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Pastor Bush
Why do so many Americans dismiss the evidence that the occupation of Iraq has gone disastrously wrong? Because the US has a long tradition of putting faith before facts. Jonathan Raban on George Bush's debt to the Puritans

In the secular, liberal, top-left-hand corner of the US where I live, the prevailing mood was one not far short of despair as incredulity mounted that the daily avalanche of bad news from Baghdad, Fallujah, Tikrit, Samarra, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kufa, Ramadi, Baquba and elsewhere was apparently failing to make any significant dent in Bush's poll numbers, or expose his claim that freedom and democracy are on the march in Iraq as a blithe and cynical fiction. What would it take? people asked: How many more American and Iraqi deaths? When would it sink in that the occupation of Iraq is a bloody catastrophe? Why was the electorate so unmoved by the abundant empirical evidence that the administration's policy in the Middle East wantonly endangers America as it endangers the wider world? Kerry's performance in the first presidential debate brought a much-needed lift of spirits to this neck of the woods, but the Democratic candidate is up against something more formidable than the person of George Bush: he has to deal with the unquiet spirit of American puritanism and its long and complicated legacy.

Last Monday, on the school run, I caught an interview on NPR's Morning Edition with the grieving family of a sergeant in the Oregon National Guard who was killed in Iraq on September 13. Here's what Sergeant Ben Isenberg's dad said: "This war is not about Iraqis and Americans, or oil: this is a spiritual war. The people who don't understand that just need to dig into their Bible and read about it. It's predicted, it's predestined. Benjamin understood that the president is a very devouted [sic] Christian. Ben understood that the calling was to go because the president had the knowledge, and understood what was going on, and it's far deeper than we as people can ever really know. We don't get the information that the president gets."

In context it's clear that by "information" he wasn't talking about the stuff that passes from the CIA to the White House. This information comes from the guy whom Bush likes to call his "higher Father". As the president said in the closing lines of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last month, "We have a calling from beyond the stars ..." - a claim that in some societies might lead to a visit from the men in white coats, but in America, among the faithful, is met with rapturous applause.

Every Bush speech is richly encrypted with covert Biblical allusions and other secret handshakes with his fundamentalist listeners, but one need not be a fundamentalist to warm to this sort of religiose rhetoric, for it is every bit as much of an "American" thing as it is a "Christian" one. Rationalist liberals, tone-deaf to its appeal, make a serious mistake in their assumption that facts-on-the-ground, in Iraq or in the domestic US, can readily explode what the Bush administration has managed to project as a matter not of reason but of faith. ...

...When Americans tell their own history at the grade-school, storybook level, they conveniently forget the earliest and most successful colony of tobacco-aristocrats in Virginia (a bunch of degenerate smokers) and instead trace themselves back to the zealous theocrats in tall black hats who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whose first harvest is celebrated in the all-American orgy of Thanksgiving. The names of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, which put into the James River in 1607, have little resonance now, but everyone knows about the 1620 voyage of the Mayflower and its Pilgrim Fathers because the Puritans, who have never gone out of date, left behind a peculiarly American philosophy of the miraculous power of faith and hard labour, along with a dangerously uplifting vision of America's rightful place in the world. In a sermon of 1651, Peter Bulkeley laid out the essential rhetorical frame of Bush's foreign policy: "We are as a city set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth, the eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God ... Let us study so to walk that this may be our excellency and dignity among the nations of the world among which we live; that they may be constrained to say of us, only this people is wise, a holy and blessed people ... We are the seed that the Lord hath blessed." The sting in that exclusive only has been lately felt by almost every foreign ambassador to the UN who's had to listen to Bush or Powell lecturing the assembly on America's historic moral exceptionalism....

...While the Virginia colony brought 18th-century rationalism to America, and supplied four of its first five presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe), the New England puritans of Massachusetts gave Americans an intensely dramatic and emotional sense of their peculiar predicament. They were an exception among nations, uniquely favoured by Providence. They alone enjoyed the liberty to walk with God according to their own lights. They were a people of faith beleaguered on all sides by wicked spirits. Cleaving to their faith, they must distrust "imperfect reason" (Mather's phrase) as a means of discerning the mystery of creation and the visible world around them. Not least, the Puritan plain style (Mather warned writers of "muses no better than harlots" and of prose "stuck with as many jewels as the gown of a Russian ambassador"), which owed much to the teaching of Peter Ramus, the French philosopher and rhetorician, made these ideas accessible to the least educated, and gave them the unvarnished vigour that they still have today. The remarkable survival of this 17th-century worldview in 21st-century America has as much to do with style as with theological substance: people who would now find Jefferson or Madison hard going could easily thrill to the words of Mather, John Winthrop, the rollicking hellfire poet Michael Wigglesworth, or the poet of domestic sublimity Anne Bradstreet.

The Puritans live! And the shrewd men of the Bush administration have expertly hotwired the president to the galvanic energy-source of Puritan tradition. It's as if America, since 9/11, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village: walled-in behind a stockade to keep out Indians (who were seen as in thrall to the devil); centred on its meeting house in whose elevated pulpit stands Bush, the plain-spun preacher, a figure of nearly totalitarian authority in the community of saints....