Shortly before the recent election, David Kuo's book captured the headlines along with other startling exposés relating to the Republican party and evangelical Christianity.

Kuo's story of life as an insider in the Bush White House and in conservative Christian circles was shocking on two fronts. It described a White House staff that cavalierly "used" evangelical leaders, disparaging them in private even as the staff counted on them to deliver the president's political base.

And it claimed that the "faith-based initiative" – President Bush's vaunted program to fund religious groups that serve the needy – failed to deliver promised resources because the program was ignored or undermined at crucial moments by that same staff, and perhaps by the president himself.

Yet this poignant, compelling memoir has bigger themes. Tempting Faith: an Inside Story of Political Seduction shows how readily someone with the best intentions and noble purposes can be caught up in the heady world of Washington politics – to the detriment of family life and the warping of deeply held convictions. Most significantly to the author, it sends an urgent warning to fellow Christians of the dangers of fusing religion with politics.

Kuo is a devoted Christian who believed, as do many, that putting evangelicals in office was the answer to fulfilling God's purpose for America. Instead, he concludes that focusing on a political agenda tends to distort the Christian message and perhaps even make a god of politics.

"I longed for the day the right political leaders would arrive, govern morally, eloquently profess their Christian faith, and return America to greatness," he writes. "Now I know better. I have seen what happens when well-meaning Christians are seduced into thinking deliverance can come from the Oval Office, a Supreme Court chamber, or the floor of the United States Congress. They are ... tempted to turn a mission field (politics) into a battlefield, leaving the impression Jesus' main goal was advancing a particular policy agenda."

Kuo calls on conservative Christians to take a fast from politics, at least temporarily.

One might wonder if the deep disappointments Kuo experienced led to a coloring of the story. But the stark honesty and insight with which he depicts his own shifting allegiances and personal failings suggests that this book is the stuff of genuine soul- baring and truth-telling. And there are also warm, funny, and grateful memories of his White House days.

Kuo "found Jesus" in high school and was a political liberal in his early years, interning in the Massachusetts office of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Yet he started out in Washington in 1990 at the National Right-to-Life Committee, after experiencing guilt over a shared decision to have his college girlfriend get an abortion.

It was regular attendance at a Baptist church in Virginia that taught him that "our Christian faith presupposed a common political agenda" as well as being a conservative Republican.

Page: 1 | 2