don't mix. I approached "Tempting Faith" with an open mind, but the information Kuo supplies confirms my view: Religion and politics not only don't mix, they shouldn't.

"Tempting Faith" is an important book for religious true believers and secularists alike.

Publisher's web site: www.simonsays.com (Free Press is a division of Simon & Schuster).

Kuo's web site: www.beliefnet.com