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Our Magical President
How Bush goes beyond the Bible to create his own reality.

The big religion story of the day -- Ron Suskind’s NYT Magazine fisking of Bush’s faith -- is also the big political story of the day, and since it follows so closely on Matt Bai’s inadvertent take-down of Kerry, it’ll likely provide wonk-gossip fodder as well. Is this the Times' idea of "balance"? More importantly, which aide channeled New Age chanteuse Enya by asserting that “we create our own reality”? Who are the “sources” who set Suskind’s phone a-ringing after the publication of The Price of Loyalty? And is George W. Bush the first magical president of the United States?

Well, probably no one will ask that last one, but that’s what I was left wondering after reading Suskind’s report, only the latest in a long series of investigations of Bush’s faith. What’s surprising about Suskind’s summary of Bush’s “walk,” to borrow an evangelical term, is how small a role Jesus Christ seems to play in it. God gets a few cameos, but even he’s a supporting player. Front and center, though, is faith.

Given what we know about Bush, from pro-Bush sources such as Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of George W. Bush and the documentary George W. Bush: Faith in the White House, from the reasonably neutral Frontline special, “The Jesus Factor,” and from mainstream print investigations such as Alan Cooperman's, that’s a fair assessment.

Believing, it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief. Jesus Christ’s particular teachings -- well, those are good, too. But what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can.

What Suskind misses, and what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion.

A common aspect of many New Age schools of thought (though not all; plenty of them blend numerous philosophical traditions in a sophisticated manner) is a gentle disdain for perceived reality. Many New Agers argue that their beliefs are actually ancient; and, despite the fact that the superficial characteristics are often of a recent vintage, there’s some truth to that assertion. New Age religions are, literally, reactionary, responses to what’s been called the disenchantment of the world. Another word for that process is the Enlightenment, with its claims of empirical accuracy. New Age movements attempt to revive -- or create anew --pre-Enlightenment ideas about magic, alchemy, ghosts, and whatever else practitioners can glean from a record for the most part expunged by institutional Christianity.

Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is the child of the Enlightenment, a functionalist view of faith that’s metaphorically “scientific.” It's scripture as read by a cranky engineer who just wants to know how God works. The Bible, for a fundamentalist, isn’t powerful literature demanding our ever-changing discernment; it’s an instruction manual. ...

...In this particular sense, Bush does seem to be a descendent of the Enlightenment: He’s Rousseau’s noble savage, operating on the pure, animal instincts that’re true because they are, and are because they’re true. The noble savage does not live in what Bush’s aide contemptuously calls “the reality-based community”; he is in and is of a “nature” more real than reality, which, in an unexpected nod to postmodernism, Bush believers seem to dismiss as a social construct.

Suskind and other Bush detractors (and make no mistake, Suskind’s story is a hit piece -- a smart, informative hit piece, but a hit piece all the same) document Bush’s tautological thinking, but they fall short of taking it seriously. That’s a point Mark McKinnon, one of Bush’s media advisors, tries to hammer home in brutal fashion when he tells Suskind, “ ‘When you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what [Bush supporters] don’t like? They don’t like you!’”

Beyond the schoolyard shoving aspects of this declaration, there’s some insight. Suskind reads McKinnon's comment as an attack on snobbery; in fact, it’s an angry defense of positive thinking, of creating one’s own reality. Bush believers long for absolutes, but they don't care about empirical definitions. They're not literalists, which means they're not Christian fundamentalists. They don't trust language, which is why they read clunky, soulless translations of scripture, when they read it at all. Bush himself doesn't study the Bible; he samples phrases and invokes them like spells. ...