Cults In High Places; Why Politicians Need Cults

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From "The Family," by Jeff Sharlet (page 383) from 2008 but as relevant as ever:


"... When Kuo (David) discovered that Bush’s faith-based rhetoric was for
the most part just that—lost in the shadow of the Iraq War, the program never received anywhere near the $8 billion Bush had once spoken of—he resolved to prove its value to the money men. Tempting Faith is, most damningly, the story of how he and a few others transformed the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives into the very Republican vote-getting machine its critics had accused it of being from the beginning. “We laid out a plan whereby we would hold ‘roundtable events’ for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders,” he writes. In 2002, those roundtables contributed to nineteen out of twenty victories in targeted races. In 2004, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives repeated the trick on the presidential scale. But by that time, Kuo was gone. He had quit. “We were good people forced to run a sad charade, to provide political cover to a White House that needed compassion and religion as political tools.”

It was a startlingly honest admission. The media celebrated Kuo as a truth teller and his book as the first big crack in the Christian
Right’s alliance with the Republican Party. By 2007, the press was
declaring the Christian Right dead and evangelicalism a waning force
in American life, despite the fact that by Kuo’s own confession, the
machine he helped build will likely continue to lurch along after
Bush is gone. Bush never provided it the funds he had promised in
idealistic speeches aimed at evangelical voters, but he did something
more significant: through administrative changes made by executive
order, he transformed Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms into a wedge
with which to drive irreparable cracks into the wall of separation
between church and state."