May 18, 2003
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God and George W. Bush (Bill Keller, NY Times, 5/17/2003)Is President Bush a religious zealot, or does he just pander to that crowd? That, crudely put, is probably the most persistent question I hear about Mr. Bush when I travel outside the country, and it comes up all the time in the less godly American precincts (universities, Bush-hater Web sites, Hollywood, the island of Manhattan)....
Mr. Bush's public piety ... contributes to an image of crusading arrogance abroad, and to a fear of invasive moralism at home....
I've long suspected the essential fact about Mr. Bush is that God was his 12-step program. At the age of 40, Mr. Bush beat a drinking problem by surrendering to a powerful religious experience, reinforced by Bible study with friends. This kind of born-again epiphany is common in much of America — the red-state version of psychotherapy — and it creates the kind of faith that is not beset by doubt because the believer knows his life got better in the bargain....
Mr. Bush's faith is ... highly subjective. It enjoins him to try to do the right thing, but it doesn't tell him what the right thing might be. It is faith without a legislative agenda....
Mr. Bush's frequent invocation of the Almighty in his speeches grates on the ears of worldly Europeans, who, when the president says, "God bless America," imagine they hear, "And to hell with everybody else."...
As for the enduring notion that Mr. Bush takes his instructions from the organized Christian right, it misses a much more interesting story: as an independent political structure, the Christian right is dying....
The Moral Majority is long gone. The Christian Coalition is withering....
At the same time, noted Mr. Green, who has studied the Christian right, many local activists have gravitated into the Republican Party as county chairmen and campaign consultants. Once an independent force hammering at the president and Congress, they are now an institutional part of the party base.... Karl Rove, the White House political genius, has a master plan for enlarging that ecumenical array of believers — churchgoing Catholics, Mormons and Jews as well as the evangelicals — and welding them permanently into the Republican mainstream.
The interesting story, then, is not that Mr. Bush is a captive of the religious right, but that his people are striving to make the religious right a captive of the Republican Party.
The original zealots were Jews who believed that the Roman attribution of divinity to Caesars meant that Roman tyranny was unacceptable and had to be resisted by revolutionary activity. I suppose it's fitting, then, that New York Times readers - the closest thing we have to a self-imagined ruling class - should think of the religious right as zealots; for religious conservatives would surely rebel against rule by Times readers.
Be that as it may, charges of zealotry against Bush just won't stick, and Keller knows it. Bush combines piety and public prayer with an unthreatening personality and politics, and this mixture disarms the critics of public religion.
Consistent with unofficial Times policy, Keller offers scraps of support to Krugman/Dowd theses -- "Bush is dangerous because he doesn't doubt," "Bush has alienated our European allies," "Karl Rove, aka Machiavelli, has a master plan." But his main point is that Bush's faith is nothing for liberals to worry about. This is yet another sign that Bush is gradually calming the Clinton inflammation of American politics. The article even refrains from a favorite argument of the multicultural left -- that, regardless of whether Mr. Bush's religion is in fact dangerous, the fact that others fear religion means it should be banished. If multicultural leftism can't get a mention in the Times, it must be dying.
As Orrin noted below, the Republican Party needs the religious right. But it's because the Republican Party and the religious right have become so close that groups like the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority have died. Republicans and evangelicals were once segregated, now they are integrated; and this may influence our politics as much as other forms of desegregation.