By Jeff Sharlet

The New York Times is filled with ups-and-downs for Christian conservatives today — Ralph Reed has lost his primary race for lt. governor of Georgia, Bush vetoed stem cell research, and the Kaczynski twins, darlings of American Christian Right activists (though you wouldn’t know it from the Times‘ coverage) are twisting Poland’s crank rightward. But the Times seems most fascinated — and confused — by the Christian activists’ imperviousness to research undertaken on its own behalf.

First, there was last week’s Department of Education study that revealed that private schools do no better than public schools, and that in most cases Christian conservative schools do worse. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings vigorously denounced the report, produced by her own department — perhaps in an attempt to build a justification for vouchers — and then boasted that she hadn’t even read it, despite having had it on her desk for two weeks. Then, today, we learn that a small group of GOP legislators are proposing a national, $100 million voucher program for private and religious schools. To hell with the facts! To heaven with the little lambs.

Next, we lean in another report that a government-commissioned study has discovered that Bush’s faith-based initiatives programs lacks safeguards against the use of government funds for religious activities (as opposed to social services). Who cares? Why, the programs haven’t even bothered to measure their grants’ effectiveness. Let the angels sort that out, right?

The Times clearly takes delight in this fumbling irrationalism, proof that the religious challenge to secular governance is still an amateur affair. That’s true, but it’s also beside the point. A Christian conservative need put no stock in a study that shows religious education lagging a bit behind on the three R’s, because he knows that the most important aspect of an education is spiritual, not secular. Or, if one must use secular terms, it’s a matter of “character,” as Silja J.A. Talvi reported in the leftist magazine In These Times this past winter. In other words, Christian voucher activists — Senator John Ensign (R, NV), one of the sponsors of the national proposal, was living in a sort of conservative Protestant monastery dedicated to recalibrating policy according to Christ’s will when I met him a few years ago — are measuring success by a different set of criteria than secular analysts, a fact that the Times ignores.

The same holds true for faith-based initiatives. The missing safeguard, the study discovered, was a definition of the “inherently religious” activities that grantees are told not to use the funds for. Neither the study nor the Times seem to consider the fact that for many Christian conservatives, there are no “inherently religious” activities, since they don’t consider their beliefs “religious” — a term associated with stuffy mainline Protestants and Catholicism — but simply “the truth.” The fundamentalist approach to faith is much like a civil engineer’s approach to bridge-building: there are certain irrefutable facts to be taken into account, but of the laws of physics and God are followed, success is certain. So, for instance, a fundamentalist would see nothing “inherently religious” in counseling a drug addict to accept Jesus; the fundamentalist would consider the conquest of addiction impossible without Christ’s help in rejecting sin.

I’m reminded of a formulation for governance conceived of by John MacKay, a mid-century dean of conservative protestantism cited by rightwing lawmakers for years. There are only three kinds of government, MacKay advised: secular, a modern invention which is based on denying the facts of God; demoniac, which is based on lying about the facts of God; and covenantal, which is based on harmonizing the law of the land with the laws of nature — that is, God’s.

Fundamentalists aren’t interested in a place at the secular table. If the press wants to respect fundamentalist activists — and accurately report on the challenge they raise to separation of church and state — they need to accept that and look past the worldly proofs of efficacy — or the lack thereof — that mean little to true believers bent on “restoring” America to what they believe are its covenantal origins.