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That's absolutely right. Perhaps there needs to be an ordination process for Christian political leadership. Maybe you have to have a certain level of knowledge, of instruction, in human political history—not just history taught from a partisan point of view—to understand the City of God and the City of Man. Because at the end of the day, how many of us have read Augustine? We may quote Augustine, but how many of us have read him? Wilberforce is the patron saint of many religious conservatives, but how many have actually read anything he's written?

And there's another problem: Augustine does not fit well with our standard of life, our economy, of anything we are as a people. We love the idea of St. Francis, right, as the guy with the birds, but really, do we want to be imitating St. Francis? Do we want to be confronted with the gravity of our corporate sin? I don't.

What could the President have done to advocate for faith-based legislation in 2002 and 2003 that he didn't do? It stalled over the objections of some powerful senators. And other agendas that weren't there at the beginning of his presidency were suddenly at the top of the list.

Absolutely, but so were the numerous domestic policies that he had been advocating in 2002 and 2003. It's not as if the White House domestic policy shop shut down. But here's what it came down to: the realization that the faith-based initiative was more politically powerful not having passed the Senate than having passed. The President could go out and say, "I call on the Democrats to pass the faith bill," while doing nothing behind the scenes. That was among the more disturbing things of my whole experience. One day he would be advocating repeatedly for the Senate to do something, and the next day we'd be trying to get the White House to do anything to make it happen, and they wouldn't do it.

It's just way too convenient to say, hey, the Democrats wouldn't give it to us—when in late 2002 [Tom] Daschle had a proposal on the table, late one evening, for it to happen. But it would have cost the White House a couple hundred million dollars, and the decision was, no, we're not going to do it.

You talk almost exclusively about specific faith-based initiatives, but those are a tiny fraction of what the government does, and Christians should care about the whole thing, right?

But this is emblematic of the White House's approach on virtually every domestic issue. The same basic pattern emerged: great grand announcements, held in very beautiful and media-friendly environments. But the follow-up on all of this was trivial—just enough to provide justification that something had happened. And the reason I focused on this area—beside the fact that I have the most knowledge of this area—is that I believe that when a politician makes a promise to the poor, it is a particularly sacred kind of promise. Because it is a promise that is enforceable only by his own character.

There's not going to be any pressure to follow through.

Right. It's not like the media is going to be spending a huge amount of time focusing on policies for the poor. I think the failure of this promise is a cautionary tale for Christians, not only in all of government, but unfortunately a cautionary tale about this administration. Because this administration, by setting up George W. Jesus—I mean—how's that for a Freudian slip? By setting up George W. Bush and Jesus in such close terms, this administration also set itself up for particularly strong scrutiny.

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November (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50