Crusader

Christian Century, July 13, 2004 by Kevin P. Phillips

ARE GEORGE W. BUSH'S religious convictions his own business and no one else's? Or do they have very public consequences? We can begin to probe the question by considering the religious context of his entry into national politics.

Not long after he was recruited for Christ by Billy Graham amid personal and business difficulties of the mid-1980s, Bush became his father's principal liaison with the Religious Right. During the presidential campaign of 1987-88, Bush worked with the Religious Right in receiving lines and at parachurch functions. He also undertook such tasks as getting his parents together with televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. As Newsweek bluntly summarized in March 2003, George W. "assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then-emerging evangelical movement."

No other president got his start this way. Indeed, the contacts he developed with little national attention gave him unique credentials for harnessing the political momentum of fundamentalist, evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism. And Texas, a state where business and religious conservatives have long collaborated, gave Governor George W. Bush a prime launching pad for a national campaign.

In the 2000 campaign, fortune smiled oil George W. Bush in the form of Bill Clinton's tarnished legacy. While Clinton's Southern Baptist idiom might otherwise have reassured born-again white Dixie, his affair with an intern made him a moral Beelzebubba. Though he survived impeachment, he was anathema to fundamentalists and evangelicals. This helped Bush to defeat Al Gore, himself a Southern Baptist, in all 11 states of the Old Confederacy. Part of Bush's strategy was to promote a national moral restoration by holding out his parents and the Bush clan as exemplars of traditional values and religious commitment.

So powerful was this surge that Bush's support among fundamentalists and evangelicals hit 84 percent--the highest ever for a Republican presidential nominee. Religious conservatives cast an unprecedented 40 percent of the nationwide GOP presidential vote.

Academicians analyzing the 2000 election were struck by how Bush had integrated the hitherto demanding leaders of the Religious Right into his electoral coalition without provoking negative attention. Professor John Green of Akron University, an expert on religious politics, identified this alliance as an "untold story" of the election. The connection became obvious, however, in the religiosity of the president's speechmaking, his heavy attention to prayer, and the patronage he gave to Religious Right loyalists in positions related to population planning, women's rights, reproductive rights, faith-based programs and church-state relations.

It is timely to ponder a related Oval Office attentiveness: the way American policy in the Middle East may have been shaped to appeal to the Religious Right. Could Iraq possibly have been cast and attacked partly as the new Babylon (and Saddam the new Nebuchadnezzar)? Was a compelling percentage of the Bush coalition cheered by conflagration and crisis in the Middle East, seeing it as a prelude to Christ's return?

Bush's willingness to identify: religious intention in war planning is unprecedented. In July 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz quoted him as telling the Palestinian prime minister that "God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East." A friendly Bush family chronicle by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer quoted one unnamed relative as saying that Bush sees the war on terrorism as a "religious war": "He doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know" (New York Times, March 29).

The first President Bush watched fundamentalist and evangelical voters emerge as a powerful constituency in 1990 and 1991. Huge ratios cheered the first gulf war, and many imbued it with deep biblical meaning: Babylon-cum-Baghdad, the symbolic center of wickedness, would be destroyed by God. The war might be the prelude to Armageddon; the Second Coming and the Rapture might be at hand.

Reporters described the atmosphere at the 1991 National Religious Broadcasters' Convention in Washington, D.C., which overlapped with the first weeks of the gulf war: the convention was full of sweatshirts saying "Jesus Is Coming" and copies of the 91st Psalm bound in desert camouflage colors. Many attendees expected or even welcomed nuclear war as a sign of the Second Coming (Larry Jones, Evangelicals for Nuclear War, Covert Action: The Boots of Terrorism, Ocean).

Shortly after 9/11, Pat Robertson's retirement as president of the Christian Coalition prompted the Washington Post to ask Washington-based Religious Bight leaders about a successor. None was needed, they said; the terrorist attack and the White House response had made George W. Bush their leaden No previous U.S. chief of state had ever been accorded that recognition. God, several said, had picked Bush to lead America through its crisis.