Holy War

It's easy to recognize religious extremism abroad. But can we recognize it at home

Religion has definitely been a good thing personally for President George W. Bush. He is the most aggressively religious president in American history. But is that a good thing for democracy? Is that a good thing for religion? He would not be president today had not a vivid religious experience charged his life with new meaning, direction and discipline. His first 40 years had been a wasteland of drift, aimlessness, buffoonery, business failures and excessive drinking. Redemption and transformation through his commitment to Jesus made him a man and a leader.

His parents are conventional Episcopalians, and for a while young George had conventionally attended the Presbyterian church in Midland, Texas. Marriage and Laura involved him with the Methodists. But he missed something, as he said, "on the inside." In the summer of 1985, while visiting his parents in Kennebunkport, George W. took his famous walk along the rugged Maine shore with Billy Graham. "Are you right with God?" Graham asked. "No," Bush answered, "but I want to be."

"That weekend," Bush later recalled, "my faith took on new meaning. It was the beginning of a new walk where I would recommit my heart to Jesus Christ." He was born-again, and he gave up drinking, smoking and tobacco chewing. Returning to Midland, he joined a men's community Bible-study group devoted to intensive reading of scripture. When his father ran for president in 1988, young George served as an informal liaison with the religious right. Subsequently turning to politics, he was elected governor of Texas. By this time he was a regular reader of the Bible and enjoyed a personal relationship with his savior. He was a great believer in the power of prayer. At a White House reception he said, "Our country has been delivered from many serious evils and wrongs because of that prayer."

In 1999 he decided to run for president himself. Asked on television about his favorite philosopher, he replied, "Christ, because he changed my heart." As his religiosity gained confidence, he said to members of the Southern Baptist Convention, "I believe that God wants me to be president." To a Houston minister he said, "I believe I am called to run for the presidency." Working through the Supreme Court of the United States, the Almighty delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.

President Bush now finds himself a born-again Christian locked in a struggle with a radical Muslim leader. Neither can be said to represent the whole West or the whole Middle East, and of course there is a world of difference between Protestant and Muslim fundamentalism. But in a way, President Bush is fighting a holy war predicated on his religious convictions, much as Osama bin Laden fights for his fanatical interpretation of the creed of Muhammad. According to the appreciative book by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, a family member said, "George sees this as a religious war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."

American presidents are routinely God-fearing and God-invoking, but they have rarely asked for divine guidance on secular issues. The framers omitted the word God from the Constitution. During the Civil War, a convention of Protestant ministers, led by the redoubtable Horace Bushnell, drafted an amendment that repaired the omission by inserting "Almighty God" and "the Lord Jesus Christ." But President Lincoln declined to back the Christian Amendment.

Few among the framers were born-again. Nor did the men who drafted the Constitution conceive of the president as a religious or even a spiritual leader. Of our first three presidents, Washington was a nominal Anglican who did not stay for communion, John Adams was a Unitarian (whom strict Trinitarians spurned as heretics), and Jefferson--denounced as an atheist--was actually a deist who produced an edited version of the New Testament with the miracles eliminated.

In the 19th century, all presidents of course professed belief in a heavenly father, though religion did not occupy a major presence in their lives. Lincoln was the great exception, and even he protected the Constitution from sectarian amendments. Nor did our early presidents exploit their religion for political benefit. "I would rather be defeated," said James A. Garfield, "than make capital out of my religion."

Many 19th century voters did not much care whether politicians were men of faith. James G. Blaine, for example, picked Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, "the great agnostic" and a famed critic of religion, to nominate Blaine at the 1876 Republican convention. A 21st century equivalent of Colonel Ingersoll would be hissed off the platform at Republican conventions today.

There have been presidents of ardent faith in the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson had no doubt that God had anointed the United States--and himself--for the salvation of suffering humanity. Jimmy (continued on page 142)Holy War(continued from page 96) Carter, like the younger Bush, was born-again. Bill Clinton was never in better oratorical form than in a church, especially a black church. But neither Wilson nor Carter nor Clinton applied religious tests to public policy, nor did any of them rely on churches to mobilize voters on their behalf.

President Bush's conversion experience was undoubtedly authentic. But his faith also provides political benefits. "There's no question that the president's faith is real, genuine," said Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God evangelist, "and there's no question that it's calculated." The rise of Protestant evangelicals as a political force has restructured American politics, and President Bush is taking full advantage of the millennial fervor.

When I was young, Protestant evangelicals were a disdained minority, made sport of by H.L. Mencken as inhabitants of the Bible Belt. Born-again fundamentalists could be relied on to be anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. They had led the campaigns against Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. They had lynched Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915.

But in recent years the Protestant right has forged an alliance with right-wing Catholics over abortion and with right-wing Jews over the Holy Land. Such alliances have made the Protestant evangelicals more respected and more politically potent. Religious statistics are notoriously unreliable, but it may be, as the Pew Center for the People and the Press asserts, that evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants. In the late 1980s, according to the Pew Center, 41 percent of Protestants identified themselves as "born-again or evangelical." Today 54 percent of Protestants identify themselves that way. Evangelicals make up 30 percent of the population and, with their allies among right-wing Catholics and Jews, make up close to 40 percent of the electorate.

Karl Rove, W.'s political wizard, is evidently worried about less than maximum turnout among evangelicals. W.'s father had alienated the religious right--one reason for his defeat in 1992--and the son is determined not to repeat the father's mistake. According to Rove, 4 million of their brethren did not vote for W. in 2000. In 2004 the Bush-Cheney campaign, according to The New York Times, "is asking conservative churches and churchgoers to do everything they can to turn their churches into bases of support without violating campaign finance laws or jeopardizing their tax-exempt status." W. himself told a White House conference of religious organizations that the federal government gave more than $1 billion in 2003 to faith-based organizations. In August, as the presidential contest grew more heated, The New York Times ran a story under the headline Churches See an Election Role and Spread the Word on Bush. The Wall Street Journal described the weekly conference call between the White House and conservative Christian leaders.

Meanwhile the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives introduced a bill that would permit religious organizations a limited number of violations of the rules against political endorsements. When the president addressed the Southern Baptist Convention, a chorus line of ministers pledged to call for his reelection. It is indeed a far cry from President Garfield and justifies the rebuke by Ron Reagan, who said at his father's funeral that President Reagan "never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians--wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage."

The Bush presidency is the first faith-based presidency in the history of the U.S. David Frum, a quondam presidential speechwriter, reports that the first words he heard in W.'s White House were "Missed you at Bible study." A senior White House staffer told David Aikman, author of the admiring A Man of Faith, that he estimated there are seven separate Bible-study and prayer-fellowship groups meeting every week in the White House, involving some 200 of 500 White House staffers--all presumably meeting on taxpayers' time. Aikman quotes a BBC correspondent as saying, "It's not uncommon to see White House functionaries hurrying down corridors carrying Bibles."

W.'s first executive order as president was to set up in the White House the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The idea behind this unprecedented office was to steer federal funds into religious organizations set up to help the needy. Religious organizations indeed contribute greatly to the rescue of casualties of an unfeeling economic system. "No discrimination against faith-based programs" is W.'s battle cry. "I welcome faith to help solve the nation's deepest problems."

But hard questions remain. What if a religious group hired only persons of the same denomination? What if the group proselytized among those in need of assistance? What if it failed to draw a bright line between secular and religious activities? What if a faith-based presidency opened the way to federal regulation of religion? What if a religious group took a partisan role in elections? The courts in due course will have to answer such questions. As usual, lawyers will be major beneficiaries.

Nevertheless, the president has carried forward his project of funding faith-based groups. He has established such offices in seven executive agencies--including the Department of Justice, the Labor Department, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. And as noted, he sent more than $1 billion in 2003 to religious organizations for charitable purposes. Yet religious organizations, for all their selfless work, can have only a marginal impact on "the nation's deepest problems."

To affirm his own heartfelt faith--and incidentally to assuage Rove's worries about the born-again vote--our president has embraced much of the evangelical program. "I don't think there's any question," says Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, "that his faith was absolutely determinative in his decision making."

W. is unique among American presidents in his extensive application of religious tests to secular problems. This explains his opposition to stem-cell research--an opposition that so disturbs Nancy Reagan. Stem-cell research promises to expedite cures for Alzheimer's, diabetes, AIDS, Parkinson's and other diseases. But evangelicals are against it and so is George Bush.

The pressure to activate his evangelical base surely explains W.'s call for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. If the Supreme Court had upheld the decision of the Ninth Circuit Court to delete "under God" from the pledge of allegiance, W. doubtless would have proposed another constitutional amendment. During the 2000 election, he allowed that he thought schools should teach creationism as well as evolution. A National Academy of Sciences panel seeks to save the Hubble space telescope; the suspicion arises that some Hubble opponents see a conflict between Hubble and Genesis over the age of the earth.

Ideological restrictions on scientific inquiry and humanitarian action are especially burdensome on women. W.'s rigid opposition to abortion colors every decision that affects family planning. In July the administration for the third year withheld $34 million from the United Nations Population Fund on the grounds that, while the UN agency does not condone abortion, it cooperates with Chinese programs that may involve abortion. The fund cutoff penalizes poor women around the world.

The tragedy of September 11 deepened Bush's relationship with his creator. On matters of life and death, Bush radiates a calm but disquieting certitude. His faith-based presidency encourages absolutist, black-and-white thinking: Either you're for us or for the terrorists--there's no room for nuance or doubt. "There's no doubt in my mind we're doing the right thing," he told Bob Woodward. "Not one doubt." Friends attribute to his religious faith this capacity to confront grave trouble with a certain serenity.

Woodward, who interviewed Bush for nearly four hours for his book Bush at War, came away with the distinct impression that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan." W. told Rove, "I'm here for a reason, and this is going to be how we're going to be judged." A senior aide commented that the president "really believes he was placed here to do this as part of a divine plan."

In a later book, Plan of Attack, Woodward reports that he asked Bush whether he had discussed the invasion of Iraq with his father. After all, the elder Bush had already fought a war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a son to seek his father's counsel. Instead of disposing of the question as a private matter between father and son, the younger Bush insisted he had not consulted his father. "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength," young Bush told Woodward. "There is a higher father that I appeal to."

The higher father evidently tells him what he most wants to hear and imparts a messianic drive to his discourse. W. has remade himself through redemption and transformation, and he may well regard it as his God-given destiny to redeem and transform the Middle East. He sees his administration as agents chosen by God to combat evil and establish virtue. (Of course, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Muqtada al-Sadr think the same way.)

Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though not formally enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the mystery of the Almighty. He was intensely aware of the unfathomable distance between the Supreme Being and erring mortals, and he would have agreed with Hawthorne that to claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was the unpardonable sin. Self-righteousness was the existential curse.

How Lincoln would have rejoiced in Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. A fanatic, Mr. Dooley said, "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if he only knew th' facts in th' case." The most dangerous people in the world today are those who convince themselves that they execute the will of the Almighty.

Lincoln summed it all up in his second inaugural. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, had read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged, for "the Almighty has his own purposes."

Thurlow Weed, the boss of New York, sent Lincoln a letter of congratulations. "Men are not flattered," Lincoln replied, "by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls more directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."

Reinhold Niebuhr was the great American theologian of the 20th century. About Lincoln's second inaugural, Niebuhr wrote, "This combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free civilization on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle. We, on the other, as all God-fearing men of all ages, are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire."

Is the evangelical domination of the Bush administration good for democracy? Democracy presupposes negotiation and compromise. Evangelical religion deals in uncompromising absolutes. Perhaps George W. Bush should read Lincoln and Niebuhr in order to understand the limits on human knowledge of the divine purpose.

Is it even good for religion? Let Andrew Jackson answer that question. Pressed by clergy to proclaim a national day of fasting to combat a cholera epidemic, President Jackson replied that he could not do as they wished "without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the general government."

Let us forever honor the wisdom of the founding fathers and the separation of church and state.