Allen Hertzke, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, cited a passage from the Book of Matthew, in which Jesus admonished his followers for failing to comfort the poor and imprisoned and praised those who helped "the least of these" in His name.

Paul Marshall of the Center for Religious Freedom noted that evangelicals are pushing the Bush administration to deal with issues like sex trafficking, religious persecution, the environment, AIDS in Africa, civil strive in Sudan and human rights in North Korea, he said.

"There's a perception that evangelicals are the driving force behind President Bush," said Deborah Fikes, a human rights activist from Mr. Bush's childhood home of Midland, Texas. "He was there [on foreign policy issues] many years before he was president. Evangelicals have gotten more credit than is their due."

Ambassador William R. Timken, while not trying to excuse slow government action to rescue Katrina's victims, said the television and newspaper criticism of those actions -- coupled with the images that were broadcast around the world -- had given foreign audiences a wrong impression of the United States.

Mr. Timken, addressing a group of visiting American journalists in Berlin, also rebuked the American news outlets for not paying enough attention to those who worked "nonstop" immediately after the disaster, our correspondent Nicholas Kralev reported.

Japan, the only country Washington publicly supports, has been ready for years, while Germany is "just arriving" at the necessary stage, he said.

Mr. Timken, a wealthy industrialist and political supporter of President Bush, said he is still struggling to understand the State Department bureaucracy after a little more than a month in Berlin.

In Washington, Germany won praise for its historical contributions to the development of the United States, as German Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger and President Bush celebrated German-American Day.

"German-American friendship is not a mere policy goal," the ambassador said as he commemorated the Oct. 6 holiday. "It reflects the close relationship between Germans and Americans, which is based on common values and interests and an American culture enriched by more than 40 million Americans of German descent."

He recalled that Germans were among the first settlers at Jamestown in 1608 and cited architect Adolf Cluss, who designed many 19th-century buildings in Washington, and engineer Johann August Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge.

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