TELL OLD PHAROAH:

The Divine Calm of George W. Bush: So Iraq's a mess and half the country hates you. Just keep praying. (Rick Perlstein, May 3rd, 2004, Village Voice)

It's hard to be perturbed when you believe what our president believes. According to Professor Bruce Lincoln, who teaches a seminar on the theology of George W. Bush at the University of Chicago Divinity School, the president "does feel that people are called upon by the Divine to undertake certain positions in the world, and undertake certain actions, and to be responsible for certain things. And he makes, I think, quite clear—explicitly in some contexts, and implicitly in a great many others—that he occupies the office by a Divine calling. That God put him there with a sense of purpose."

It has been a topic of some confusion, the meaning of George Bush's religious beliefs. Some commentators trumpet the president's ties to Howard Ahmanson, a fantastically wealthy Californian who is an acolyte of the "Christian Reconstructionist" movement—which aims to place the United States under Biblical law (though Ahmanson proclaims himself personally against, say, the stoning of homosexuals). Others point up his connections to apocalyptic millennialists like Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind novels. The problem is that, theologically, Bush can't serve both these masters at once. The likes of LaHaye actively search for signs of the Second Coming of Christ and spend their days feverishly speculating about and preparing for the seven years’ battle for the world that will follow. Reconstructionists, Alan Jacobs, a professor at the evangelical college Wheaton, has explained, "are pretty confident Jesus isn’t going to show up any time soon," which is precisely their rationale for bringing the Book of Leviticus to life in the here-and-now.

There's no evidence that George Bush believes what Christian Reconstructionists believe. And in contrast to Ronald Reagan, who was always letting loose intemperate slips about America's role in Revelation's End Times showdown, the University of Chicago's Bruce Lincoln says, "in [Bush's] public messages I find very little that's apocalyptic."

Cautioning that it's almost impossible to know anyone's true beliefs, Lincoln still thinks he's got a pretty good sense of Bush's. The results help illuminate this question of how Bush maintains his peace of mind under such unimaginable stress.

When the drunken and dissolute prodigal finally found Jesus in the mid 1980s, the book of the Bible his study group was poring over was the Acts of the Apostles. "It's focused on missionizing, evangelizing, spreading the faith," Lincoln explains. "It's not end-of-the-world stuff. It's expansionist—it's religious imperialism, if you will. And I think that remains his primary orientation."

What's more, Lincoln adds, his primary orientation also holds that "the U.S. is the new Israel as God's most favored nation, and those responsible for the state of America in the world also enjoy special favor. . . . Foremost among the signs of grace—if I read him correctly—are the cardinal American virtues of courage, on the one hand, and compassion, on the other." For Bush to waver would be to tempt God's disfavor; what's more, we can speculate that the very act of holding to his resolve—what his critics identify as stubbornness and arrogance—becomes, tautologically, a way of both producing, and reassuring himself of, his special place in God's plan. The existential benefits are obvious. "Wherever the U.S. happens to advance something that he can call 'freedom,' he thinks he’s serving God's will, and he proclaims he's serving God's will."

In that sense at least Mr. Bush is precisely in tune with the premises of America's founding generations, who routinely thought of this as the New Israel.

MORE:
-SPEECH: We Will Be A City Upon A Hill (Ronald Reagan, January 25, 1974, First Conservative Political Action Conference)
-ESSAY: Our Union's Jewish State (David Klinghoffer, 3/17/04, The Forward)
-REVIEW: of The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop by Edmund Morgan
-REVIEW: of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 by Walter MacDougall
-THE DEFIANT ONES
-IS CULTURE HOW YOU THINK OR WHAT YOU DRINK?
-LIBERTY AND JUSTICE UNDER GOD
-LET OUR PEOPLE GO
-PURITAN NATION
-Mel Gibson's Passion (Spengler, 3/09/04, Asia Times)

Wycliffe and his spiritual heirs, the Separatists who landed at Plymouth in 1620, set out to create a New Israel. Before the new Israel could arise, the ecclesia called out from amongst all nations, Christians first had to tear down the images of a Savior made in the image of a particular ethnicity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2004 9:25 AM