c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I have long maintained that America was a better place back when the fundamentalist Christians flocked to the Democratic Party. David Kuo’s book offers evidence to support that belief.

Kuo is the author of “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.” It tells the story not only of Kuo’s rise to the position of special assistant to President Bush for faith-based initiatives but also of the rise of the fundamentalists within the Republican Party.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. People tend to assume that the religious “right,” as it is mistakenly termed, has always been loyal to the GOP. In fact, the Bible Belt was solidly Democratic until relatively recently. The highlight of this era was undoubtedly the infamous 1925 “monkey trial,” when the good Democrats of Tennessee put teacher John Scopes on trial for informing the kiddies of the undeniable fact that man is a mammal. Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

Noted conservative curmudgeon H.L. Mencken summarized the situation this way:

“The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life.”

As a loyal Republican and a conservative, I look back fondly on the days when such characters infested the Democratic Party. After the 1970s, however, the Democrats became more hospitable to the followers of astrology and shamanism. So the fundamentalists eventually migrated to the GOP.

Kuo traces this migration to the work of Charles Colson, the Nixon aide who found religion in prison after being convicted for his role in Watergate. In 1987, Colson told Kuo that America needed “a restoration of religious values in public life.”

That sounds nice. But Christianity is not necessarily compatible with the exercise of political power. Edward Gibbon certainly didn’t think so. In his classic “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Gibbon traced the breakup of that great empire to the conversion to Christianity of its political class.

The connection is obvious to any thinking person. Anyone who truly believes in the precepts of Christianity _ such as turning the other cheek _ is going to lack the realism necessary to impose his will on the people of foreign nations. This of course is exactly what happened under George W. Bush with his misconceived notion that the “liberation” of hostile peoples would somehow work to America’s advantage.

Meanwhile, the Bush acolytes in the red states are only now waking up to the notion that the liberation of Iraq has led to the persecution of Christians there, and that in liberated Afghanistan, a convert to Christianity can face the death sentence and so on.

In his book _ which is a surprisingly good read, by the way _ Kuo describes how, after graduating from Tufts University, he went to Washington in 1989 and took a job on Ted Kennedy’s staff. He reasoned, logically enough, that as a Christian he should commit himself to the service of someone who engaged in Christian behavior, i.e. who gave away a lot of stuff for free.

The Democrats will always be better at this than the Republicans, and that is what gives tension to the narrative. Before long, Kuo had migrated to the Republican Party, within which clever characters like Ralph Reed had begun engineering the final migration of Bible Belt fundamentalists from the party of Bryan. In 1998, Kuo got a call from a rising star in Texas who had a plan to employ the fundamentalist vote as part of his drive for the presidency in 2000. George W. Bush also had a great name and firm ties to the Wall Street wing of the GOP.

It seemed like a good formula, and it was. After Bush won, Kuo was enticed to work at the White House implementing Bush’s promises to the faithful. The denouement concerns how Kuo gradually came to discover that Bush had no real intention of funding what presidential svengali Karl Rove once termed that “f-ing faith-based thing.”

Though Kuo takes some shots at Rove for failing to fund the programs, he also sympathizes with the tough job Rove has in holding together the coalition that makes up the GOP. So do I. How does one deal with a party that contains, on the one hand, some of the smartest investors and entrepreneurs on the planet and, on the other hand, people who believe dinosaurs roamed the Earth 6,000 years ago? Of if I may employ Mencken’s terminology from a happier time, how does one appeal to both the inferior man and his betters?

Rove showed that it can be done. Surveying the results, however, I doubt it will ever be done again.

(Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

KRE/PH END MULSHINE

Editors: A version of this commentary is also being transmitted by Newhouse News Service.