SO THE BLIND MAN DESCRIBES THE ELEPHANT

God and George W. Bush (BILL KELLER, May 17, 2003, NY Times)

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). On issues from Saddam to sodomy, the assumption is that Mr. Bush is an evangelist for a moralistic
agenda that grows from his born-again Christianity. Or else (the more cynical variation), regardless of what he believes in, he has handed over the
presidential portfolio to the preacher pols of the religious right in exchange for their influence as campaign ward heelers.

I understand the critics' discomfort with Mr. Bush's public piety. It contributes to an image of crusading arrogance abroad, and to a fear of invasive
moralism at home. Most recently, the president's reluctance to offend Senator Rick Santorum--a Catholic theocrat who believes that states should have
the power to arrest gay lovers in their bedrooms, or even to criminalize couples who use contraceptives--was an occasion to wonder what, exactly, Mr.
Bush was born-again into.

But I've been talking to people who think seriously about religion, including some who know Mr. Bush, and I'm convinced that the notion of a White
House powered by fundamentalist Christianity badly misses the point. The critics are right that Mr. Bush's religion is both the animating force of his
presidency and one of his greatest political assets, but not in the ways they assume.

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.

There are lots of ways to describe Mr. Bush's religion. By church affiliation, he is a Methodist. In theological terms he would be called a pietist,
referring to a tradition in which religion is more a matter of the heart than the intellect. One of his fellow believers describes Mr. Bush's Bible study
milieu as "small-group evangelicalism." However labeled, Mr. Bush's faith entails a direct relationship between the believer and God. It does not
provide a pope, or any other intermediate authority figure.

Nor does Mr. Bush's religion provide a very specific playbook, except the Bible, and among born-again Christians that book can be regarded as
anything from a collection of inspirational poetry to a literal recipe for life. (Mr. Bush gives no sign of being among the literalists.) According to
people who have worked closely with him or who travel in evangelical circles, Mr. Bush's faith is therefore 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.

So how does religion influence this presidency? Gregg Easterbrook, a liberal Christian who has written extensively about the modern search for
meaning, suspects that for starters Mr. Bush is simply more comfortable with religious people than with nonbelievers. That may explain the
atmosphere in the White House, where, as Mr. Bush's former speechwriter David Frum put it, "attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not
quite uncompulsory."

But it is a nonsectarian comfort. Mr. Bush has talked of bonding with Vladimir Putin over the story of a crucifix Mr. Putin's mother gave him.
According to Deborah Sontag's reporting in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday, Mr. Bush startled Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the devout
Muslim who now leads Turkey, by declaring: "You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in the Almighty. That's why we'll be great partners."

It is probably not entirely irrelevant to our international relations that Tony Blair is, as one British columnist put it, "the most overtly pious leader
since Gladstone," while Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany are adamantly secular. Mr. Schroeder was the first German
chancellor to refuse to end his oath of office with the customary "so help me God."

"I suspect Bush takes the view (which may prove right) that the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in something larger than themselves, and people who believe that it's all an accident of chemistry," Mr. Easterbrook said.

Mr. Keller is a near-perfect example of a problem that continues to haunt the major media: he likes George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian, but hates such Christians. This, after all, is the same Bill Keller who said the following:

Nor can Mr. Bush be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right, although he gave them John Ashcroft and occasionally throws them a steak. The president is not a bigot, or a pessimist.

Obviously if you think conservative Christianity is inherently bigoted it must make it difficult to write impartially, even positively, about the world's leading advocate of the ideology.

So Mr. Keller is forced--just as folks did with Ronald Reagan--to minimize the possibility that Mr. Bush's faith is intellectual as well as emotional. The President's Christianity in this scenario is devoid of any moral component and consists of nothing more than "red-state version of psychotherapy". Mr. Keller's belief that this is a non-sectarian he's writing about seems especially foolish when one recalls the famous incident when Barbara Bush brought in Billy Graham to convince her son that Jews are not barred from Heaven. Similarly, Ronald Reagan, who was always portrayed in the press during his presidency as only casually religious, was revealed after he left office to believe that we might well be living in the End Times and that apocalypse might be imminent.

The problem with reporting like Mr. Keller's is that, to take the Santorum kerfuffle as an example, it forces one to always take the most cynical viewpoint. Thus, Mr. Keller has to assume that the reason Mr. Bush didn't destroy Senator Santorum--the way he did Trent Lott--is because he wants to win PA, MI, IL, etc., more than he wants to do what he knows in his heart is right. Suppose instead, as all the evidence seems to suggest, that Mr. Bush agrees that homosexuality is immoral, that the Constitution doesn't protect it, that to claim it does would open us up to further degradation of society, and that people should be free to debate the matter openly, rather than be cowed by the Thought Police. That may make Mr. Bush a moralist and a "homophobe", but it also happens to comport with his religious faith. Mr. Keller has effectively cut himself off from this more logical analysis--that has to be a problem for the Times.

Finally, the last point here, the one that the terrific Gregg Easterbrook makes, reveals just how significant even a de minimus belief like the one that Mr. Keller has outlined will have on Man's future. This is the divide that separates the two sides of the political spectrum: there are those who are concerned only with themselves, and the secularized, demoralized, welfare state is the ideal vehicle for realizing their desires; on the other hand there are those who believe that the self is relatively unimportant, a mere part of an eternal chain of being, of the culture, of society, of family, etc. For the latter, traditions, revealed knowledge, moral absolutes, independence from government, and freedom generally are vital. Ultimately, even this lowest common denominator religiosity ends up being determinative of the kind of society we will have. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 19, 2003 9:57 AM