Wow, was I underwhelmed by the 60 Minutes piece.

First the supposedly blockbuster quotes. Someone said Pat Robertson is “insane,” described Jerry Falwell as “ridiculous,” and that James Dobson “had to be controlled.”

Uh, ok. I think Pat Robertson is pretty insane and, judging from several years of Robertson-bashing in the Corner and subsequent feedback from evangelicals, so do a lot of Christian Conservatives. Or to be more fair, can even Robertson’s biggest defenders really be surprised that a White House operation trying to run the war on terror and keep its approval ratings high wouldn’t produce moments where someone said, “Man, Robertson’s insane.” Calling Falwell “ridiculous” is hardly a shocker either. I’d wager White House staffers said far worse about Arlen Specter, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, and John McCain on more than a few occassions. Does that mean this White House has contempt for Republicans or Conservatives?C And to say Dobson needed to be controlled sounds to me like someone at the White House respected his clout. In other words, the White House treated these people as serious political players, with all of the frustration that usually generates. Does anyone dispute that these guys are political players? Is anyone shocked that, say, the creator of the Christian Coalition and a 1988 presidential candidate is interested in politics? Or that politicians treat him as a political figure rather than a religious one?

Well, the only person who seems shocked is Kuo himself. He is dismayed to discover that an office in the White House is concerned with politics. He’s disgusted that the White House allegedly used its Faith Based Initiatives as a political instrument in order to gain support for the program and for President Bush…oh, wait: That was Kuo’s idea! But he’s still tsk-tsking about it. His lame quotes served their purpose — even 60 Minutes took the bait! But they amount to intellectual mischief and nothing more in Kuo’s argument. Kuo says that people rolled their eyes at some Christian conservatives or Christian conservative ideas. So what? I’m sure Paul Begala and James Carville rolled their eyes at a host of naive or impractical ideas from friends on the left when they worked for Clinton. That hardly means that the Clinton White House wasn’t aligned with the left when it counted, does it?

I was never particularly enthusiastic about the faith-based stuff. I always thought we could do more by freeing up religious institutions from onerus regulations that make their mission needlessly difficult as opposed to putting religious groups on the dole. But, I also figured the effort was such grab bag of different ideas it would be silly to say they’re all bad or all good. But I never for a moment doubted that there was — gasp! — politics involved. Just as I never suspected that the tons of federal monies which have ended up in the “Reverand” Jesse Jackson’s pockets over the decades were solely intended to promote social justice or diversity.

What is interesting is that Kuo’s two indictments ultimately contradict each other. On the one had he says that the program was corrupted by politics. On the other he says that Bush’s greatest sin was not to spend enough money on it. If the program were truly solely about winning at the polls and if the Bushies are really so cynical, why not spend more?

All of that said, I do think Kuo had some reasonable things to say about the politicization of religion in this country. But I think he’s an unpersuasive Jeremiah on the religion front and a far cry from the conservative Harold Stearns when it comes to politics or conservatism.* It seems he’s trying to get grace on the cheap, and sell a lot of books in the process.

* Harold Stearns was a New Republic liberal who got swept up in the Progressive groupthink and hysteria of WWI and who lamented that liberalism had lost its way by putting pragmatisma and power above principle. I’d just link to Wikipedia rather than this pretentious footnote, but there’s no entry for him.