Bush Brings Faith Into Full View; A new book traces the evolution of George W. Bush's faith and illuminates the role that religion plays in the president's life, both as a politician and a private person

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 11, 2004

A great number of Europeans and far too many Americans especially among the nation's academics and intellectuals purport to fear Bush's religious faith and compare it to the fanaticism of the Taliban and the Islamic extremists responsible for 9/11. That is stuff and nonsense. In Aikman's last chapter he shows how firmly Bush stands in a long tradition of U.S. presidents of deep faith: George Washington, John Quincy Adams (who read three chapters of the Bible every day), William McKinley and Harry Truman, to name but a few. These were hardly fanatics. And polls show that 58 percent of Americans view Bush's public religiosity as just "about right." In fact, those who think the president isn't open enough in expressing his faith outnumber by a 2-1 ratio those who think he is too demonstrative.

But just how American Bush's expression of faith is can be shown best by a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s: "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation on the earth."

Book Reveals Deep Truth About Washington

It was the Rev. Mason Locke Weems who wrote the first biography of George Washington that, well, made him a bit better than he probably really was. Weems published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, the year after Washington's death at Mount Vernon, a relatively short carriage ride from where Weems himself lived and wrote the book.

Weems' "history" of Washington's life famously told the story of the great man's truthfulness even when he was a boy. It was a tale every school-age boy and girl learned in the 19th century and well into the 20th, and which is still around today. It ends with young Washington saying to his father, "I cannot tell a lie," and fessing up to cutting down a small cherry tree near the family home.

The incident never happened. Later historians noted that Weems likely invented the story and others like it in his very popular book to make Washington, who was noted for his stiff reserve, seem more human. The book pictures Washington as a naughty child who cut down a tree on a whim but then was of sufficient character to confess his guilt. Others have said that even if the cherry-tree event wasn't true, it should be since it revealed something basic about the nation's first president: his sense of duty and his impressive integrity. These are words that people who knew him well, and who did not need to invent stories about him, frequently used to describe Washington during his lifetime.

Janice Connell's new Faith of Our Founding Father: The Spiritual Journey of George Washington (Hatherleigh Press, 202 pp., $15.95) stands firmly in the Weems tradition and makes of him a more spiritual man and tradition-minded Christian than he might have been. But in so doing, Connell tells a deep truth about Washington, just as Parson Weems did two centuries ago. And this truth is that by all accounts Washington was an exceptional man in many ways unique without whom the founding of the United States of America probably would have come out differently than it did, and decidedly for the worse.