One man and his god By Jonathan Steinberg
George W. Bush is a deeply religious man and the US remains a very religious country. In February 2004, Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Trust's Religion Programme, wrote that in a recent poll, "Eighty- five per cent of respondents stated that religion was either 'very' or 'fairly' important in their lives, and nearly 60 per cent reported that they attend religious services at least once or twice a month."
If religion matters in general, the particular religion that President Bush avows matters all the more. Bush and many of his closest advisers are Evangelicals, a variant of Christianity that non-Americans scarcely comprehend, and Americans in the large urban centres rarely encounter.
According to The Economist in its "American Survey" of November 2003, Evangelical Christians make up the largest single religious group in the US, larger than Roman Catholics. Thirty per cent of all Americans in 2003 (up from 24 per cent in 1987) belong to the group, which, according to Professor George Marsden of Notre Dame University in Indiana, includes "holiness churches, Pentecostals, traditionalist Methodists, all sorts of Baptists, Presbyterians, black churches in all these traditions, fundamentalists, pietist groups, Reformed and Lutheran confessionalists, Anabaptists such as Mennonites, Churches of Christ, to name only the most prominent types". In spite of this bewildering variety, Evangelicals generally agree on the absolute authority, and literal truth, of the Bible, the redemptive power of Christ, the importance of missionary work and the centrality of a spiritually transformed life.
George Bush became an Evangelical in 1985 by being "born again". Being born again transforms the believer. As the Gospel According to St John puts it, "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John, 3:5). Bush makes no secret of the fact that God transformed his life in just that way. Asked at a televised debate during the Iowa primary in 2000 to name his favourite philosopher, he said, instantly, "Christ" - explaining how, through Christ, he had become a new man.
Here, too, he shares his identity with a very large number of his fellow citizens. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, about 35 per cent of Americans have been "born again". In a survey carried out in April 2004 for the Public Broadcasting Service, 71 per cent of Evangelicals polled said they would vote for George W. Bush if the election were held at the time of the poll. No wonder the White House calls them "the base", that bloc of voters in "Middle America" whose unstinting loyalty to the Republican party and willingness to turn out to vote gives the president a built-in core of support, a support strengthened by the way the Electoral College magnifies the distribution of votes in the south and south- west, areas of Evangelical predominance.
Thanks to some recent books, we know quite a lot about the governing style - and the fervent faith - of the president. Both Paul O'Neill, the treasury secretary fired by bush in 2002 (profiled in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty) and Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism officer and author of Against all Enemies, noticed Bush's refusal to consider alternatives. Bush told O'Neill that, "I will not negotiate with myself," when the then treasury secretary questioned the wisdom of vast tax cuts. Clarke heard him say, "you are either with us or against us" and wrote that the president "looked for simple solutions, the bumper-sticker description of the problem".
Bob Woodward, in Plan of Attack, writes that when he asked the president whether he consulted his father, Bush seemed surprised by the question. "There is a higher father that I appeal to." And, when replying to a question about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush said to Woodward: "But you run in different circles than I do. Much more elite."
The remark pulls you up short. Bush - the son of patricians on both sides, educated at Andover and Yale, a member of Skull and Bones, the most aristocratic, secret society on the Yale campus, former governor of Texas, president of the United States of America - does not run in elite circles?
But the alcoholic, upper-class, Episcopalian playboy Bush no longer exists. The reborn Bush is a Texas Evangelical Christian, a Methodist, who feels at home among ordinary folks at the Midland Men's Community Bible Study Group in Midland, Texas. He has, in effect, become one of them. He talks like they do and believes what they believe: the Bible is the literal truth. Good and Evil oppose each other. There can be no middle ground. Hence, when Woodward relates how he asked the president whether he had ever doubted his course of action in Iraq, the president replied: "Yeah... I haven't suffered any doubt." "Is that right?" Woodward asked. "Not at all?" "No. And I'm able to convey that to people." To those who had lost sons or daughters in the conflict, he said, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way."
To doubt his policy would be to doubt his God-given calling. Shortly after the State of the Union Message of 2002, in which he had called Iraq, Iran and North Korea "the axis of evil", Bush addressed an audience in Daytona Beach, Florida. "We've got a great opportunity," he said. "As a result of evil, there's some amazing things that are taking place in America. People have begun to challenge the culture of the past that said, 'If it feels good, do it.' This great nation has a chance to change the culture."
In the State of the Union address of January 2003, President Bush repeated his theme of moral transformation: "Our fourth goal is to apply the compassion of America to the deepest problems of America. For so many in our country - the homeless and the fatherless, the addicted - the need is great. Yet there's power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people."
Non-Evangelicals will not recognise "wonder-working power", but the "base" does. It comes from the refrain of a famous revivalist hymn, composed by Lewis E. Jones at a campfire revival in 1899, "There is Power in the Blood": "There is power, power, wonder-working power / In the blood of the Lamb."
The White House, the cabinet and the Congress of the US all contain strong supporters of Bush's Evangelical crusade. Bush appointed a devout Pentecostalist and member of the very conservative Assemblies of the Church of God, John Ashcroft, to be attorney- general. Michael Gerson, the president's speech writer, graduated with a degree in theology from Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading Evangelical institution. Bush's electoral strategist, Karl Rove, whom many consider the most important member of the entourage, received an honorary degree in May 2004 from the controversial Evangelist, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, at his Liberty University, for his "commitment to conservative ideas". And according to Peter Singer, in his recently published The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, the majority leader of the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay of Texas, has said: "Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world - only Christianity." By this, DeLay means "a biblical world view" that rejects the teachings of Charles Darwin. DeLay believes that the shootings at Columbine High School took place "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionised out of some primordial mud".
Exit polls in 2000 showed that 55 per cent of those who voted for Bush placed moral reform as their highest political objective. All the so-called "hot-button issues" of this campaign - conflicts over gay marriage, abortion, guns, feminism or stem-cell research - reflect that. All those issues grow out of what Evangelicals call "secular humanism" - a movement which, they believe, has debauched American life in the form of feminism, moral relativism, bible criticism, Darwinian evolution and, worst of all, abortion. US representative Mark Souder of Indiana, who accepts the Bible as literally true, told the interviewer for "The Jesus Factor", an episode of a PBS documentary on Evangelicals and politics: "I believe that the fundamental change in America was the legalisation of abortion."
For conservative Christians, the election of 2004 represents the ultimate struggle between good and evil in American life. Republican Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma told supporters that a vote against George Bush was a vote for Osama bin Laden. He later strengthened that to comparing it with a vote for Adolf Hitler.
Evangelical Christianity holds Jews in special regard and works toward their conversion as a necessary stage for the Second Coming of Christ. As early as 1711, German Pietists, the ancestors of many modern American Evangelicals, founded an Institutum Judaicum in Halle to train missionaries to the Jews. Today, Evangelical Christians regard the state of Israel as a wonder wrought by God, a stage in the great epic of redemption. These attitudes have immediate political implications. The Pew Trust's public survey of September 10 2003 concludes that "fully 44 per cent of Americans believe that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people", while a substantial minority (36 per cent) think, "The state of Israel is a fulfilment of the biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus." White evangelical Protestants and, to a lesser degree, African-Americans accept both of these propositions.
One powerful source of Evangelical support for Israel is "pre- millennial dispensationalism". Dispensationalists believe that the world has reached the sixth age, or "Church age", the final stage before the "Time of Tribulation", a crisis that will lead to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, the conversion of the Jews and the Second Coming of Jesus.
Is it far-fetched to see Bush's acceptance of Sharon's plan for withdrawal from Gaza as partly Evangelical faith and partly electoral calculation? Among the best-selling books in America are the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye, a dispensationalist theologian, and Jerry Jenkins. The 12 novels describe the world after "the Rapture", when the godly are plucked bodily from this world of sin and disappear. Those "left behind" are to be ruled by the forces of evil. The books have sold an estimated 45 million copies. According to The Economist (April 17 2004), the core buyer is a married evangelical woman with a college degree, who attends church weekly.
Like their president, conservative Evangelicals accept a peculiarly American version of Christian rebirth. They rarely mention Christ's command: "Sell all that you have, and give to the poor" (Mark, 10:21). American Christians in general have never obeyed that command. As early as 1648, the Puritan preacher Thomas Shepard claimed that the New World was the Kingdom of God, a covenant between God and the colonists. In today's mega-churches, that message is known as "prosperity preaching". As a disillusioned Evangelical told The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 9 2004, "Prosperity preaching tells us that God wants us all to be super- rich right now." Poverty still exists in America, as Bush argued in the State of the Union address of 2003, because the poor fail to find true Christian charity among their neighbours. Hence his "compassionate conservatism" requires "faith-based initiatives" by local churches and not progressive taxation.
In a survey like this, nuances get flattened. My account of Evangelical Christians concentrates on the majority who place moral reform above social reform, but not all Evangelicals today, nor in the past, have done so. African-American churches share the theology but not the politics of the white churches. Not all white Evangelical churches accept "consumerist forms of worship". Professor Tony Campolo, an evangelical Baptist minister, told an interviewer in the PBS documentary on Evangelicalism that he had counted some 2,000 references in the Bible that command us to help the poor. The main body of Evangelicals ignore that. They have apparently forgotten their long history of radical protest against the evils of this world, their campaign against slavery, or for prison and social reform.
Just as the president sees nothing wrong with his Iraq policy, he can't accept the view that his tax cuts are immoral. Bush is not disturbed by the huge transfer of wealth from poor to rich. He believes returning moral choice and economic liberty to individuals matters more than any obligation on the rich to help the poor. He was entirely consistent when he urged his fellow citizens to react to September 11 by going shopping.
Today's American Evangelicals are descendents of the radicalism of the "dissenters" in Britain. They believe the state takes away the liberty of the Christian believer and relieves the taxpayer of the moral responsibility of stewardship. Moral choice requires moral freedom. When the president repeats the mantra, "it's your money", he reiterates too that very American, individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation. The state stands for alien power and, in the black-and-white morality of Conservative Christians, it - together with the United Nations - shows the power of the Antichrist.
Whereas in traditional sacramental Christianity (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Anglican), the priest, the church, the sacraments and the liturgy are necessary for salvation because the Church is God's manifestation on earth, Evangelical Christians of whatever denomination emphasise the individual experience of God's love. Doctrine or denomination play little part. A new life witnesses to a new faith. It is a very individualistic, hence deeply American, faith.
This version of the Evangelical message has substantial benefits for Bush and the Republican party. Large corporations are delighted to accept the Evangelical attack on the state. They like to see the Federal Communications Commission relax regulations on media mergers; the Federal Power Commission ease strictures on energy companies; the Environmental Protection Agency modify air pollution regulations, and the Interior Department condone logging in the national parks. Bush easily raises record-breaking sums for his presidential campaigns from all the biggest corporations, even though only a few have Evangelical CEOs.
September 11 added urgency to the president's sense of mission. The subsequent reverses - the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the absence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists, the failure of Iraqis to greet the Americans as liberators, the mounting death toll among US servicemen and women, the stories of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the incoherent planning for an Iraqi interim government - none of these has shaken George Bush's faith in God's purpose, or the faith of the "base" in him. His public justifications for making war on Iraq have, of course, changed, but his religious zeal has not lessened. He has repeatedly described Saddam Hussein in the blackest of biblical phrases. In the State of the Union address of 2003, he asserted categorically of Saddam that, "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."
Fighting evil must be accompanied by doing good. In a recent press conference, the president asserted that the real objective of the war in Iraq was freedom. "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in the world." The Philadelphia Inquirer, in its May 2 2004 edition, asked two theologians, one Evangelical and the other Catholic, what biblical foundation there was for this doctrine. Neither could find any. Greg Thielmann, former acting director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs in the Department of State, observed recently that, "The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show."
"Faith-based intelligence" abroad and "faith-based initiatives" at home reflect the essence of the Bush administration. The president and his Christian followers want nothing less than to transform the domestic values and the international actions of the US. They know that they have divine sanction for their policies. Hence neither doubts nor uncomfortable complexities trouble them. They have accomplished the first stage in their crusade. The next is to win the presidential election of 2004 at whatever cost and by whatever means.
As the Evangelical Centre for Christian Statesmanship in Washington DC puts it, "Today, in our nation's capital, a new call is going forth. It is a call to serve that invites us to embrace God's providential purpose for this nation." That "new call" is how Evangelicals see the administration of George W. Bush.
Jonathan Steinberg is Walter H. Annenberg professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania.