A timely look at how faith informs Bush presidency
George W. Bush may be the most openly religious president in memory, yet Americans have been neither privy to his personal journey on the road to Damascus nor fully aware of the political implications of the scales falling from his eyes.
"The Jesus Factor," a report from PBS's "
The connection between his religious conversion and his politics is huge. In the 2000 election, almost half of his nearly 50 million votes -- about 23 million -- came from evangelicals, according to "Frontline." (Evangelicals define themselves less by their denomination than by their commitment to Jesus Christ -- their being "born again" -- and, for most, by their acceptance of the Bible as the errorless word of God.) At that time, more than 40 percent of Americans described themselves as evangelicals, and 70 percent of those evangelicals who voted were politically conservative. This bloc, quite simply, was and is Bush's most important base.
Like his father before him, Bush won the White House without carrying the Catholic vote. (Both lost among black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters as well.)
"The message did come home," Doug Wead, a former adviser to Bush the elder and his link to the evangelical community, says of the 1988 election. "My God, you could win the White House with nothing but evangelicals."
To understand the religious conversion of George W. Bush, one must first understand Midland, Texas, in the mid-1980s, when the oil business went bust. Companies disappeared, families struggled. Many men sought spiritual help to deal with the crisis. Bush, then a failed oilman and the hard-drinking black sheep of his family, appeared in late 1985 at the Midland Men's Community Bible Study group to save his marriage and himself.
The group was evangelical Christian. Bush read the Bible with its members and gave up alcohol on his 40th birthday. In 1987, he moved to Washington to work in his father's presidential campaign and soon became a key link to the evangelical community, which was skeptical of the Episcopalian credentials of Bush senior. In the process, he read every political memo about attracting the religious vote.
"I remember George W. reviewing the memorandum on Texas and he just lit up," Wead says. "He said, `You know, I could do this in Texas.' "
He did. His evangelicalism helped propel him into the governor's office, and then to a landslide reelection. The day of his second inauguration, he told a small group of supporters in the governor's mansion, "I believe that God wants me to be president."
During the campaign of 2000, Bush drew media scorn when, during a debate, he named Jesus as the philosopher with whom he most identified. But the evangelicals loved it.
"I think that was instinctive and genuine," Wead says. "The media elite and non-evangelicals see that statement, and they think it's calculated. The evangelicals know it's not."
According to "Frontline," Bush denies that his faith has affected his policy decisions, yet a number of his actions reflect the agenda of conservative evangelicals.
Most evangelicals applauded his first executive act as president, the creation of "faith-based initiatives" to steer federal funds to religion-based social programs. They applauded his opposition to "partial-birth" abortions, his appointment of judges who, as he said, "understand that our rights were derived from God," and his support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.
Bush's faith changed after 9/11, according to Jim Wallis, editor of the liberal evangelical magazine "Sojourners." "He had been a sort of self-help Methodist" who followed "kind of a 12-step God," Wallis says. "Then September 11 came, and the self-help Methodist became now almost a messianic American Calvinist, speaking of the mission of America."
It is bad theology, Wallis adds, to call others evil and ourselves good. He quotes the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: "Why do you see the evil in them but not in yourself?"
So where does his religion stop? Where do his politics begin?
"There's no question that the president's faith is calculated," Wead says. "And there's no question that the president's faith is real. I would say I don't know and George Bush doesn't know when he's operating out of a genuine sense of his faith and when it's calculated."
