David Kuo’s new book, “Tempting Faith,” has generated considerable buzz in the political world, but a regular reader, Stephen, emailed me the other day with an angle that seems to have been largely overlooked.
I have to admit I’m a little torn inside. I’ve been reading (and you’ve been blogging) for years about the dangerous marriage of church and state that this administration has fostered, but now we find out their hearts weren’t in it all along.
As a secular humanist and a scientist, I paid close attention to the Christian right’s growing influence in government affairs, but David Kuo’s book now suggests that the administration was just another group of assholes who would say anything to be elected.
I had figured Karl Rove to be that way, but I had thought Bush to be a True Believer (TM). My question is, which is scarier – George the Baptist or George the Neocon?
It’s an important point. When it comes to matters of faith and church-state separation, one of the central criticisms of the Bush presidency is that he’s committed to pushing religion and government together, perhaps more than any president in U.S. history. The faith-based scheme, school vouchers, national days of prayer, creationism, the relationships with the religious right … we’re talking about a president who appreciates our constitutional principles on religious liberty about as much as he appreciates military advice from Hugo Chavez.
On the same issue, the other central criticism of Bush’s presidency is that he’s a transparent phony. He’ll talk a good game about compassion and Christian principles, but his deeds don’t match his words. Bush strings the religious right along, making all kinds of promises, but his commitments to evangelicals are hollow and meaningless. Religion is just another political tool, which the president and his White House cynically use to get what they want, nothing more.
The problem, of course, is that these two criticisms contradict one another.
Amy Sullivan touched on this a couple of days ago.
Despite the evidence Kuo presents in Tempting Faith, liberals simply don’t believe him. They’ve spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them. In fact, the real revelation of Kuo’s book is not that the Bushies don’t care about evangelicals; it’s that liberals are too wedded to their views to capitalize on it. […]
The problem is that Kuo’s book creates cognitive dissonance for liberals. Conspiracy theories about theocracy have haunted liberals for the last few years, and, if you believe that religious conservatives lead Bush around by the nose, evidence to the contrary is impossible to absorb.
Sullivan raised a couple of points in her piece which I definitely disagree with, but the point about the contradiction is not without merit. Bush cannot be a pious theocrat and an indifferent-to-faith charlatan at the same time.
So, what do you think? Is the contradiction irreconcilable? If so, which is the more accurate reflection of Bush’s true character, the theocon or the con-artist? True-believer or cynic?