Hold the front page: White House plays politics.

Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction David Kuo (Free Press, 2006, 283 pp) 0743287126, $25.00

DAVID KUO'S TEMPTING FAITH enjoyed instant fame last October when it was released in time to influence the midterm elections. Whatever points the author was trying to make inevitably got enmeshed in electoral politics. Pro-Bush conservatives and partisan Republicans lambasted the author for daring to criticize the saintly president and to cast aspersions on his signature faith-based programs. Republicans accused the author of being a secret Democrat. Some old-fashioned evangelicals who have never been truly comfortable with politics nodded in agreement with his central thesis, as if to say, "I told you so." Democrats and liberals didn't know quite what to make of Kuo's argument that many Bush insiders cared nothing for religious values in general, saw evangelicals as pesky kooks, and hoped the faith-based programs would do no more than help Republicans at the ballot box. Liberal evangelicals seized on the book with glee, only adding to the dislike of Kuo by his fellow conservative evangelicals.

Many secular liberals kept quiet, because they had opposed the faith based programs from the start and did not particularly care how sincere Bush was in his advocacy of it. The program itself has cost billions and clearly has constitutional deficiencies, they argued. So Kuo's expose, while timely, did not faze them.

Kuo is an evangelical Christian activist who spent nearly three years as the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. His enthusiasm soon turned to disillusionment. He came to see the entire faith-based programs effort as a political stunt to woo evangelical voters. "In the end, the compassion initiative was personally important, politically significant--and policy that wasn't ever going to be implemented," he wrote.

Kuo seems to have been a fish out of water, even at the beginning. He confused religious and political objectives. He saw no fundamental constitutional difficulties in Bush's program. His book shows little concern for constitutional niceties or the rights of employees and recipients of aid to be free of having a faith that is not their own imposed on them.

Early on in his job, Kuo knew the score. "Now, with a conservative evangelical president in the Oval Office, with Republicans controlling the House and nearly the Senate, some conservatives thought it was time to allow 'real' faith-based groups to receive federal funding. In short, they wanted to allow groups that aimed to convert people to a particular faith to be able to receive direct federal grants--which was far beyond what [faith-based programs precursor] Charitable Choice was actually intended to do. They also wanted numerous large federal grant programs converted to vouchers so that grant recipients could have access to plainly religious groups. Finally, they wanted to give all religious groups receiving public funds an unfettered right to hire and fire people based not only on their professed religion but on whether they lived according to the 'rules' of their religion.... They wove these objectives together into a single, highly partisan bill."

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT CRITICS of the president's plan warned against, but Republicans and their evangelical allies ignored these objections and implemented the scheme in almost every Cabinet department. They encouraged state-level initiatives as well.

Kuo soon lamented, "I hadn't appreciated the raw politics of the White House before I arrived there."

Once again, his naivete is astounding. The Bush White House has been judged, even by friendly critics, as especially partisan and mean-spirited. Every action has been suffused with politics--before 2004, oriented toward re-electing George Bush. Kuo soon found his office was more a vehicle for propaganda than for substantive policy change. Sadly, he admits, "that was it. The president's faith-based promises almost certainly wouldn't be met. Compassion wasn't on the agenda anymore. For the rest of his presidency Bush would be called many things: a big-government conservative, a crusader captured by neocons, among others. But he could never again be called a compassionate conservative."

AS AN INSIDE VIEW OF ONE PHASE of this administration, Kuo's book is of some value. But it ignores the religious liberty concerns and the fundamental constitutional flaws of a program that was designed to solidify, evangelical votes for the GOP rather than to alleviate poverty. Kuo seems to have sensed this at the end of his days as a White House staffer: "By so passionately pursuing politics, Christians have alienated everyone on the other side, many of them good people with genuine policy differences."

He admits, ruefully, that many Christians have been "seduced" by dreams of political power and have substituted politics for activities best confined to the religious realm.

ALBERT J. MENENDEZ is associate director of Americans for Religious Liberty and a church-state research specialist.