Evangelicals and the Sentimental Affinities of George W. Bush
By Omri Elisha
President / Queen
I don't have a television. I don't follow the blogs. I have an almost Churchillian aversion to statistical polls. In short, I won't even try to make sense of the recent cacophony of election explanations. I can't say, like Garry Wills, that we've reached the end of the Enlightenment, nor will I argue that voters today increasingly gravitate around political constructs as hopelessly vague as "moral values."
My knowledge of how conservative evangelicals think and act is more modest in scope, but also more intimate. I'm not an evangelical, but I study them as an ethnographer. I listen to the desires, fears, and ambitions of white, conservative evangelicals in the so-called red state of Tennessee. I've come to know the evangelicals who are the focus of my research very well, and I've learned to anticipate their sentiments the way that one anticipates the reactions of a close friend. If nothing else, I can speculate on a particular structure of feeling that made many American evangelicals rally their support and their blessings behind the President because, rather than despite, the fact that his life before September 11, 2001, seemed to contain so little that would have prepared him for what was to come.
In the months prior to the election, there were countless articles, documentaries, and TV and radio segments on Bush's evangelical faith. But nothing crystallized for me the nature of Bush's symbolic significance among his evangelical base as compellingly as a short, pre-election email letter from Laura Bush. The email was sent out on October 26 to the newsletter subscribers of Crosswalk, a fiercely conservative, "Christ-centered, for-profit corporation" that provides daily devotionals, news digests, and numerous other Internet resources for Christians, and is one of the most popular Christian sites on the web. The "Message" from Laura Bush included a picture of her smiling face, and began "Dear Friend, We've watched as President Bush has led this country through the most historic struggle of our generation " A few lines later, Laura Bush recounts the following, which she repeated at rallies on the campaign trail:
In Ohio, I visited with a woman who summed up our success this way. She said, "President Bush was born for such a time as this. He never wavers when it comes to doing the right thing. It makes me feel so secure to know that our leader has such a love for our country."
I don't know which part of that statement jumps out at you, but I do know which part resonated the most with popular evangelical sensibilities. Six words: "for such a time as this."
This is not empty rhetoric. It is a straightforward reference to the Bible -- the Book of Esther, chapter 4, verse 14, to be precise -- and it is among the most evocative and meaningful catchphrases in the language of evangelicalism.
The Old Testament Book of Esther is familiar to most of us as the basis for the Jewish holiday of Purim (full disclosure: Although I was raised Jewish, I can't say I would have recognized that scripture quotation before I started hanging out with evangelicals). It is the story of Esther, a Jewish woman who becomes Queen of Persia. A villainous royal official named Haman decides that all the Jews in the kingdom should be killed. Esther wants to intervene but she can't, since, as she tells her uncle Mordecai, she can't approach the king without being summoned by him. If she does so, she, too, will be killed. Mordecai says:
If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this. [NRSV]
Esther commits herself to three days of fasting and prayer, after which she approaches the king and -- long story short -- undermines the plans of Haman (cue the groggers) and saves the Jewish people from destruction.
The Esther story, and that passage in particular, is read by evangelicals as a sign of the individual's role in God's sovereign designs for human history.
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