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God Save the Queen
Evangelicals and the Sentimental Affinities of George W. Bush

...My knowledge of how conservative evangelicals think and act is more modest in scope, but also more intimate. I’m not an evangelical, but I study them as an ethnographer. I listen to the desires, fears, and ambitions of white, conservative evangelicals in the so-called red state of Tennessee. I’ve come to know the evangelicals who are the focus of my research very well, and I’ve learned to anticipate their sentiments the way that one anticipates the reactions of a close friend. If nothing else, I can speculate on a particular structure of feeling that made many American evangelicals rally their support and their blessings behind the President because, rather than despite, the fact that his life before September 11, 2001, seemed to contain so little that would have prepared him for what was to come.

In the months prior to the election, there were countless articles, documentaries, and TV and radio segments on Bush’s evangelical faith. But nothing crystallized for me the nature of Bush’s symbolic significance among his evangelical base as compellingly as a short, pre-election email letter from Laura Bush. The email was sent out on October 26 to the newsletter subscribers of Crosswalk, a fiercely conservative, “Christ-centered, for-profit corporation” that provides daily devotionals, news digests, and numerous other Internet resources for Christians, and is one of the most popular Christian sites on the web. The “Message” from Laura Bush included a picture of her smiling face, and began “Dear Friend, We’ve watched as President Bush has led this country through the most historic struggle of our generation…” A few lines later, Laura Bush recounts the following, which she repeated at rallies on the campaign trail:

In Ohio, I visited with a woman who summed up our success this way. She said, “President Bush was born for such a time as this. He never wavers when it comes to doing the right thing. It makes me feel so secure to know that our leader has such a love for our country.”

I don’t know which part of that statement jumps out at you, but I do know which part resonated the most with popular evangelical sensibilities. Six words: “for such a time as this.”

This is not empty rhetoric. It is a straightforward reference to the Bible -- the Book of Esther, chapter 4, verse 14, to be precise -- and it is among the most evocative and meaningful catchphrases in the language of evangelicalism. ...

...In Farenheit 9/11, Michael Moore wonders what Bush might have been thinking while he sat in the classroom looking bewildered for those seven minutes after learning that a second plane struck the Twin Towers. In light of political and business links between the Bush family and its Saudi bedfellows, Moore speculates that Bush must have been thinking “Hmm, which one of my friends screwed me?” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Sadly, that question is already beside the point.

What remains significant is how conservative evangelicals read that moment, and every presidential moment since then. If we come at this from a perspective that they might take, it follows that evangelicals did not see a bewildered politician, a man in over his head, stymied by his own inexperience and geo-political entanglements. Rather they saw the reluctant Queen Esther struggling to come to terms with the abrupt realization that she is implicated in a drama much larger than herself.

At that moment, Bush, like Esther, represented the evangelical’s greatest ambition and anxiety -- that one day he/she will be called upon to surrender him/herself to an irreversible state of being where personal faith and historical destiny become one and the same. The higher the stakes, the tougher the personal challenge. Consequently, the firmer the resolve to follow through -- regardless of obstacles or substantive realities -- the greater the faithfulness.

Bush’s Esther-appeal extends beyond the evangelical population. Millions of Americans perceive the drama of Bush’s post-9/11 leadership transformation – a drama that has not been lost on the mass media -- as a mirror of the national story of post-9/11 recovery, revenge, and revival. If we need to understand why Bush was re-elected in spite of everything -- the attacks on civil liberties, the devastating truths behind WMDs and Abu Ghraib -- we need to accept that at least on a certain level Americans are seduced by emotional drama. Yes, it is a highly moralistic nation that we live in, but it is also one whose mass culture relies heavily on its ability to dramatize itself, to tell its own story in the form of public people who bend or break like characters on a soap opera. Our national celebrities are not just people, they are allegories of us. ...