---

FATHERS AND SONS
George W. Bush and his forebears.

...The news media have been prone to underestimate the importance of George W.’s evangelicalism. Perhaps it’s because the religious right has perfected the art of what used to be called Mau-Mauing, rendering the press corps fearful of broaching the subject. Maybe reporters genuinely believe that George W. plays it up for political purposes; they often describe him as behaving cynically when he takes actions that please the Christian right. But this reading stems from an assumption of continuity between the son and the father, who did pander to evangelical conservatives. “I always laugh when people say that George W. Bush is saying this or that to appease the religious right,” his first cousin John Ellis told the Schweizers. “He is the religious right.”

George W. has been active in evangelical politics since his father’s 1988 campaign, when he served as the campaign’s liaison to the religious right. Working with Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God pastor and a longtime Bush associate, he forged personal alliances with influential ministers, broadcasters, and activists. In the Iowa caucuses, the televangelist Pat Robertson outpolled the elder Bush (who explained, comically, that his supporters were off that night golfing or at air shows and débutante balls). But the son’s aggressive networking paid off in the Southern primaries weeks later, when his father, once distrusted by born-again Christians, trounced even Robertson within that constituency. In the younger Bush’s own Presidential bid, in 2000, he got a minority of the over-all vote but eighty-four per cent of highly observant, white evangelicals. “For the first time,” Phillips notes, “a Republican presidential victory rested on a religious, conservative, southern-centered coalition.” For the first time, the President of the United States was also “the de facto head of the Religious Right.”

Phillips attributes Bush’s success to demographics, in particular the surge of evangelical Christian denominations as a proportion of the faithful. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans who attended weekly services fell from thirty-eight per cent to twenty-five per cent. At the same time, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention grew from ten million to seventeen million, and membership in the Pentecostal churches from less than two million to nearly twelve million. “Liberal religion was being routed,” Phillips concludes. Bush shared the values of this growing bloc and enjoyed its overwhelming support.

Bush has not been shy about displaying his faith. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the President came across Proverbs 21:15: “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Soon, “evildoers” became his favorite term for Al Qaeda. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: “whirlwind,” “work of mercy,” “safely home,” “wonder-working power.” Phillips refers to a study by the religion scholar Bruce Lincoln, who identified, in Bush’s speech to Congress announcing the invasion of Afghanistan, allusions to Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. In private, Bush has been even more explicit. “George sees this as a religious war,” a family member told the Schweizers. “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.” Phillips says that Bush has spoken of himself as an instrument of divine will.

But what’s wrong with an infusion of religion into Presidential speeches or even policy? The Founders may have believed in a separation between church and state, but the Constitution’s secularism doesn’t prevent a President from drawing on his religious beliefs in making decisions. Nor has Bush somehow “imposed” his faith on others, however alienating some may find his spiritual language to be. The problem lies, rather, in the specific ways in which Bush uses religion. Abraham Lincoln, in his second Inaugural address, invoked God, but he did so in a spirit of humility, questioning his own certitude and thus inviting further questioning. Bush does the opposite: his use of religion seems designed to remove any doubt—first in his own mind, then in the public’s—about his course. It doesn’t assist Bush with his reasoning; it substitutes for reasoning. Instead of providing a starting point for careful judgments, it assures him that the instincts on which he has based his policy are unerring.

This kind of recourse to religion leaves citizens no grounds on which to question the President’s actions. If the inspiration of God or the Bible is purely personal or subjective, it’s not open to debate—and decisions based on it become immune from scrutiny. The result is to short-circuit political deliberation, since democracy rests on the ability of the governed to check their leaders through reasoned argument. Ironically, George W.’s religious beliefs bolster the manorial tendencies of the Bush family. God and family alike promote a sense of special dispensation. It’s what happens when the politics of personal relationships comes to center on a personal relationship with God.

Politically, Bush’s conspicuous religiosity offers him two advantages over his father’s Episcopalian reticence. Like the trappings of his Texas populism, his public piety allows him to connect with ordinary folk as his father never did. Talking Biblical talk, he can shuck off his social class’s perceived indifference to people’s everyday concerns. It’s a paradox, but a politically invaluable one, that his invocation of religion both places him beyond public accountability and conveys that he’s just like everyone else. Religion also provides the other key asset his father lacked: the vision thing. The religiously infused sense of mission that George W. reportedly found after September 11th now carries the burden of keeping his Presidency from veering off course the way his father’s did.

No one would suggest that George W. embraced evangelicalism for electoral advantage. But it’s easy to wonder whether his born-again faith might not represent a decision to break with his father, to escape from the culture of Wasp reserve and austerity. George W. came to his new creed at a time when his life seemed to have fallen short of family expectations. His younger brother Jeb was outperforming him in business and seemed more likely to excel in politics. George W. was, his brother Marvin has said, “the family clown.” Indeed, George and Barbara found their son’s conversion “a stretching experience,” the Schweizers report. “Some of that same brashness in his personality came out when he talked about faith. . . . It sparked disagreements within the family.” Rich Bond, an associate of the Bushes, told the Schweizers,“You might say it was almost exaggerated. . . . But George W. seemed to want to be defined differently from the beginning.”

When it came to war with Iraq, George W. told Bob Woodward that his father “is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” But, in denying his real father’s influence, George W. reaffirms its importance. The very decision to stage a celebration on the Abraham Lincoln flight deck can be read as a rebuke to his father, signalling that he forged ahead where his predecessor had held his fire. It was also at odds with the elder Bush’s self-effacing style. Today, as the Iraq adventure slogs on, that stunt is looking less like a moment of glory than like a moment of vainglory—and a mistake that George H. W. Bush, whatever his shortcomings, never would have made.