Today (Wednesday) I had the chance to interrogate – or at least interview—David Kuo, author of the lavishly controversial new book TEMPTING FAITH, which has provided the most recent tool for Bush-bashing by the nakedly partisan press.

Most attention has focused on Kuo’s assertions about disrespectful remarks about religious leaders by some of his unidentified past associates in the White House office of Faith-Based Initiatives, but much of the book (which I admit I have not read in its entirety) focuses on the author’s thwarted hopes for vastly increased federal spending on anti-poverty programs. He concludes with an “Afterword” entitled “Fast, Let’s Fast” that argues that just as Jesus and Moses fasted from food for forty days each, so today’s people of faith should “fast” from political involvement-- perhaps for as much as two years. Of course, a fast-fast that lasted even as briefly as forty days would bring us just beyond the upcoming elections, so his plea isn’t even subtle in its attempt to suppress conservative turnout and hand victory to the Democrats.

While it’s easy to sympathize with Kuo’s disappointment that the big federal innovations he expected never took shape, and it’s even easier to sympathize with some of his recent health problems, there is neither sense nor sanity in his desire to immobilize the powerful movement of Christian conservatives so painstakingly assembled over the past thirty years. He writes: “We need to eschew politics to focus more time on practicing compassion. We need to spend more time studying Jesus and less time trying to get people elected.” He ignores the fact that for most people of faith, it’s not an either-or proposition: we can study scripture at the same time that we’re working for our political principles, and we can “practice compassion” in private at the same time we endorse compassionate policies in public. Yes, it’s crucial to extend personal assistance to a frightened, pregnant teenager who might feel tempted to abort her baby, but it’s also essential to use political platforms as well as mass media to help build what Pope John Paul II described as a “culture of life.”

The deepest problem with Kuo’s confessional/polemic (which has drawn attention only because of its usefulness to the political left) is its assumption that by fasting from politics, and handing victory to the determined enemies of traditional religious values, people of faith will help themselves find deeper satisfaction and salvation. His logic represents the political equivalent of suggesting that soldiers can help themselves by deserting the battlefield. Sure, you may personally enhance your life by walking away from a fight but you’ll still need to face your deadly enemy in the future and at that point you’ll need to recapture lost ground.

The political struggles of the moment really do matter– to defend our beloved country from the very real horrors of Islamo-Nazi terror, to protect the institution of marriage from irrevocable alteration, to save some of the millions of babies lost each year to abortion, to defeat the madness of multiculturalism and to affirm the importance of one nation, under God, indivisible. When compared to the consequences of defeat in these battles (a defeat that Kuo, for all his protestations, seems to crave and recommend) his obsession with faith-based anti-poverty initiatives seems petty, almost childish.

In other words, you don’t need to feel tempted in any way by the arguments in TEMPTING FAITH – and you certainly don’t need to support the leftist establishment behind the book by buying it. But you may well want to listen to the exchange in which Mr. Kuo gamely participated on Wednesday, and to his defense of himself and his position from energetic attacks from both the host and the callers.