The image of Karl Rove tracking down a member of the George W. Bush transition team and threatening him with the words “Just get me a F*%#ing faith-based thing. Got it?” is one that I will never forget.
This and many other behind-the-scenes revelations are to be savored in David Kuo’s 2006 tell-all, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. I am re-visiting this book as part of my current research on Barack Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
The much-maligned OFBNP is the renovated, Democratic version of an earlier and highly controversial prototype. That would be the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The latter was the brainchild of Kuo’s boss and idol, George W. Bush.
The two Offices—the conjoined twins of 21st-century American domestic policy—have been the subject of much discussion. Their deeper significance is hotly debated. But if you were to see the Bush/Obama contraption as representing a complete and long-coming re-thinking of the relation of government to religion you probably wouldn’t be far off.
Washington, I am starting to notice, pulverizes people. Kuo, an Evangelical Christian, Republican operative, and admirer of Bush, knows this better than anyone else.
His years in D.C. serving as the second-in-command for the Bush Office drove him to the brink of emotional, spiritual, and physical collapse. File this autobiography in the genre of I-Came-to-D.C.-to-Do-Good-and-D.C.-in-Turn-Ripped-My-Guts-Out-And-Deposited-Them-in-the-C+O-Canal-Where-They-Were Devoured-By-Crows lit.
One of the major goals of Bush’s Office was to provide religious groups with federal funds so they in turn could administer social services to the needy. These services included alcohol-dependency counseling, prisoner-rehabilitation programs, homeless shelters, and so forth.
Of course, religious charities had already been offering these services for decades. What Bush wanted to do was to “level the playing field.” He wanted to expand the roster of taxpayer-funded service providers to include not only secular groups, not only well-respected religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services), but smaller groups as well.
These groups often enough lacked an understanding of how to navigate the government’s complex grant-giving bureaucracy. Bush’s program would rectify that.
But some of these groups would engage in behaviors like discriminatory hiring practices and the proselytizing of clients that made them ineligible to receive federal funds. Bush’s program would rectify that as well.
The story of the Bush and Obama Offices is impossible to tell within the span of a blog post or even a book. Some would say the story is impossible to tell, period.
That’s because neither administration has been particularly forthright about what these offices are doing or intended to do. In fact, I can say that nothing I have ever studied in my career—including dead and often indecipherable northwest Semitic languages—has mystified me more than the Office.
That is the beauty of Kuo’s book—it is the only detailed insider account of the inner game, so to speak, of the original Office (a balanced scholarly evaluation which also gets some good journalistic backstory is offered by Jo Renee Formicola and Mary Segers in Faith-Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).
Kuo, alleges that the main purpose of the Office was not to spread the “compassionate conservatism” so dear to the 43rd president. Rather, the project was hijacked by the Rovian wing of the White House with an eye towards sealing Bush’s reelection in 2004 (which it just may have done; see below).
What Bush’s Office did was to “reach out” to two key constituencies. The first was composed of White Conservative Evangelicals, many of whom, fascinatingly, were deeply suspicious of the program.
The second target was the African-American Church. Kuo relates how the trap was set. His colleagues set up informational seminars with minority communities (in swing states, naturally) across the country. Their ostensible purpose was to teach Black and Latino congregations how they too could get a share of the federal largess.
Reflecting on a particularly well-attended seminar in Atlanta, Kuo laments the odds: “Maybe one out of the 500 people in the room,” he admits, would actually receive a grant from this con.
A fascinating postscript is that the con may have worked. I have done my own calculations as to how the Evangelical vote tilted for Bush in Ohio in 2004. What I learned in this recent round of research was that the African-American vote in Ohio went from 9 percent for Bush in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004 (As noted in Bob Wineburg, Faith-Based Inefficiency: The Follies of Bush’s Initiatives, p. 88).
Obama’s iteration of the Office, while somewhat more transparent, has received many of the same criticisms. Whereas the president promised in his campaign to eliminate Bush-era provisions that permitted religious social-service providers to discriminate in their hiring of personnel, he has dragged his feet on this issue.
I anxiously await the tell-all from inside the Obama Office. My suspicion is that its author would draw conclusions similar to those of Kuo. He ended his book, by the way, with an appeal for Christians to divest themselves of the “filth of politics.”
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Dear readers: Here is an early, pilot video from Georgetown University’s Faith Complex series that I conducted with former Washington Post reporter Jacqui Salmon. It aired on the “On Faith” page of Washingtonpost.com in June of 2009 and focuses on the Bush and Obama faith-based initiatives.
It’s long and detailed and you will have to click through three parts. For some reason in the interview I erroneously claim Obama made his famous Zanesville address (where he promised to expand Bush’s Office and eliminate the discriminatory hiring practices) in April of 2008. It was actually July. Other than that and a few garbled references to the names of the respective offices, it’s an informative interview with a knowledgeable journalist.
PS: I am doing a review of the literature and would recommend the excellent pieces by David Ryden and Jeffrey Polet in Sanctioning Religion?: Politics, Law, and Faith-Based Public Services.
