Bush: Father, Son and the Holy Rhetoric

It’s widely acknowledged that George W. Bush’s ‘born again’ religious beliefs play a large part in the simplistic way he views the world, but until recently most of the pieces I’d read concerning the US’s current policies have tended to concentrate on the neo-conservative side of things. So I decided to spend a while reading up on the Christian fundamentalist vein running through the Whitehouse. (Got a mug of coffee to hand? If not, hit your back button now…!)

Now I’d be the first to admit that my theological knowledge doesn’t really extended far beyond Father Christmas, Easter Eggs and a few Charlton Heston films, so I’ve absolutely no idea about some of the more, er, technical aspects of the religious analysis, but combined it does make for interesting and scary reading. The one thing that all the articles seem to agree on is that an understanding Bush’s Christian fundamentalist views is essential to understanding his stance on international affairs.

For starters, there’s Bush’s arrogance and impatience at press conferences and interviews; could what I’d always assumed was just his way of avoiding having to discuss matters which he might find a little too intellectually taxing actually be a symptom of his religious conviction? An article in the Washington Post seems to suggest this:

“Bush’s rigidity can come across as smugness. This has always been his least appealing quality, and it was on display, or so I was told, at a lunch he had for network anchors before the State of the Union message. He reportedly came across as cocky, not so much sure of himself as too sure of himself…. Maybe this single-mindedness of the president’s is the product of his deep religious belief - the conviction that he has been chosen for the task of decking Hussein.”

Jeffrey A. Tucker also writes about Bush’s attitude in an interesting article entitled Bush the Infallible:

He impatiently drummed his fingers on the table, as if he knew in advance that nothing could be asked that was really worth asking. His attitude was that if it needed to be known, he would have already have said it. All inquiries were just an imposition on him, an insult to his own sense of certainty. His answers consisted of barking back the stated position, along with a reminder that the position had already been stated. There was no attempt to charm, no attempt to inform, no attempt to hide his disdain… What gives a person that sense of certainty, that swagger that no one but himself ought to be in charge of what is known and what is not known? Power, certainly. Maybe that explanation is enough… There is something recognizably regional and sectarian in his religious way, a product of a doctrinal sensibility that thrives in the Southern region of the United States. It is woven into the culture in myriad way. Bush has adopted it as his own.

Tucker also addresses the religious rhetoric in Bush’s speeches:

In the state of the union address, Bush said the following: “There is power - wonder-working power - in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.” His cadence in these lines come from the hymn by Lewis E. Jones, a revival hymn from 1899 once sung in the streets to whip up religious frenzy for prohibition…

“There is power, power, wonder working power,” go the words, “In the precious blood of the Lamb.” The sentiments are classically revivalist. All Bush did was replace Jesus as the source of the wonder-working power with the idealism and faith of the American people. He said this as if everyone should recognize the hymn and the meaning, though Europeans couldn’t possibly, and few even in the West and East Coast of the US could have any idea what he was referencing. It was code designed to liven the hearts of the faithful - the tribe of evangelicals who constitute his strongest support base.

The article goes on to look at the background to Bush’s brand of religion, and concludes:

The culture of the evangelical religion includes standards for behavior, but they center on pietistic tropes condemning drinking, cursing, gambling, and other sins of the flesh. Rather, the emphasis is on the need to make a one-time choice for good, after which point all struggle is over. In the case of Jimmy Carter’s brand of the Southern Baptist religion, this impulse leads to Progressive politics of using the state to do good works to improve society. For Bush, it works itself out through the arena of foreign policy.

Bush’s State of the Union speech is also mentioned in another article, Bush Turns Increasingly to Language of Religion. The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is quoted as saying that most Christian conservatives would pick up on the ‘wonder-working power’ line immediately:

“It was designed to signal that he is one of us,” Lynn said. “The tone set by Bush is, ‘I am a Christian; I’m going to tell you about it on a regular basis.’ It eventually gets very exclusionary.”

Listening to Dubya speaking, there’s certainly no escaping the fact that he’s a full-on God-botherer; for example Bush’s address also included the line ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.’

Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels talks about Bush’s religious rhetoric in an interview by Kim Lawton:

[T]he way President Bush is using this language now is attempting to polarize the world between forces of good against forces of evil. He’s using it in a political way.

It’s not a new thing, of course, for a president to use religious language. But he’s turned the volume way up on this kind of language, and doing so portrays us as people caught in a battle of good against evil. You’d think we were in “Lord of the Rings.” What that sets up is a conviction that we are engaged in conflict that can only end in the annihilation of one side and the victory of the other. There can be no negotiation, there can be no discussion, there really can be no political process as Americans normally understand it. The language, as he uses it, is religious language intended in a way to bypass the brain and thereby [bypass] political discourse. It goes straight to the gut, straight to the emotional center and connects with that. It demands an immediate and uncritical emotional response.

You’d think we were in “Lord of the Rings.” – brilliant!

However, it’s not just Bush’s speeches that exhibit this religious zeal. The Washington Post describes his ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’ document as giving the US ‘a nearly messianic role in making the world “not just safer but better.”‘ Another article, George Bush’s Faith-based Foreign Policy, points out that:

George Bush closes his introduction to the document by resorting to religious metaphor, referring to his foreign policy as “this great mission.”

As St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews (11:1), “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” – a characterization that fits perfectly the administration’s vertiginous conception of the post-conquest reconstruction of Iraq.

In a piece for The Times, Ben Macintyre examines the President’s sources of inspiration during the current war:

Not for Bush the grimly inspired ironies of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, nor the poignant, painful questioning of Wilfred Owen. Instead, every morning at dawn, the US President devotes himself to the exhortations of Oswald Chambers, a Scottish evangelist who died while serving as an army chaplain in Egypt in 1917.

The key to Bush’s emotional brand of religion (utterly different again from the restrained Episcopalianism of his father) is what one associate calls the “Goodbye Jack Daniels – Hello Jesus moment”. Bush believes that God put him in the White House. “Beware of giving over to mere dreaming once God has spoken,” is the advice of Chambers. Since the age of 40, it has also been the guiding principle of Bush’s life.

As one former White House official told me last week: “If you believe God is on your side, there’s no argument; but argument is the only way to make reasoned decisions.”

A BBC article entitled Bush puts God on his side says that Bush kept his evangelical Christian beliefs quiet until the September 11th attacks.

Those close to Mr Bush say that day he discovered his life’s mission. He became convinced that God was calling him to engage the forces of evil in battle, and this one time baseball-team owner from Texas did not shrink from the task.

Fritz Ritsch, a Presbyterian minister in Bethesda, is quoted as saying that the concept of placing America in God’s camp gives Christians in America an easy way out:

They do not need to examine their souls because their president has told them they are on the side of good.

The article goes on to say that:

Mr Bush is certainly not the first president to invoke God in time of war, but his approach is markedly different from his predecessors.

…

Does the president believe he is playing a part in the final events of Armageddon? If true, it is an alarming thought.

An alarming thought indeed, and one which is further explored by Michael Ortiz Hill’s article Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory – Bush’s Armageddon Obsession. Hill speculates that Bush may be suffering from some sort of ‘messianic complex’. (Well, perhaps more accurately, the rest of us are suffering from Bush’s messianic complex…!)

The man is delusional and the shape of his delusion is specifically apocalyptic in belief and intent. That Bush would attack so many vital systems on so many fronts from foreign policy to the environment may seem confusing from the point of view of realpolitik but becomes transparent in terms of the apocalyptic worldview to which he subscribes. All systems are supposed to go down so the Messiah can come and Bush, seemingly, has taken on the role of the one who brings this to pass.

In dominionism we can see the theological source of Bush’s monomania… He believes his mandate toward action is from God.

Talking about Revelations, Hill writes:

Truth, carnage, and the ecstasy of vultures. In a ruined world the Messiah slays the antichrist and creates “a new heaven and a new earth.” The dead are judged, the Christians saved and the rest damned to eternal torment. The New Jerusalem is established and the Lord rules it “with an iron scepter.”

It is not inconceivable that Bush is literally and determinedly drawn, consciously and unconsciously, toward the enactment of such a scenario, as he believes, for God’s sake. Indeed the stark relentlessness of his policy in the Middle East suggests as much.

Of course it’s not just the loopy Christian fundamentalists we have to worry about…

Revelations is much beloved by Muslim fundamentalists and like their Christian compatriots they also thrill to redemption through apocalypse. Jewish fundamentalists of course do not believe in Revelations but have nonetheless made common cause with the Christian Right. “It’s a very tragic situation in which Christian fundamentalists, certain groups of them that focus on Armageddon and the Rapture and the role of a war between Muslims and Jews in bringing about the Second Coming, are involved in a folie a deux with extremist Jews,” said Ian Lustick, the author of For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition (and yes it is a single tradition) is being led by its fringe into the abyss and the rest of us with it.

Nor is Hill the only one wondering if Dubya thinks he’s on a mission from God (I’m starting to picture Bush in the Blues Brothers). Another article entitled Bush’s Messiah Complex cites parts of a book on Bush by Whitehouse speech writer David Frum:

Since September 11, Bush has barely gone a day without using the word “evil” or “evildoers.”… The phrase “axis of evil” did not happen accidentally, either, nor was it the original speechwriter’s exact term. Frum came up with the term “axis of hatred” in the draft he sent on to chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. Says Frum: “Gerson wanted to use the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11–so ‘axis of hatred’ became ‘axis of evil.’ ”

Frum is quite open about the importance of fundamentalism in the Bush Administration. The first words he says he ever heard in the White House from George Bush were: “Missed you at Bible study.” Frum writes, “Bush came from and spoke for a very different culture from that of the individualistic Ronald Reagan: the culture of modern Evangelicalism. To understand the Bush White House, you must understand its predominant creed.”

Bush expressed the same feeling when he was governor of Texas. “I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans,” he said.

That Bush believes he was assigned the Presidency from on high comes through in another passage of Frum’s book. After Bush’s September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Gerson called up the President to compliment him: “Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought–God wanted you there,” Gerson said, according to Frum.

“He wants us all here, Gerson,” the President responded, according to Frum.

Also cited is an interview with Bush from Bob Woodward’s book on the President:

Bush seems to believe that he is carrying out God’s will by waging war. In Woodward’s book, he says, “There is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war. There is a value system that cannot be compromised–God-given values. These aren’t United States-created values.” To be fair, the values Bush was referring to were “freedom and the human condition and mothers loving their children.” But still, the idea that the President believes he is doing God’s bidding at war time is unsettling.

Unsettling? Bit of an understatement I’d say. The most powerful man in the world’s clearly several cucumber sandwiches short of a picnic!

The article also quotes Chip Berlet, an expert on rightwing religious groups:

“Bush is very much into the apocalyptic and messianic thinking of militant Christian evangelicals,” he says. “He seems to buy into the worldview that there is a giant struggle between good and evil culminating in a final confrontation. People with that kind of a worldview often take risks that are inappropriate and scary because they see it as carrying out God’s will.”

Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, believes what motivates Bush is “a combination of the empire and the messianic. He grasps the practical need to control oil, for which the Administration is willing to go to any lengths, and he fuses it with messianic fervor.”

Perhaps the most comprehensive and informative piece I’ve read about Bush’s religious influences is Wonder-Working Power by James Heflin.

Bush’s own conversion seems sincere. He seems to be a true believer, heavily influenced by the Republican powers that surround him; only a man who believes he is ordained by God to lead America into a grandiose struggle of (literally) Biblical proportions could stun reporters with his state of, as a BBC reporter put it, “serenity” as bombs began to fall on innocent Iraqis.

Heflin argues that an understanding of the Christian fundamentalists’ systematic, long-term political manipulation of the Southern Baptists is integral to understanding the second self-professed ‘born-again’ man in the White House, his political tactics and his war in Iraq. In a nutshell, their attitude is:

We’re right. Everyone else is wrong. God is on our side, so what we do to those in our way is irrelevant, if our right triumphs over their wrong. That the central, selfless directive of Christianity is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a petty detail, imminently ignorable to God’s self-appointed chosen.

…

Bush is in the White House despite losing the popular vote; that has not stopped him from pursuing a black-and-white vision of the world that ignores those who did not elect him. The administration’s reasoning is classic fundamentalism: They know best. Those who dare to question their vision are “irrelevant.”

And on the influence the fundamentalists have over Bush, he cites an interview with Richard Land, (president since 1988 of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Capitol Hill lobbyist and member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom):

“In the Reagan administration, they took our calls,” but with Bush, “sometimes they call us.”

The separation of church and state, long central to Baptists, is of little interest to the fundamentalists: In 1998, Richard Land, at a strategy meeting with Republicans and members of the religious right, told the Republicans, “No more engagement. We want a wedding ring, we want a ceremony, we want a consummation of the marriage.”

I think the strength of this article is that it puts the Christian fundamentalists’ views into the wider context; not only does he cover the Project for the New American Century, and neo-conservatives such as Wolfowitz and Perle, but he also looks at their attitude to the EU, UN and the Israel/Palestine issue:

For many extremists, the heavily represented pro-Likud faction has occasioned cries of “Jewish cabal.” But current policy is not so easily pinned down; it is a convergence of fundamentalisms, regardless of the faiths involved.

The East Coast, mainly Jewish, neoconservatives and southern Christian fundamentalists are easily reconciled. Many in the Jewish community are wary of the proselytizing Christian contingent, but the strong pro-Israeli bent of the fundamentalists (who nonetheless are often, remarkably, anti-Semitic) has allowed an alliance between the most extreme elements of both religions.

…

Many fundamentalists (and many moderates, too) live in constant expectation: At any moment, maybe the very next, a distant trumpet might sound; the clouds might give way and the unimaginable, shining visage of Jesus descend. Many Southern Baptists believe they are part of the final generation on earth. Opinions differ about the pre- and post-return details, but they often include an Anti-Christ. Many fundamentalists encourage unilateralism because that Anti-Christ is expected, by current interpreters, to lead the European Union or the United Nations.

Another thing is clear to many literal interpreters of the Bible: Israel — all of Israel, even the bits currently underneath the Palestinians — must belong to the Israelis before Jesus can return. Obviously, a two-state peace settlement precludes that. Bush has indeed endorsed a Palestinian state, but the day such a settlement is signed, especially with E.U. or U.N. support, Bush’s solid backing by many fundamentalists will be in question.

Heflin sums up the current problems beautifully in his conclusion:

The Muslim fundamentalist bin Laden wants a holy war with Jewish and Christian fundamentalists. With George Bush in charge, he’s got it.

The issue is not, in the end, religious. It’s not racial. It’s philosophical: No matter what religion or political view provides a starting point, the end destination of the march toward absolutism is the willingness to cease caring about unbelievers as human beings. That is a danger greater than any weapon of mass destruction.

Very true. I’ve often thought America in general had a strange take on religion though. Take, for instance, the much-uttered phrase ‘God bless America’; I mean, if there is a god, wouldn’t he/she/it want to bless Mongolia or Nigeria just as much as the US? Or do American’s feel that they’ve got some special relationship with The Big Cheese? Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler (a name that could have come straight out of a Harry Potter book), featured in a Washington Post article entitled Pastor Hears The Insanity Of the War Cry wonders the same thing, proving that not all American Christians are as insane as Bush and the fundamentalists.

“Why would God only bless America?” he asked. “Does God bless geographical boundaries? When it comes to ‘God bless America,’ this is just an attempt to own God, to create God in our own image instead of the reverse. This is the god of civil religion, the same one that was evoked to justify white supremacy, slavery, the bashing of gays and lesbians and anything else people wanted to do just because there were enough of them to do it.”

And therein, Hagler believes, lies the most destructive message of all: that God exists to serve the empire that is the United States.

Rev. Hagler does seem to have a much better grasp of the world than Bush:

“In Revelation,” Hagler told his congregation of about 800 one Sunday, “we find the apostle John in exile critiquing the empire, which is Rome. As the world’s only ’superpower,’ Rome has taken God from the pedestal and put the empire in His place.

“Now the whole world is having to prostate itself at Rome’s feet and beg for favors. There is order within the empire, but it is an order imposed on others by force, on Rome’s terms.”

Before getting to the part where the Roman Empire falls “because of greed, selfishness and brutality,” Hagler asked his congregation a question: What is the empire today?

The answer came in unison, with a disheartened certainty, and nobody said Iraq.

Amen.

Leave a Reply