George W. Bush and the Latest Evangelical Menace
Ribuffo, Leo P.
IN MARCH 2003, Newsweek pronounced George W. Bush's presidency the "most resolutely 'faith based' in modern times." This judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration but it is...
...Much as the president hails the "free market" at least as often as he publicly praises God, the worldviews of religious conservatives—including the ways in which they practice their religion—are also affected by class, race, gender, region, ethnicity, and sexual orientation...
...Readers who have forgotten that Reagan prompted fears on the left of theocracy or worse can refresh their memories with Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Lawrence Hill Books, 1986), pp...
...His claim that freedom is God's gift to humanity has ample precedent in speeches by FDR and Eisenhower as well as in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence...
...Nonetheless, this commitment to tolerance stands out as Bush's best public action relating to religion...
...Nonetheless, as Bush famously observed while running for president, 'When I was young and irresponsible I was young and irresponsible...
...A spiritual searcher, he had recently settled in as a moderate evangelical Southern Baptist...
...Moreover, Clinton's impeachment for lying about sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky energized religious moralists and partisan hypocrites alike...
...I will now retell it here with neither enthusiasm nor alarm...
...The first is journalism's addiction to gimmickry, in which ostensibly unusual acts are framed as something new and revealing (Man bites dog...
...Understanding even the strongly religious minority means abandoning the theological determinism that marks the prevailing interpretation of Bush's faith...
...Not surprisingly, Bush's inner spiritual life is hardest to chart...
...In addition, he created a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and sought wide-ranging legislation to facilitate the quest for government contracts by religious organizations...
...On the contrary, he believed that God had saved him from an assassin's bullet in order peacefully to end the cold war.' Although President George H. W Bush offered no musings on Bible prophecy, he continued the practice of publicly asking God to bless America...
...99 - 114...
...Even so, it was Nixon who marked the twentieth-century return of overtly partisan religiosity to the White House as part of his mobilization of "Square America...
...Reagan's public musings on dispensationalism prompted fears among militant secularists that he might launch a nuclear war in order to advance Jesus' return...
...and Richard Nixon, an eclectic pro forma Protestant...
...Yet Bush never wavered...
...Still, for reasons relating to class, race, gender, region, ethnicity, and sexual orientation as well as religion, in the short run nothing less than a serious economic downturn—something like that of the 1970s—occurring during a Republican administration is likely to nudge more than a quarter of religious conservatives away from that party on election day...
...A large minority of Democrats have decided that their party must at least look and sound less secular...
...Furthermore, Bush understood that the story of his conversion from carouser to Christian was, as he said in atypical Yiddish, "part of my shtick...
...The alliance between this "messianic militarist" (Ralph Nader) and the "evangelical menace" (New York Review of Books) has brought the country to the edge of an "American theocracy" (Kevin Phillips...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt was the founding father of modern, tolerant civil religion as well as the father of modern economic and political—though not cultural—liberalism...
...Much as Presidents James K. Polk and William McKinley pointedly repudiated anti-Catholicism while leading the country into battle against Mexico and Spain respectively, Bush repeatedly denied that the United States was at war with Islam...
...Whatever Jesus would do about this controversy, it certainly inhibits dispassionate analysis of the role of religion in Bush's presidency...
...Like Reagan, he favored equal time for both evolution and "intelligent design" in public schools on grounds of fairness...
...This phase of his life, marked by heavy drinking, arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol, and recreational drug use, lasted at least from his matriculation at Yale in 1964 until the mid-1980s...
...For example, religious charities providing a shelter to the poor could not try to convert them...
...What exactly is the relationship and how does he know—or sense—what God wants him to do...
...Reverend Falwell attended the latter signing ceremony...
...But, as Stephen Monsma, the leading conservative expert on the subject, notes, these FBOs operating abroad "do work that no one else is eager to 46 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 do...
...For our purposes, presidential modern times begin with Theodore Roosevelt...
...Rather, the Democrats had faced escalating problems on the religious front since the "FAITH-BASED" POLITICS 1960s...
...In areas of greatest concern to religious conservatives, the Bush administration has mixed symbolic stroking, embarrassed concessions, shrewd politics, and enthusiastic supDISSENT I Fall 2006 n 4 5 "FAITH-BASED - POLITICS port rooted partly in the president's "theology...
...Or (as I think is clear from the little we know), enough of the pre-conversion Bush may survive to poke a little fun at sanctimonious religion...
...Since the late 1940s, the Supreme Court has tried, in a series of murky and even incoherent decisions, to define the relationship between church and state under the First Amendment...
...Gore's vice presidential choice, Senator Joseph Lieberman, was a "modern Orthodox" Jew visibly more moralistic than George W. Bush...
...Depending on where and how "FAITH-BASED" POLITICS we look, the United States has grown both more and less religious since 1960...
...Furthermore, the left must try at long last to understand the American religious scene...
...Bush's advisers probDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 43 - FAITH-BASED - POLITICS ably fear that he might speculate, as he did in 1994, that Jesus is the only way to heaven...
...President reads Bible...
...and premillennial dispensationalism, a popular form of Bible prophecy in which Scripture is used to interpret current events...
...Woodrow Wilson was a theologically liberal social gospeler who privately ridiculed fundamentalists, regarded love of Jesus as sufficient doctrine, hailed the Bible as a spur to reform ("the people's book of revelation"), and thought God rarely intervened in human affairs (though his own election looked like an exception to this rule...
...According to Wead's tapes, he thought it "bad for Republicans to be kicking gays...
...These passing remarks, usually made to clergy, probably mean less than either side supposes...
...Reagan may qualify as the most religiously eclectic modern president...
...Bush sounded ecumenical during the campaign...
...Bush signed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and a ban on late-term abortions, which had been vetoed twice by Clinton...
...the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down a ban on sodomy, elicited minimal comment from the White House...
...Unlike Kennedy, Kerry is a serious Catholic, which only added to his problems, because he disagrees with his church about those public issues most commonly associated with it—birth control, abortion, and gay sex...
...In particular, they have drawn on the speeches of FDR, Truman, and Kennedy...
...So, while keeping calm and remaining thoughtful, the left might as well defend its economic, social, and cultural positions on the merits...
...Trying to reassure critics, Gerson quipped that the president is not basing Mideast policy on Tim LaHaye's popular dispensationalist novels...
...As conservative columnist John Tierney wrote, this was probably the "first joke told in earshot of a president involving him and a horse's phallus...
...Imagine that...
...The post–Second World War social scientists who predicted "secularization" were on to something even as they exaggerated their case and chose the wrong word to summarize it...
...This constituency, like others, has received its rewards...
...In urging war on alQaeda and on a much more amorphous phenomenon called international "terrorism," Bush used the rhetoric of unambiguous moral judgment...
...Bush prayed about these decisions...
...Although the term "Judeo-Christian tradition" was only starting to come into use, the increased pluralism it represented was the kind of religion FDR urged on the country...
...Nor do prominent journalists with regular access to the president know enough or care enough to ask such questions...
...Belated skeptics like Senator Kerry could only whine in retrospect that a president mobilizing a country for war did not tell the truth...
...Foreign Policy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp...
...Cabinet meetings begin with prayer, and there are Bible study groups in the White House...
...Yet worship is Bush's preferred option...
...Addressing the annual March for Life in 2002, the president called opposition to abortion a "noble cause...
...Ronald Reagan, the winner in 1980, had no doubts on that score and began the practice of ending speeches with, "God bless America...
...The Kennedy and Nixon administrations, in which the F-word echoed incessantly as a marker of manliness, seem as distant as Thomas Jefferson's deism...
...A self-described born-again Christian in 44 • DISSENT / Fall 2006 1988, Bush wooed evangelicals and fundamentalists on behalf of his father's presidential candidacy...
...So did Bill Clinton, the latest president to combine womanizing with spiritual searching...
...The decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime was also painted in moral terms, though strategic considerations were said to loom at least as large...
...Indeed, some of Bush's favorite shibboleths predate the creation of American political parties...
...He quickly reversed Clinton's reversal of Reagan's ban on the use of federal funds to support international family planning programs that offered even abortion counseling...
...203 - 219 and Norman Redlich, "The Religion Clauses: A Study in Confusion," in Herman Schwartz, ed., The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right (Hill & Wang, 2002), pp...
...Any likely Republican president, born again or not, would behave much the same way...
...That revival both energized the cold war and was energized by it...
...Whatever their personal doubts, ethnocentric biases, or moral lapses, every president since Roosevelt has celebrated citizen participation in all faiths deemed legitimate (a category that enlarged over time...
...He also sought out American Islamic leaders and hosted a Ramadan dinner at the White House...
...In this respect, Bush would not differ from FDR...
...Jimmy Carter, the victor over Gerald Ford, is a sophisticated "born again" Baptist and competent lay theologian...
...Kerry lost the Catholic vote...
...Although the left has assailed the president's excessive international moralism, Protestant theological conservatives issued their strongest criticism ever because Bush seemed soft on Islam...
...and Stephen Mansfield, The Faith of George W Bush (Penguin, 2004)—vary in quality but all provide the basic information...
...Evangelicals and fundamentalists probably sense that the answers would not fit their needs...
...ROWING UP amid the standard religiosity of the fifties' awakening, Bush attended Presbyterian and Episcopal services in Texas and then endured the muscular Christianity of Phillips Andover Academy...
...The confusion is probably inevitable given the inherent tension between the "free exercise" clause and the "establishment" clause...
...Bush has never given a sustained interview in which he was asked probing and informed questions about his religious beliefs...
...He convinced a large minority of congressional Democrats to believe, or profess to believe, that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States...
...Second, since the heyday of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, the political and cultural left has been announcing that fundamentalist and evangelical menaces stand on the verge of conquering the country: native 48 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 "fascists" in the 1930s, the "radical right" in the early 1960s, and Ronald Reagan's alliance of convenience with the Christian right in the 1980s...
...40 - 50...
...According to Bush's semiofficial conversion narrative, the turning point was a discussion with Billy Graham while walking on the beach at the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1986...
...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 49...
...Here, ideals and political self-interest merged, as the president drew the overwhelming majority of Catholics and Jews into the famous "Roosevelt coalition...
...He assured a television interviewer, "I don't pray for votes...
...Here, too, sexual abstinence is preferred to condoms...
...Moreover, on numerous issues relating to lifestyle, race, and cultural pluralism, even the religious hard right, typified by Falwell, Robertson, and Buchanan, is less far right than its counterpart in the 1950s, which, in turn, was less far right than its counterpart in the 1930s...
...David Aikman, A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W Bush (W Publishing Group, 2004...
...At the same time, Bush supports a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman...
...Understand that...
...All of these policies were predictably controversial...
...astrology...
...At various turns he is presented as a dupe of Jewish neoconservatives, a tool of Saudi Muslims, and an evangelical zealot conducting a religious war against all "FAITH-BASED" POLITICS Muslims...
...The United States remains the most religious big rich country, according to such criteria as belief in God, frequent prayer, and regular church attendance...
...Yet Bush is less the born again goody-goody than religious conservatives claim...
...Bush still declines to "kick" gays and has appointed some openly gay officials...
...For a painless scholarly introduction, see Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992...
...Instead of waiting twenty years for memoranda to become available at a George W Bush presidential library, let's try to get ahead of the curve...
...Unfortunately, there has been little serious examination of this judgment...
...Above all, he cited his faith as a source of his "compassionate conservatism...
...Until the 1980s, however, it was clear that government funds could not be spent for "pervasively sectarian" purposes...
...The F-word sometimes slips into his conversation...
...Although open clashes between Catholics and Protestants probably increased during the fifties, especially over the question of federal aid to education, the areas of conflict were small enough for Kennedy to smother them with invocations of cold war patriotism and affirmations of the separation of church and state...
...As has long been the case, most religion-related social funding still goes to mainstream organizations such as Catholic Charities, United Jewish Communities, and Lutheran Social Services...
...Symbolic stroking included Bush's well-orchestrated signing of legislation allowing the Terri Schiavo case to reach the Supreme Court...
...But Bush in fact swims within the mainstream of presidential religiosity—even recent presidential religiosity—though his cultivation of theological conservatives clearly places him on the right side of that stream...
...All more or less hoped that the Almighty blessed America, but none regularly ended speeches with the expectation that God unambiguously did so...
...As president, Bush has publicly stopped calling himself an evangelical...
...Like other religions, Islam does not mean peace always and everywhere...
...Third, in his positions on gay rights, abortion, birth control, evolution, and stem-cell research, Bush has cultivated Protestant theological conservatives...
...His best speech writers, Michael Gerson and David Frum, who helped to write Bush's "evil-doers" address after September 11 and presented Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "Axis of Evil" in 2002, have made this point repeatedly...
...Ultimately the fear of a Bush-led "American theocracy" will fall into the dustbin of journalistic gimmicks and leftist folklore along with the comparable scare about Reagan hankering for Armageddon...
...No Christian rightist was allowed to proclaim a "culture war" on prime time television at the 2004 convention (though the president's daughters appeared at the podium to joke about Sex and the City...
...John F. Kennedy, a womanizer and an agnostic Catholic who nonetheless stood with God against atheistic communism...
...Supporters included conservative Protestants who wanted religious groups to receive state funds for their charities without diluting their doctrinal message...
...Lyndon Johnson, a combination womanizer and spiritual searcher...
...Daughters Barbara and Jenna enjoy the social life common among affluent twenty-somethings without parental censure...
...Since contemporary political liberalism is more secular than "FAITH-BASED" POLITICS Roosevelt's version, his religiosity is acknowledged primarily by conservative Republicans such as Newt Gringrich...
...Simply put, glib ruminations about a "faithbased presidency" and an "American theocracy," distort our understanding of Bush's administration generally, religion's place in contemporary politics, and life in the United States as it is and might plausibly become in the foreseeable future...
...Nor should secular Americans be judged less patriotic than those who believe in God...
...THE FIERCE CONTROVERSY over Bush's "faith-based initiative" was surprising, though...
...Asked to name his favorite philosopher in 1999, Bush cited "Christ, because He changed my life...
...While militant secularists react in horror, conservative Protestants point with pride to Bush's statements that, in 1999, Bush felt a "call" from God to run for president...
...1. These three books—Paul Kengor, God and George W Bush (Harper Collins, 2004...
...This display of cultural aggression cost the president moderate votes in November...
...The president attempted to mollify both Christian conservatives and less devout swing voters in his decision to fund some embryonic stem cell research...
...Rather, a facile stereotype of a "faith-based" presidency has become conventional wisdom among Bush's friends and foes alike...
...Although the president prays often, the process remains obscure...
...the Shroud of Turin...
...He may or may not still refer to adviser Karl Rove as "turd blossom...
...TR did this despite his private flirtation with agnosticism...
...Bush undoubtedly heard the call just as clearly from countless pundits after his easy reelection in Texas the previous November...
...Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas interpreted Bush as saying that God had told him to go to war against Iraq and, earlier, against al-Qaeda and the Taliban...
...The son of a Protestant mother and Catholic father, he developed into a New Age combination of Eisenhower and Johnson...
...By 2000, however, a more conservative Supreme Court had loosened this standard to allow religious groups to seek government funds on a "neutral" basis...
...While helping to build solidarity on the left for generations, these scares have been politically ineffective overall, not least because no one except militant secularists and religious liberals believes them—or should believe them...
...4. For a good introduction to the faith-based initiative question and differing political perspectives, see Stephen Monsma, "Faith-Based NGOs and the Government Embrace," in Elliott Abrams, ed., The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and U.S...
...The attacks by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, pushed the faith-based initiative to the legislative back burner...
...Mondale convinced a plurality of voters in Minnesota and the District of Columbia...
...First, Bush experienced a religious conversion in his early forties and it has stuck...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower, a belated Presbyterian who avidly promoted civil religion...
...Rather, they are also part of two intellectual bad habits we need to break...
...The first requirement is to calm down...
...Bush's moralistic rhetoric hardly places him outside of the American presidential or foreign policy tradition—especially in times of war...
...Whatever his political aspirations at that point, the younger Bush undoubtedly learned the dangers of associating too closely with religious conservatives and their core issues...
...In 1992, many of them supported a challenge to his renomination by conservative Catholic Pat Buchanan...
...There is no evidence that Bush enjoys telling off-color stories (as Reagan did), tolerates carousing by his closest aides (as Carter did), or often uses barracks language (as Eisenhower did...
...Charities associated with Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and other Christian rightists have received contracts, but the pork barrel has been small...
...Several bills were introduced in 2001 with the support of the Bush administration...
...Reagan spoke similarly to the same group, yet the issue seems to be much more visceral for Bush...
...Busii woN with more Protestant religious conservatives going to the polls than had been anticipated by anyone except, perhaps, Karl Rove...
...And a sensible policy of AIDS prevention has been hampered by numerous conservative mid-level appointees who endorse abstinence instead of condoms...
...Those who view Bush as an exceptionally religious president leading an extraordinarily religious administration typically stress three points...
...With the usual human capacity to contain multitudes in ways that defy determinist formulas, fundamentalists and evangelicals both read novels about Jesus' imminent return and sign up for thirty-year mortgages...
...He also told reporter Bob Woodward, "I'm surely not going to justify war based on God...
...After all, Clinton agreed in principle that faith-based organizations (FBOs) should be able to compete for government social service contracts on the basis of competence...
...Liberals not only criticized a dangerous breach of the "wall of separation" between church and state, but also correctly viewed the plan as a potential pork barrel for Protestant theological conservatives who, enriched and grateful, would cleave even more tightly to the Republican Party...
...As president he prayed often, kept a Bible on his desk, and talked about his own faith in the process of urging communist leaders abroad to embrace religious freedom...
...Framing the issue for his evangelical allies, Bush emphasized that he, too, was a "sinner" who therefore could not condemn the sins of others...
...The first five presidents of the cold war era differed noticeably in their personal faith...
...Attendance at religious services has fallen, and the number of Americans acknowledging no religious commitment has risen to somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent...
...According to Bush, he prayed for the safety of American troops, minimal casualties in general, and the wisdom and "strength to do the Lord's will...
...Moreover, there are good reasons for the left to try to understand this issue instead of fulminating about it...
...Yet Bush, influenced by friends and his wife, Laura, had been moving toward a heightened religious commitment before then...
...This lack of publicity obscures the increased influence...
...Nonetheless, by 1984 theologically conservative whites had become the most reliable mass constituency in the Republican coalition...
...In May 2005, Laura Bush warmed up a press dinner with a joke about an attempt by her husband the rancher to milk a male horse...
...Insofar as the 2004 presidential campaign was "infused with religion," as the Washington Post observed at the time, most of the infusion came from Bush's liberal critics and Senator John Kerry's conservative critics rather than from the candidates themselves...
...He participated in a religious fad of the day, wearing a "WWJD" pin—a shorthand for Reverend Charles Sheldon's late-nineteenth-century social gospel question, "What would Jesus do...
...Asked in March 2006 if "prophetic Christians" had convinced him that the Iraq War was a sign of the coming Apocalypse, Bush responded, after a long pause, "I haven't really thought of it that way...
...Bush tried to curb his drinking in the early 1980s, fearing that he might embarrass his father...
...5. I have a hunch, but no more than a hunch, that this locution represented an attempt to sound Muslim...
...Bush's foreign policy statements since September 11, 2001, have both highlighted his faith and infuriated opponents who consider him a religious extremist...
...At his most hyperbolic, Bush declared, "Islam means peace...
...They sponsored anti-gay-marriage initiatives in eleven states with the understanding that these referenda would draw their followers to the polls...
...Religion alone did not bring him back from the edge of alcoholism, but there is no reason to doubt Bush's conviction that faith kept him sober...
...Above all, Bush's appointees to the federal bench have joined other judicial conservatives in chipping away at Roe v. Wade...
...Roman Catholic Democratic nominee DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 47 "FAITH-BASED - POLITICS Kerry faced a more complicated set of challenges than John F. Kennedy in 1960...
...Nonetheless, liberal writer Esther Kaplan is correct when she concludes that the religious right exerts an "unprecedented" level of influence in Bush's administration.' No single Christian right organization currently holds the prominence of the Moral Majority during the early 1980s...
...For instance, although roughly 40 percent of Americans claim to attend religious services regularly, in real life the figure is closer to 25 percent...
...One liberal Internet satirist envisioned a Bush campaign ad directed against a peace-loving social gospel Jesus, with biblical quotations illustrating softness on crime, terrorists, and welfare loafers...
...At the Republican National Convention that year, Buchanan declared a "cultural war" on liberals, a declaration echoed in prime time by Pat Robertson...
...Convinced by their arguments and his own experience with alcohol that religion helped to renovate shattered lives, Bush implemented this precursor to the national faith-based initiatives in the Texas prison system...
...Theologically and politically conservative Protestants quickly rushed to claim the president as one of their own in interviews, articles, and at least three books on his faith.' Liberals and radicals have also emphasized the influence of Bush's faith on his policies, but they are appalled...
...While reiterating his opposition to abortion and gay marriage as well as his straddle on embryonic stem-cell research, Bush himself declined to place these issues in the context of a "culture war...
...2. Premillennial dispensationalism is probably unfamiliar to many Dissent readers but, judging from book sales and movie attendance, more Americans recognize its basic features than can identify the central premises of Keynesian economics, not to mention the central premises of postmodern cultural criticism...
...He seems never to have had a crisis of faith...
...It is no insult to Bush's faith to recognize that he was already a skilled politician who knew what to say to conservative Protestants...
...But Bush established an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House as well as in seven departments and agencies...
...Earlier versions of this article were presented at Boston College, the Congress of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2004, and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan...
...Liberal and radical complaints about Bush's foreign policy, including its religious aspect, have been less coherent than critiques of his domestic program...
...This judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration but it is self-evidently true only if modern times began on January 20, 1989, when George H. W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan...
...Political aspirations could not have been far from George W. Bush's mind in 1992, since he was elected governor of Texas two years later...
...3. Although the author slips too easily into hyperbole about an imminent theocracy, Esther Kaplan, With God on their Side: George W Bush and the Christian Right (New Press, 2004) is the best account of the Christian right's influence within the Bush administration...
...FDR's personal faith was simple, slightly eclectic, and unreflective...
...Bush prays often, reads both the Bible and inspirational meditations every day, and 42 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 says frequently that he seeks and receives God's guidance as president...
...If he did so, Bush would share a trait with Wilson...
...The list includes Harry Truman, a Baptist committed to a sturdy separation of church and state...
...In the final analysis, insofar as a "theology" of George W. Bush can be pieced together from existing sources, he should be described as a moderate evangelical and advocate of a politically conservative version of the social gospel...
...Conservative Protestants never fully trusted the elder Bush...
...Perhaps Bush's advisers fear above all that he could say nothing substantive about matters of faith...
...Consciously or inadvertently echoing one of Eisenhower's famous quips, former aide Andrew Card explained, "The President doesn't care what faith it is as long as it's faith...
...Thus, except for a few public off-the-cuff remarks and some conversations secretly recorded with then-Governor Bush by evangelical activist Doug Wead, there is little nonformulaic information about his faith...
...The government must "protect the great right of people to worship—or not worship—as they see fit," he has said...
...LEO P. RIBUFFO teaches history at George Washington University and is writing a history of the Carter presidency in broad social and cultural perspective...
...Second, some of his major appointees, including former chief speech writer Michael Gerson and former attorney general John Ashcroft, are evangelical or Pentecostal Protestants...
...Those responsible for the attacks of September 11 were "evil-doers...
...No Democratic presidential contender in 2000 could lay claim to the conversion schtick...
...Changes in behavior took some time...
...Whereas Reagan advertised—and sometimes exaggerated—his connection with Christian right clergy such as Jerry Falwell, Bush has generally kept his distance...
...As issues related to religion proliferated, the white portion of the party became increasingly secular, with the loss of many northern ethnic Catholics and southern evangelicals...
...Asked by a journalist if prayer worked, Bush responded, "Brother, if you have to ask, you just don't get it...
...Shortly after his second inaugural, he said, "I don't see how you can be President—at least from my perspective how you can be President—without a relationship with the Lord...
...Carter's 1979 address on the "Crisis of Confidence"—widely caricatured as his "malaise" speech—implied that whining Americans no longer deserved to have God on their side...
...Despite his alliance of convenience with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other leaders of the (then) new Christian right, Reagan never placed a Right-to-Life Amendment or restoration of prayer in public schools anywhere near the top of his agenda...
...On election day, Bush beat Gore by 20 percent among voters who frequently attended religious services...
...As devout critics have correctly complained, at least since the 1830s, however, American religiosity is much wider than it is deep...
...Along the way he showed interest in Baha'i...
...Religious conservatives were less witty but shrewder...
...I guess I'm a more practical fellow...
...While achieving his chief domestic goal, cutting taxes for the rich, he has held together a conservative coalition that, to a considerable degree, crosses class, ethnic, and religious lines...
...But it should come as no surprise that increasing secularization and cultural liberalization in some parts of the culture have precipitated a faith-based conservative political revival in others...
...A longer, fully footnoted, and more academic version appears on the author's Web page at George Washington University...
...Why should anyone care who is not an academic specialist in religion or the presidency...
...There followed a grotesque debate among politicians and pundits about the role of "moral" issues in determining the results...
...Some go further, contending that their liberal version of the social gospel is morally superior to Bush's version of Christianity...
...Bush seems to me the worst president since Nixon, but he is neither a zealot nor a simpleton...
...At least as important, foreign beneficiaries do not vote in American elections...
...Of course, such catchphrases are standard political hyperbole, but they are not only that...
...Evil-doers" sounds odd in the contemporary American vernacular but is used in some translations of the Koran...
...Ron Suskind, one of many journalists who recently discovered American religiosity, claimed in the New York Times Magazine that Bush's administration is so strongly "faith-based" that it ignores earthly reality in most significant respects...
...These problematical decisions provided an opening for strongly sectarian groups to seek legislation guaranteeing them access to federal contracts on the same basis as other social service organizations...
...In 1984, for example, Walter Mondale warned that Reagan was going to allow Jerry Falwell to name a majority of the Supreme Court...
...ANYONE SERIOUSLY attempting to place the younger Bush in this context of presidential religiosity faces problems rarely acknowledged...
...The conversion rendered him no more introspective or intellectually curious about religion and only slightly less cocky...
...The broad religious revival that began during the Second World War—sometimes called the fifth Great Awakening—was amply represented in Roosevelt's speeches...
...At the same time, Bush and his party showed that they had learned the lesson of 1992...
...On the contrary, all professed to view the cold war as a test of American faith and character...
...Democratic nominee Al Gore was immune to charges of infidelity and sacrilege...
...In addition, Democrats are loath to admit that several features of his foreign policy—moralistic rhetoric, unilateral military action, and preemptive attacks on countries posing no immediate threat—fit into a venerable bipartisan pattern...
...This trend is even clearer among young people and ordinary theocons, for whom political activity means little more than voting...
...That version will be published next year in Sophia University's Journal of American and Canadian Studies...
...He has so intimidated liberals that many are afraid to defend the constitutional right to an abortion, gay rights, and sensible policies regarding AIDS and family planning on the merits...
...Rank-and-file theological conservatives have become an unshakable part of the Republican base...
...Oblivious to international realities, Pat Robertson denounced Islam as an inferior religion, and Falwell called the Prophet Muhammad a "terrorist...
...In short, stagflation might do it, but opportunistic references to God by liberals won't (though, as I suggest in this essay, a less obtuse approach to the religious scene might raise the level of political discussion...
...He retains his preconversion penchant for sarcasm...
...Indeed, diverse religious charities were already receiving millions of federal dollars to serve the poor overseas...
...Certainly the White House does not want Bush to address Jesus' philosophy, biblical inerrancy, or the prospect of the Antichrist alive and well in Europe...
...Writers discussing his religion recycle the same limited material and tell essentially the same story with varying degrees of enthusiasm or alarm...
...This lack of coherence derives partly from the left's divisions about the Iraq War...
...In 1976, as many voters sought an affirmation of American virtue after the Indochina War and Watergate scandal, the major parties nominated the most devout pair of candidates since William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan in 1896...
...Most of Bush's statements about the relationship between church and state could have come from any contemporary president...
Vol. 53 • September 2006 • No. 4
