Just before Christmas, George W. Bush was asked about a recent federal report that 5 percent of Texas households had suffered from hunger from 1996 through 1998. "Where?" Bush wanted to know, adding, "You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas."

Yes, you would. He then effectively issued a challenge: Show me the hungry. "I would like for the Department of Agriculture to show us who, where are they, and we'll respond." Whether he meant with a sandwich or a press release was left unclear.

There has been a tidal wave of religious posturing in Campaign 2000. The problem is that these pious protestations do not seem to extend to what is at the heart of the Bible: tending to the poor. Indeed, what made Bush's remarks so chilling is that he articulated the entire political class' response to America's poor: Where are they? They don't show up on our donor lists.

The attempt by the Democratic National Committee and local Texas Democrats to make political capital out of Bush's comments is another example of how much easier our leaders find it to exploit suffering than to attempt to reduce it. Not only have both parties ignored the poor during our much-touted prosperity, but now one party is using them as a cudgel against the other.

While the governor was catching up on his state's poverty stats and the DNC was promptly blast-faxing his incredulous remarks, I was reading the galleys of "Faith Works," a remarkable book by the Rev. Jim Wallis, to be published in March. In it, Wallis, a preacher-activist and leader of Call to Renewal, a national movement to overcome poverty, identifies three kinds of poverty: material, spiritual and civic.

The partisan sniping about the existence of material poverty was evidence of the civic poverty that has overrun our country. "Aiming either at the stock brokers or the soccer moms," writes Wallis, "neither political party has talked about poor and left-out people for a very long time."

Throughout the book, Wallis stresses how our perceptions are shaped by our different vantage points. He writes of finding himself in homeless shelters, poor shanty towns and the insides of assorted jail cells where he's been sent "probably 20 times by now for various vigils, marches and peaceful actions of nonviolent civil disobedience. I've noticed how different the world looks from those places." Clearly very different than it looks from the corridors of power in Washington or Austin, Texas. "Bush knows where the fund-raisers are," Wallis tells me. "He knows where the middle-class voters are, but he doesn't know where the poor are."

Yet Bush chose Jesus as the political philosopher who most influenced him. That was the same Jesus who, in the chapter 25 of Matthew's Gospel, so identified himself with the poor and the outcast that he admonished his disciples, as Wallis puts it, that "to serve them was to serve him, and to ignore them was, indeed, to ignore him."

Al Gore tells us that he often asks himself, "What would Jesus do?" If George W. Bush asks the same question, he won't need the Department of Agriculture to provide the answer.

While in theological seminary, Wallis sought to identify every mention of the poor in the Bible. He found that it was the second most prominent theme in the Hebrew scriptures, idolatry being the first. As we're finding out, the worship of material objects and the neglect of the poor tend to go hand in hand.

In the New Testament, the subject of poverty and the responsibilities of wealth is found in one out of every 10 verses in the first three Gospels, and in one out of seven verses in the Gospel of Luke. To drive his point home when he preached, Wallis often used a Bible from which every reference to poverty had been cut out. "The Prophets were decimated," he writes, "the Psalms destroyed, the Gospels ripped to shreds, and the Epistles turned to tattered rags. The Bible was full of holes."

And so is the rhetoric of many born-again politicians who profess Christ as their savior but spend more energy inveighing on the benefits of abolishing estate taxes and the evils of homosexuality (about which, incidentally, Jesus had nothing to say) than about the overwhelming biblical insistence on expanding our circle of concern to include "the least among us."

Have we become so insulated against any contact with poor people that the Republican front-runner needs the Department of Agriculture to find them for him? And before any more Democrats mount their moral high horse, they should review the photo ops provided by the first family at Christmastime -- the president shopping with Chelsea, the first couple arriving for Christmas Eve dinner at the home of Vernon Jordan and the White House Christmas dinner menu proudly displayed upon our TV screens. (It culminated in seven desserts, including chocolate cake with white icing and pumpkin pie with glazed ginger.)

Yes, the president did make the obligatory stop at a soup kitchen earlier in the week, but the triptych of Christmas images that stayed with us was shopping, celebrating with power brokers and culinary overkill. In the midst of such civic poverty, it is not surprising that our political elite has forgotten the 20 percent of our fellow citizens -- 15 million children among them -- left out of the booming economy.