Bringing Christ and Liberty to the World

First off, this news from the WaPo:

Andrew S. Natsios, the long-time chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced today he was resigning to join Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
[...]
Natsios traveled widely and oversees an agency that oversees the distribution of about $9 billion in development aid. But some critics have said he has allowed USAID to be shoved aside from its central role in development as the administration created a new program, known as the millennium challenge accounts, that aids countries that meet certain political and economic goals.

Well, at least he's not moving to K Street to become a lobbyist. But David Corn points us to this commentary piece in Beirut's Daily Star newspaper by William Fisher (a former USAID official), who questions the bona fides of a Bush appointment to deputy director of USAID (who, in light of Natsios' resignation, could possibly rise in rank):

Washington is a town where the best and the brightest usually coexist with well-connected political hacks. However, the Bush administration has taken promotion of the latter to embarrassing extremes, selecting unqualified people for posts because of their political loyalty and ideological persuasion. The most recent example of this was the appointment of Paul Bonicelli to be deputy director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is in charge of all programs to promote democracy and good governance overseas.

One would have thought the administration had learned its lesson. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, was forced to resign because of his incompetence in dealing with the consequences of the storm.
[...]
Like Brown and Miers, Bonicelli has little experience in the field he has been tapped to supervise. The closest he comes to democracy-promotion or good governance is having worked as a staffer for the Republican Party in the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives.

More significant to the administration, perhaps, is the fact that Bonicelli is dean of academic affairs at tiny Patrick Henry College in rural Virginia. The fundamentalist institution's motto is "For Christ and Liberty." It requires that all of its 300 students sign a 10-part "statement of faith" declaring, among other things, that they believe "Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh;" that "Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead"; and that hell is a place where "all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity."

Faculty members, too, must sign a pledge stating they share a generally literalist belief in the Bible. Revealingly, only biology and theology teachers are required to hold a literal view specifically of the Bible's six-day creation story.
[...]
In 2002, Bush appointed Bonicelli, along with former Vatican adviser John Klink and Janice Crouse of the ultra-conservative Concerned Women for America, to an American delegation attending a United Nations children's conference, where they sought to promote biblical values in U.S. foreign policy. This sparked angry protests from groups advocating women's rights and the separation of church and state.

What's wrong with this picture is that the USAID programs Bonicelli will run are important weapons in the arsenal of Bush's new public diplomacy czarina, White House confidante Karen Hughes. These programs are intended to play a central role in boosting Bush's efforts to foster democracy and freedom in Iraq and throughout the broader Middle East.

One can only wonder how Muslims, the target audience for these USAID programs, will react to the view that "all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity."

David Corn notes:

I know, raising the question of Bonicelli's religious views will cause some of the right to cry bigotry. But the same Bush White House that appointed him also cited Harriet Miers' religious beliefs and practices as positive attributes in defending her nomination to the Supreme Court. If this part of a person's experiences and background can be hailed as a credential, why not as a liability? Fisher is right. It just doesn't seem intelligent to send a guy with no experience in this field out into a world full of people he considers doomed to hell and to expect him to do them--and us--proud.

For more on Patrick Henry College, check out this New Yorker article from last spring (which certainly grabbed my attention when it first came out). One of the more interesting angles of the article is that the school primarily caters to young Christian students who have been homeschooled, and who thus already don't have much of a connection to the sinful "real" world and live in a bit of a fishbowl (IMHO). Which made this passage stand out even more starkly:

Patrick Henry’s campus is small, with one main building and a group of dorms clustered around a lake; the kids call it “the fishbowl.” It can be a competitive, anxious place. Many students schedule their days in fifteen-minute increments and keep daily checklists over their desks (do crunches, read Bible, take vitamins, study). “Everyone here is going for the same prize,” Abby Pilgrim, a junior, told me. “Nothing here is chill.”

Then there's this:

Often, the campus looks like a scene from “Meet Me in St. Louis,” with young men and women talking to one another through open windows, or exchanging a chaste goodbye at the downstairs door—men and women are not allowed in the living areas of each others’ dorms. Girls talk about not “stumbling” a guy, the equivalent of tempting him, and resident advisers keep a close eye on them to make sure they don’t wear shirts that show any bra. If they do, they’ll get a friendly e-mail—“I think I saw you in dress code violation,” followed by a smiley emoticon. (Not everyone takes the strictures well: one woman I spoke to would sometimes cry in the stairwell after being criticized by other girls for dressing inappropriately; she is transferring.) Smoking, drinking, and “public displays of affection in any campus building” are forbidden. Matthew du Mée, who was an R.A., told me that if he saw a boy and girl sitting too close for too long he would pull the boy aside and tell him to stop, because “the guy is supposed to be the leader in the relationship.”

But aside from the social aspect, what really caught my attention was this:

Of the school’s sixty-one graduates through the class of 2004, two have jobs in the White House; six are on the staffs of conservative members of Congress; eight are in federal agencies; and one helps Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, and his wife, Karen, homeschool their six children. Two are at the F.B.I., and another worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Iraq. Last year, the college began offering a major in strategic intelligence; the students learn the history of covert operations and take internships that allow them to graduate with a security clearance.

All seniors do a directed research project that is designed, Farris told me, to mimic the work that an entry-level staffer would be assigned. “A whole lot of elected members of Congress started off as Hill staffers,” Farris said. “If you want to train a new generation of leaders, you have to get in on the ground floor.”

In other news of the Religious Right crossing over into US international policy, check out Max Blumenthal's post today over at the HuffPo on the meeting of James Dobson and UN ambassador John (Mr. Moustache" Bolton--which includes a wonderful denunciation of the meddling of religion into our foreign affairs by former UN ambassador (and a former Episcopal priest) John Danforth.