Bush and the Religious 'Culture War' in America:
Bush's Religious Language, Historical Background of His Religious Beliefs, Use of Race in Campaigns, and Electoral Demographics
My piece had its beginnings from several sources, but primarily what I think is the inherent racism of major parts of the the Republican party, a racism cloaked in fundamentalist Christain piety. Section (3) is re-write of an earlier posting about this Republican racism on Blogleft. Not all Republicans are racist, I'll agree, but enough of them, especially influential ones, are, and, in political campaigns too easily resort to using the 'race card'. ) To confirm this declaration, consult Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card, especially chapters 2 & 3.
In this piece, I (1) show evidence of current nativistic grassroots intolerance emanating from fundamentalistic religious groups, including providing the gist of the Bellingham Herald's editorial, (2) touch on the tidal wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that followed 9/11 -- with acknowledgment that Bush gives a passionless gesture toward expunging the prejudice, (3) note the inherent racism of the Republican party, including examples of where, as political campaign strategy, Bush himself employed the 'race card', (4) sketch out a history of the Christian right movement, and then, using examples of Bush's current Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, (5) show how Bush himself encourages religious and racial intolerance. But first, in an Introduction, I lay out selected textual passages by GWB himself or other sources, that characterize the "why?" of Bush's use of religious language. Next, are brief notes on the shifting demographics of the American electorate, the some of the "how" and "why" of Bush's strategies, and some critics on how the amercian voting public divides up into "orthodx" and "progressive" voting blocs. In later postings, I will show how these sentiments, as expressed by Bush and other Americans, reflect the historic American inclinations toward invoking 'Manifest Destiny' as a expression of nationalistic nativism since the beginning of the United States.
I am working on a sort of triptych, (1) the religious language (and racist overtones) of President George W. Bush and the Christian Right, (2) America as Garrison State [not yet linked], (3) Global Hegemony (ie, Manifest Destiny in its latest iteration) [not yet linked]. These three are coupled with the coterie of neoconservatives advising Bush, all of which, taken together, make a unique, if entirely frightening glitch in the history of our nation. I want to get across the idea that, with Bush in office, the religious right has an iron fisted grip on US internal and social policy.
This corpus of material assembled below is complicated, and I admit having difficulty placing it, very large as it is, in some semblance of logic. I ask for your patience. Tthe effort you are willing to invest in reading what is assembled below will payoff in a clearer, deeper understanding of the chemistry involved in the peculiar behavior of the Bush adminstration. To help understand the phenomenon myself, I found that I had to comprehend what scholars label "American civil religion", and have made a separate piece on it. In additionm have been forced to brush up on another, related concept, "American exceptionalism", which I am in the process of uploading. Until then, am linking to something already on the Web. (scroll through the content of this link, where AE is described quite extensively)
The following passages, from Bush himself, his followers, and noted scholars, help set my proposition in context:
One of the things we love in America is freedom. If I may, I'd like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union: Liberty is not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to each and every person. And that's what I believe.
President George W. Bush [link to Bush's text below]
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position [and employing an argument that the presidential candidate, Howard Dean, also uses], the [Texas] state's lieutenant governor has more power. His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture.
Michael Lind "The weird men behind George W Bush's war" (scroll down)
...What makes religion so salient in time of war is that it acts the way revivals did for Edwards -- a spark leaps from pole to pole. Individuals merge in the joint peril and joint effort of facing an imminent menace. ...We must save one another, since the enemy would like to pick us off one by one. ... This communal sense arose, most recently, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the president declared war on terrorism. His initial reaction was to call this a crusade, the war whose motto was ''God Wills It.''... Rod Dreher, a senior writer at National Review, says that clergymen who oppose the war are spiritually disarming us and that military chaplains supporting the war should be heeded, not ''bishops in well-appointed chanceries and pastors sitting in suburban middle-class comfort.''.... We should learn from the ''moral realism'' of soldier-priests, who are ''warriors for justice,'' and not heed ''the effete sentimentality you find among so many clergymen today.''... Religion is harnessed to political purpose and is not freely exercised if it does not serve that purpose. ...
One of the psychological benefits of this is that it makes one oppose with an easy conscience those who are not with us, therefore not on God's side. They are not mistaken, miscalculating, misguided or even just malevolent. They are evil. And all our opponents can be conflated under the heading of this same evil, since the devil is an equal opportunity employer of his agents.
Bush has been very good at fooling the American people into thinking that Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and that he is an ally and supplier of Al Qaeda, that eliminating him is the best way to keep terrorism from our shores. ... Those [Americans] who oppose [Bush] are not, in his frame of thought, just making a political mistake. They are, as Ron Dreher's military chaplains believe, cutting ''to the core of one's belief in evil.'' Question the policy, and you no longer believe in evil -- which is the same, in this context, as not believing in God. That is the religious test on which our president is grading us.
Garry Wills in NYT Magazine: "With God on His Side" ..
Since 9/11 Bush's rhetoric has been continuously punctuated by the words "evil" and "evildoer." Perhaps the most extreme use of the term came in the service in the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, in which Bush declared that it is "our responsibility to history" to "rid the world of evil."
Robert Bellah, "Righteous Empire", The Christian Century
When religious zealotry meets religious zealotry--watch out. You have a prescription for holy war on both sides where ordinary diplomacy is irrelevant; actually, diplomacy itself becomes wrong because it involves compromise with the forces of evil.
Susan B. Thistlethwaite, "The math of martyrs"
Clearly, in our society, two large groups are talking past each other. One fails to see legitimacy in religious values not comprehended by the American Mind. The other fails to see legitimacy in irreligion: If secularity is really religious, then it is diabolic -- a plot against God, not mere indifference to God.
Garry Wills, "The Secularist Mind"
In the final analysis, each side of the cultural divide can only talk past the other.
James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.
[In the Willie Horton case,] the racial message was communicated most effectively when no one noticed its racial meaning. When people finally noticed its racial meaning, the racial message lost much of its power. Despite all that has been written about the 1988 election, it has gone unremarked that Bush's fortunes suffered just when race went from subtext to text.
Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card,
... We need to pay careful attention to [bin Laden's] rhetoric, for words are weapons in the present struggle and it is his control over a specific, culturally bound discourse that gives bin Laden much of his power. In fact, it is useful to study his speech together with Bush's for their unexpected similarities as well as their instructive differences.
First, the similarities. Both describe a dualistic struggle between groups starkly opposed on moral grounds. For bin Laden, "these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels." Bush makes the same point, with roles reversed: "Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves."
A second point is that both have a demonizing key word for their enemies. Consistently, Bush refers to bin Laden and his group as "terrorists," a term used so much by now that its meaning seems transparent.
Hard as it is, we need to recognize that it is used quite specifically for nonstate groups (often, but not necessarily, Islamist) who use violence, including sneak attacks, to advance their political goals. But there is a contradiction in Bush's usage that reveals that the term is not objective but rhetorically loaded: groups we helped create, like the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, are excluded.
Osama bin Laden is equally relentless in denouncing his enemies. The worst are "infidels," meaning non-Muslim states that project their power -- military, political, economic, and cultural -- into spaces Muslims regard as holy (above all, Saudi Arabia as home to Mecca and Medina). He also inveighs against "hypocrites," i.e. the state elites in Muslim nations who help advance American interests and profit from this service. As he sees it, infidels are "killers who toyed with the blood, honor and sanctities of Muslims." Hypocrites are "apostates, who backed the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child."
Third, both appeal to maternal and paternal instincts via images of children in danger. Bush extends protection to them throughout the world, while tying this to protection of their freedom.
"The other war: The one of words"
BRUCE LINCOLN
How Both Parties Are Coping With Shifting Electoral Demographics
Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books
David Broder, Elaine Kamarck, Ruy Teixeira & John B. Judis
Notwithstanding the electoral strength that Bush draws from fundamentalist voters, in the future, what for him is dicey about the chemistry of electoral politics, i.e., 2004, is the demographics of America's changing population, particularily as winning elections relates to ethnic groups. John Davison Hunter's research (read selected passages in my American civil religion piece) argues that the American public sorts out into two large voting blocs, one 'orthodox', the other 'progressive'. And, in 2000, these two blocs were roughly even, as shown by the closeness of the election, with Bush losing the popular vote by a little over 500,000 votes, but won the electoral college vote, although the disputed Florida results throws that figure into question. (Many opposed to Bush continue to claim that he is an "appointed" president.) Basically, there is a geographical breakdown to these demographics, with the results often displayed on a map of the US featuring "red" and "blue" states. The "orthodox" voters cluster in the interior of the nation, especially the South, while "progressivist" voters prevail on the East and West Coast. Nonetheless, ethnic demographics also enter into the chemistry of elections, leading Manning Marable, in the light of Trent Lott's Mistake at the close of 2002, to observe something very close, even echoing, Mendelberg's notions about the 'Race Card' above:
At the height of the Lott fiasco, Bush's pollsters explained to him that racial demographics of America's electorate are rapidly changing. In the 2000 election, Bush lost the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. If Bush receives the identical percentages of White, Black, and Latino votes in 2004 that he had received in 2000, he would lose the election by three million popular votes. The Republican Party recognizes that the old, "undisguised" racism of the Strom Thurmonds and Trent Lotts will no longer work. That was Lott's mistake and that's why he was sacrificed. White supremacy functions more effectively when it presents itself to the entire world in a race-neutral language. Under George W. Bush's Republican regime, White racism has become "color blind."
On Blogleft, in November, 2002, we noted these trends with two posts :(1) (2). And these ideas are developed more fully in (4) below.
In a NYT 's op ed, Nicholas Kristof notes that
Claims that the news media form a vast liberal conspiracy strike me as utterly unconvincing, but there's one area where accusations of institutional bias have merit: nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That's the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians. Evangelicals have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, and that is particularly evident in this administration.
It's impossible to understand President Bush without acknowledging the centrality of his faith. Indeed, there may be an element of messianic vision in the plan to invade Iraq and "remake" the Middle East.... Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago argues that America is now experiencing a fourth Great Awakening, like the religious revivals that have periodically swept America in the last 300 years. Yet offhand, I can't think of a single evangelical working for a major news organization. Evangelicals are increasingly important in every aspect of American culture. Among the best-selling books in America are Tim LaHaye's Christian "left behind" series about the apocalypse; about 50 million copies have been sold. One of America's most prominent television personalities is Benny Hinn, watched in 190 countries, but few of us have heard of him because he is an evangelist.
Letters in NYT in response to Kristof's op ed
The May-June, 2003, issue of Books and Culture: A Christian Review, contains two articles that, to a greater or lesser degree, address Kristof's argument. Most direct, Mark Noll's "What Evangelical Media?" is a response by an evangelical academic. (Noll is McManus Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.) Noll calls attention to a recent survey by John Schmalzbauer. Schmalzbauer's People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education (Cornell Univ. Press, 2003) presents the results of interviews with 40 Roman Catholics and evangelicals who are currently active in these professions. In light of the Schmalbauer survey, Noll states,
With Kristof's problem in view, it is germane that while Schmalzbauer's Catholic journalists include several who work for the Times, The Washington Post, and national broadcasters out of Washington, D.C., his evangelical journalists are employed mostly with newsmagazines, the wire services, and newspapers outside the Boston, New York, Washington corridor. Schmalzbauer's book deserves full treatment for its own main arguments, but it can also be read as offering a partial response to the problem posed by Kristof.
Why are there so few self-identified born-again Christians active in the élite news media? Schmalzbauer offers two possibilities. First, evangelicals in general, and especially by comparison with other subsections of American society like Jews, are still in the first stages of academic professionalization. A consequence is that there simply are still not that many candidates from the evangelical geographical heartland—the Midwest and South, or social heartland, the middle- and lower-middle classes, who aspire to jobs on the Times or who secure such jobs.
But, second, Schmalzbauer also suggests that evangelicals who have entered élite levels of the academy or journalism regularly adopt strategies that obscure the character of their evangelical profession. For some it is a self-conscious choice to translate the explicit theological convictions of the church into more general frameworks of cultural analysis for the general marketplace. For others, it is a less self-conscious move, as Schmalzbauer puts it, "to combine 'mutually irreconcilable realities' into protean selves." Or, in translation, to function simultaneously with several different centers of personal value while not worrying about integrating those different centers into a self-consciously religious whole. In either case, however, the result is to mask the religious identities or convictions of those who are active in public intellectual life. Even granting the under-representation of born-again Christians in the élite media, Schmalzbauer is saying to Kristof that maybe he knows more evangelical Christians than he thinks he does, but because of deliberate choice or protean practice, Kristof does not realize that these evangelicals are evangelical.
John Schmalzbauer himself also has an article in the same issue of Books and Culture. The article has a provocative title: "Church as Civics 101" (Schmalzbauer, evidently also and evangelical academic, is E.B. Williams Fellow and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education (Cornell Univ. Press). Says Schmalbauer, p. 40,
... for much of the 20th century, mainline Protestant clergy encouraged their congregations to get involved in public issues, preaching the "Social Gospel" and crusading for social change. In Martin Marty's terminology, mainliners stood for a "Public Protestantism," focusing on "the social order and the social destinies of men," while evangelicals embraced a "Private Protestantism" that emphasized "individual salvation out of the world" and a "personal moral life." [source: Martin Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 179.]
On p. 42, Schmalzbauer adds an observation by another non-evangelical writer, op ed writer forth Washington Post, E. J. Dionne. As interpreted by Schmalzbauer,
E.J. Dionne argues that the contemporary American political debate has "revolved around what sins should matter most to us as a society." While "liberals have tended to emphasize one set of sins: materialism, prejudice, racism, sexism, a lack of individual and social generosity," conservatives have emphasized "a different set of sins: personal irresponsibility, hedonism, a lack of regard for the importance of family life and the responsibilities of parenthood."
Without much modification, Dionne's characterization of liberal and conservative views of sin could be applied to the politics of Protestant clergy. While modernist clergy have tended to focus on the sins of economic injustice and environmental degradation, their orthodox counterparts have focused on lapses in individual morality.
We get more on this idea of a religious "Great Awakening" occuring in America from an extended review of French-language analyses of American society in the New York Review of Books. (NYRB did not post this piece, but extracted some passages directly below) Written by New York University's Tony Judt, this claim about a great awakening takes on greater impact when contrasted with the condition of religion in Europe.
From the evidence gathered by Judt, today,
the two sides of the Atlantic are really different: America is, basically, a credulous and religious society. In contrast, since the 1950s, Europeans have abandoned their churches in droves, while in America, there has been virtually no decline in churchgoing and synagogue attendance. In 1998 a Harris poll found that 66 percent even of non-Christian Americans believed in miracles and 47 percent of them accredited the Virgin Birth, the figures for all Americans are 86 percent and 83 percent respectively. Some 45 percent of Americans believe there is a Devil. In a recent Newsweek poll 79 percent of American respondents accepted that biblical miracles really happened. According to a 1999 Newsweek poll, 40 percent of all Americans (71 percent of Evangelical Protestants) believe that the world will end in a battle at Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist. An American president who conducts Bible study in the White House and begins cabinet sessions with a prayer may seem a curious anachronism to his European allies, but he is in tune with his constituents.
For further info, Judt cites the polls below:
We get an example of how this chemistry works out with the recent article "Pentagon Strategy Creates Rift Among Hawks" , by Jim Lobe, AlterNet March 21, 2003
....The disagreement over military strategy is the first sign of a disagreement within the powerful alliance that has shaped U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. The coalition consists of three main components: hard right-wing, or nationalist Republicans like the Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney; neo-conservatives like Perle and most of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's immediate subordinates, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; and the Christian Right, whose concerns have been represented most forcefully within the White House itself, particularly among Bush's domestic advisers. (See also christian Right's connection with Project for the New American Century.)Over the past eighteen months, these groups have agreed that the "war on terrorism" must include the ouster of Saddam Hussein, beating the war drums against Baghdad moments after the dust settled in lower Manhattan. While they have been unanimous on key issues of tactics, such as marginalizing Secretary of State Colin Powell and other "realist" veterans of the first Bush administration, and strategy, such as ousting Hussein, they have never agreed on what happens once Hussein is removed.
(1) U.S. Politics: Current Events site
News Analysis: Bush and Bigotry Dateline: 04/08/00
From anti-Catholic Bob Jones U., to racist police chiefs, to angry gay Republicans, George Bush keeps coming under fire on civil rights issues. "Bush has had to fight off accusations that he's soft on prejudice." Setting the tone for the rest of this page below, the report in the link above concludes that
It is difficult to know if Mr. Bush's reoccurring problems with civil rights issues is an indication of any laxity on his party towards defending civil rights, or rather whether it's indicative of a more general desire to please all sides in a controversy, or even a lack of a firm position on certain issues - a trait, ironically, often associated with Bill Clinton. But he does seem prone to getting into this kind of trouble, and also has a growing record of letting these problems fester, rather than fixing them definitively once they arise.
Evidence of nativistic grass-roots intolerance of religions and ethnic groups outside of "white" Christian America
Saturday (March 15, 2003) editorial in Bellingham (WA) Herald: "Keep politics, prayers apart", gives evidence of nativistic grass-roots intolerance of religions and ethnic groups outside of "white" Christian America, the base for white supremacy sentiment. I think that much of the encourgement for intolerance toward other religions and ethnic groups comes from the fundamentalist Christian right, for whom leading spokesmen are Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The following is from a Radio Free Europe website:
Prague, 19 February 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Jerry Falwell, a prominent U.S. Christian minister, recently ignited a firestorm in an interview on American television. Citing his reading of texts by Muslim authors and others, he concluded that the Prophet Muhammad was "a violent man, a man of war." He added, "I think Muhammad was a terrorist." Reaction was fierce. An Iranian cleric demanded Falwell's death. A general strike in Bombay, called to protest against his words, turned into a riot in which five people died. Falwell apologized and called his remarks a mistake. Some Muslim leaders publicly accepted the apology, and the incident appeared to blow over. But the view he expressed is widespread in the United States among the Christian right, a body of politically active Protestant Christians. Franklin Graham, son and successor of the world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham, has called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion." [for Graham quote, scroll down on the left column] Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition -- which is influential in President George W. Bush's Republican Party -- has said that "to think that Islam is a peaceful religion is fraudulent."
Quoting from authorities, this same article explains that,
One trouble with the way fundamentalists of any faith see themselves ... is that their exclusivity leads to intolerance, which is incompatible with their avowal of compassion. Not all fundamentalists are activist, extremist, or militant .... But to a degree ... they all are dangerous [because] ... [t] hey espouse ... an "exclusivist, antipluralist, intolerant world view." ... [E] ven if they are well-meaning and moderate, other fundamentalists can seize their ideas and develop ... "a theology of hate."
Publicly, Bush gestures with the obligatory rebuke of such intolerant sentiment, it's easy to detect an insincere hollowness. Recently, if you "read between the lines," Bush's rhetoric is a mirror image of this intolerance, even though, shortly after 9/11, in an American-Islamic mosque, he publicly rebuked anti-Muslim prejudice in American society. We get an example of Bush's strategy in the NYT (Saturday, March 15), in an article entitled, "On Terror and Spying, Ashcroft Expands Reach" (In the passage below from the article, I highlight in red what I believe is 'smoking gun' evidence of Bush's post 9/11 role in developing a strategy of intolerence toward Americans of Islamic descent; i.e., if Ashcroft was Bush's 'political foil', this collusion was all pre-planned strategy:
Mr. Ashcroft has managed to blunt Congressional criticism through the carefully timed announcements of one major terrorist arrest after another. And he has also emerged as a useful political foil for President Bush. While the president has visited mosques to deliver a message of respect for Muslims, for instance, it was left to Mr. Ashcroft to orchestrate an unpopular program to register Middle Eastern immigrants. And after Mr. Bush last year announced that he wanted to enlist workers for a terrorist "tips" program, Mr. Ashcroft was dispatched to Capitol Hill to defend the unpopular idea.
"I think Ashcroft understands that he's a lightning rod for this administration," said a Justice Department official close to the attorney general who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "He's at the center of so many different policies terrorism, affirmative action, the death penalty and he's no stranger to controversy. He's been living it all his life."
The Right's New Target of Hatred: American Muslims
September 11, 2001 changed America forever. For the first time since the War of 1812 a foreign power attacked the continental United States. The most catastrophic terrorist plot since Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks killed nearly 3000 Americans. Two planes collided into the large towers, forever shattering America's sense of security.
In the weeks and the months that followed this country repeated a similiar pattern of racism and xenophobia that has characterized its more than 200 years of history. Columnists such as Ann Coulter wrote that "we should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" ("This is War" 14 September 2001). Pat Robertson and his fellow fundamentalist Christian leaders referred to Islam as a "violent region", rallying millions of Americans to this campaign of intolerance. From all fronts it seems as if America is entering a new period of xenophobia and racism, similiar to past unfortunate eras. As usual the leaders of this unjust, reprehensible backlash share conservative beliefs in common. The most vocal proponents of government-sponsored racism toward Muslims remain conservative Republicans. Although they believe that their actions help this country, they remain horrbily wrong. One, they promote intolerance; and two, it only discredits their cause even further.
Over the last six months the evidence speaks loudly that, among many citizens, being a Muslim in America is tantamount to supporting the enemy. An irrational fear exists among many segments of the population that all Muslims, rather than just Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden, support the "enemy." Conservative pundits indulge these xenophobic fears. Ann Coulter, whose words feed into the fears, insecurities, and intolerance of many Americans, incites this backlash. In a recent article she defends racial profiling: "There is no principled basis for opposition to using Arab appearance as a factor in airport screening procedures. . . This is not a psychological about an ethnic group - it is an all points bulletin: Warning! The next terrorist to board a commerical flight will be an Arab or Muslim male" ("If the Profile Fits" 10 January 2002)
Editorial on Religious Intolerance in Bellingham (WA) Herald "Keep politics, prayers apart",
CONFLICT: Recent flap in state House over prayer shows that government should stick to governing, not religion.
When at least two members of the state House of Representatives walked out rather than hear the body's opening prayer from a Muslim imam last week, it displayed a shocking lack of tolerance. It would be easy to simply say, "People should be more tolerant." But there's a reason your mother told you not to discuss politics or religion in mixed company. The two shouldn't be mixed.
Most people who choose to begin their days with prayer either do so in private or in a house of worship. There's also a reason for that. Prayer and spirituality are some of the most intensely personal aspects our lives. These are deeply held beliefs that are nurtured within ourselves.
To be enriched by prayer, you must be open to it. To simply "tolerate" it at best does not achieve the purpose of inspiration and at worst can cause intolerance to grow. When public group prayer becomes more of a disruption than a motivation for the House leaders, continuing it for appearance sake is a false mission.
Congress has prayers and its own chaplain as do many state houses - but why? If our elected officials need spiritual guidance, our Constitution guarantees them the freedom to seek it on their own. There are hundreds of examples from city councils to state legislatures where different people's ideas about what should be included in a prayer, or even what a prayer is, have caused unneeded controversy that takes away from the government's primary mission.
We've seen it here in Washington state. There have been hot controversies over praying in Jesus' name, over inviting a Native American healer to pray, over people reading poetry as a prayer and over a lesbian nun delivering a prayer, according to The Seattle Times. Neither the Bellingham City Council nor the Whatcom County Council has an opening prayer before meetings.
Many of the prayers in the Legislature are scheduled by the Associated Ministries of Thurston County, [the county in which Olympia, the state capitol, is located] which tries to pick a wide range of faiths and speakers. Hearing from different kinds of faith leaders helps members of the Legislature's dominant faiths understand how it feels to be in the minority. But in the end, the practice has proven to be more disruptive than enriching. It's quite likely that an argument over "what is prayer" could last indefinitely and it's not the mission of the Legislature to decide such issues.
After Rep. Lois McMahon, R-Gig Harbor, said she walked out on Imam Mohamad Joban of the Islamic Center of Olympia as a measure of "patriotism" and claimed, "that's not my god" denouncing Islam as "part and parcel of the attacks on America," the press releases started flowing. McMahon's apologies didn't really apologize or recant her accusations and she was not finding public support in her Republican counterparts. Her reaction is a prime example that tolerance can't be forced.
Rep. Cary Condata, R-East Wenachee, was less forthcoming. He claimed to be off the floor to talk to someone else, but added, "let's just say I wasn't particularly interested," and made sure to point out that numerous other leaders had chosen to stay off the floor during the prayer.
Following the public outcry, the imam was invited back to give a prayer. Every member stood aside his or her desk and listened politely. McMahon apologized personally to Joban.
Was anyone's heart changed? It's impossible to say, but beliefs about religion aren't often changed overnight. We have to look no farther than Northern Ireland to see a First World region still plagued by religious strife. ...
(2) on the tidal wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that followed 9/11, and because he is himself a 'born again' Christian fundamentalist, the implications of Bush in fomenting this reaction.
Defining 'fundamentalist' and 'born again Christian', 'evangelical'.
This is adapted from numerous sources, some generated by individuals in these movements, but primarily from George M. Marsden, "Fundamenatlism," Encyclopedia of American Religious Experience, v. 2 , Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up, Don Hill, U.S.: The Roots Of Christian Fundamentalism (Part 2) , Grant Wacker, The Christian Right.
The next three paragraphs draw on George Marsden's account: Fundamentalists, as aggressively 'evangelical' Christians, "are Bible-believers who take absolutely seriously the understanding of the Gospel message that proclaims that God sent his son into the world to die for sinners and that the only hope for eternal salvation, and to avoid an eternity in Hell, is to believe that Jesus died for one's sins and to make him the Lord of one's life."... Evangelical Christians are those whose religion is anchored by the acceptance of Jesus Christ as "personal Savior and Lord." Fundamentalism embraces deliberate policy of militant opposition to erosions of traditional Protestant faith in American churches and culture.
The movement began in the early decades of the 20th, and has continued to evolve, splinter, and grow. It is perhaps most distinguished by its emphasis upon resisting secularizing forces, especially "to fight for the fundamentals of the faith against doctrinal erosions and compromises." Reflecting broadly Calvinist traditions in the US, fundamenatalists were/are determined to prevent society from turning from "the God of the Bible."
The word "Fundamentalist", was coined in 1920 by a conservative Baptist editor, Curtis Lee Laws, to designate those ready "to do battle royal for the Fundamentals." Soon "Fundamentalist" was being used to designate any Protestant conservative who was willing to affirm certain "Fundamental" doctrines and to fight against the spread of modernist theology in the major denominations or against some secularizing trends, such as the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. In this broad sense "Fundamentalism" refers to a certain religious type and is more a widespread tendency than an organized movement. Since the 1950s, writers and scholars have expanded its meaning to apply to other strict and absolutist religious believers as well.
The rest of this section comes from a piece on the web by Don Hill, a broadcaster in Edmonton, Canada. (see link above):
David Beale, a professor at Bob Jones University, argues that "a fundamentalist is someone who has remained faithful to that early movement. A fundamentalist... "just knows" that the Bible is the only authoritative word of God, and contains no errors. ... This definition, according to Beale, excludes many well-known U.S. religious leaders who often are lumped together in the public mind-set as fundamentalists -- Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others. These three are remarkably well-known in the United States and beyond because of their public evangelism, involvement with TV, and other mass media and political activism. But, says Beale, they are not evangelists in the true sense of the word. "Some fundamentalists -- Billy Graham, people around him -- began to take a different approach in the late 1950s. And he started what they called an 'ecumenical evangelism,'" Beale said. Ecumenical evangelism suggests the practice of ardently preaching Christian doctrine that aims to unite different branches of the faith.
According to "Christian on Campus at UC Berkeley," a Born-again Christian
is a person who has made his beginning, receiving Christ as his new life in his spirit. Every genuine Christian is a born-again Christian, and once a person has been born again he can never lose this divine life within him. As he continues by living as a Christ-man, his thoughts, his speech, and his deeds become those which are out from Christ, in Christ, for Christ, and expressing Christ.
(3) note the inherent racism of the Republican party, including examples of where, as political campaign strategy, Bush himself employed the 'racist card'
[ Basically my post on Blogleft [12/18/2002 4:49:20 PM : note bush's rebuke of lott was motivated by politics more than anything else -- the flap over Lott's overt racist remark was destructive to the public view of the Republican party. However, Ch 2 of ]
Lott, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Republican Racism
If the GOP wants to attract black voters, argues TIME's Jack White, it must confront the legacy not only of Trent Lott, but also of former President Reagan. And in the last two weeks, ever since the Lott fiasco started, we have been hitting on the racist strategies of the Republican party. It goes on and on.
The same could be said, of course, about such Republican heroes as, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon or George Bush the elder, all of whom used coded racial messages to lure disaffected blue collar and Southern white voters away from the Democrats. Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out..
[Says White] Space doesn't permit a complete list of the Gipper's signals to angry white folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of [Reagan's] support for "states' rights" , a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.
African American op ed writer, BILL MAXWELL, rightly mentions the fact that, to show his color (no pun intended) to the Christian Right , George W. Bush visited Bob Jones University. Leave it up to George W. Bush to weasel his way out of those ethical jams, especially those involving issues of race, GOP candidates have to ritualistically visit racist Bob Jones University. St. Petersburg Times, published February 6, 2000:
Leave it up to George W. Bush to weasel his way out of those ethical jams, especially those involving issues of race. ... Bush: "the people of South Carolina should make their own decision about flying the Confederate flag in Columbia." [Maxwell argues that] "He should have more to say about the Confederate banner, a symbol of human subjugation, racism and death." During a recent stop at CBS' Face the Nation, Bush was challenged to identify the moral issue the president should take a stand on even if the issue involves states' rights. 'Bigotry and racism and prejudice,' Bush said." Maxwell continues, "Mr. Compassionate Conservative -- spoke at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. Bob Jones represents everything that was and is bad about Dixie. Founded in 1927 by the Rev. Bob Jones Sr., an unreconstructed racist, the university admitted blacks for the first time ever in the 1970s only after the federal government yanked its tax-exempt status.
The university still maintains a policy prohibiting interracial dating. In fact, such dating is grounds for expulsion. "In defending the ban on interracial dating," according to the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, "school officials point to the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, where God divided the tower builders by their different languages. Some segregationists have interpreted the story as a warning against mixing races."
At a news conference, the Observer stated, Bush said that although he opposes the ban on interracial dating, he saw no conflict between his visit and his so-called message of inclusiveness.
So why did Bush speak at this bastion of bigotry and racism and prejudice? "I went there to see 7,000 people," he told the Observer. "I went there because I was invited to go."
Let me understand.
If the Ku Klux Klan invites Bush to speak at its national convention, he would go because he was invited? Would he compliment them on their spiffy new hoods and designer sheets? I exaggerate, of course, but where will Bush draw the ethical line in his search for votes? Why is he so craven in the face of such issues?
Many Bush supporters will argue that I and others are making too much out of his noncommittal stands on the flag and Bob Jones University, that these are small matters. I do not think so. If Bush is seriously trying to woo black voters, he is going about it in a dumb way. Blacks will not forget Bush's words and reactions.
For many blacks, tolerating racist behavior and philosophy is more contemptible than all of Bill Clinton's sins combined.
Reprint of comment on Bob Herbert op ed:
Herbert's op ed traces a more damning racist streak in the GOP, but in my view Herbert doesn't go far enough.
... . Lott is not the only culprit here. The Republican Party has become a haven for white racist attitudes and anti-black policies. The party of Lincoln is now a safe house for bigotry. It's the party of the Southern strategies and the Willie Horton campaigns and Bob Jones University and the relentless and unconscionable efforts to disenfranchise black voters. For those who now think the Democratic Party is not racist enough, the answer is the G.O.P. And there are precious few voices anywhere in the G.O.P. willing to step up and say that this is wrong.
Remember an incident involving Bob Jones University became one the reasons why McCain faltered in his campaign for the presidency. [For proof, do a visimo search, using "john mccain" and "bob jones University". My search yielded over 80 hits] But, more to the point about GOP using the racist card, remember how, in the Bush I campaign, without any public outcry, the Willie Horton TV spot in 1988 was allowed to go on indefinitely until the campaign was over. Later it was disclosed that George W himself played a major role in the use of the racist ad. [the link is to a search on vivismo that yielded over 30 hits; also see George Magazine, Feb.-March, 2000, pages 22-23] . "Bush [and the GOP] knew the ad was racist but did nothing to stop its use.”
Frank Rich's NYT Op Ed: "Bonfire of the Vanities"
In its effort to portray Mr. Lott as a one-of-a-kind bad apple, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page said on Thursday: "Republicans may once have used race to polarize the electorate, especially in the South. But that strategy long ago stopped being useful." Tell that to George W. Bush, who beat John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary after what Newsweek called "a smear campaign" of leaflets, e-mails and telephone calls calling attention to the McCains' "black child" (an adopted daughter from Bangladesh). Or to Sonny Perdue, the new Republican governor of Georgia, elected in part by demagoguing the sanctity of the Confederate flag.
Long ago stopped being useful? Tell that to Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Bush, who appeared at Bob Jones University in 1999 and 2000. "Of all universities in America," asked the commentator Fareed Zakaria on ABC last weekend, "why is it that Republicans have felt the need to make a pilgrimage to the one university that bans interracial dating?" Now that Mr. Lott is no longer the issue, will any of the conservatives who called for his decapitation answer that question?
The point here is not that these Republican leaders are racists, or that all (or most) Republicans are racist, or that all racists are Republicans. "These are not normal Republican ideas," wrote the conservative author David Brooks, in a characteristically thoughtful piece about Mr. Lott in this week's Newsweek. And he's right. But there are still too many Republican politicians who believe they can pander to whatever racist voters are out there without being called on it. When they are, they cringe ? not so much because they care about losing their few black votes but because they care about losing soccer moms who are offended by race-baiting. "Elections are settled in the suburbs nowadays, 43 percent of the vote," said George Will in condemning Mr. Lott. It's that political reality, not any moral imperative, that mandated the majority leader's death sentence.
President Bush is no bigot, [I disagree. If Bush uses campaign strategies that appeal to bigotry, isn't he also 'bigot'?] and as he likes to remind us, some of his best employees are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He is in favor of something called "affirmative access", which has led to a grand total of zero black Republican Congressmen in the next Congress. "Compassionate conservatism" seems less a program than a p.r. strategy to provide cover for the likes of a Lott or an Ashcroft. [in the link above, scroll dow several paragraphs for a critique of 'affirmative access']
Asked this week what the administration has done for black Americans, Ari Fleischer used the kind of examples we heard from Mr. Lott. He said that "the president looks forward to going to Africa" (how patronizing can you be?) and wants "to double funding for historically black colleges and universities" (weren't the Republicans for color-blind policies rather than a politically correct form of de facto segregation?). Mr. Fleischer also said that the president sees education as "the next civil rights movement." If so, Mr. Bush is not that movement's courageous leader; in his education bill, he dumped the tiny school voucher provision that Republican polls say many black families want.
Black voters are not fooled by such empty theatrics. For all the "diversity" at his convention and his rhetorical "compassion," Mr. Bush drew a third less of the black vote than his father and Bob Dole did. The White House's main concern now is that white voters be fooled. So Republicans are trying to create a moral equivalence between Democratic racial lapses and their own, hoping that Robert Byrd's long-renounced K.K.K. past and use of the word "nigger" will somehow blur their own recent record. Bill Frist is the ideal new Senate majority leader, because his own genuinely good works in Africa and "compassionate conservative" geniality will camouflage a voting pattern that, on any issue touching black Americans, is virtually the same as Mr. Lott's.
I almost feel sorry for Trent Lott. Despite all the hyperbole that preceded his demise, he is no Bull Connor or David Duke or even Jesse Helms. He's just the guy who had to die before anyone looked too closely at other, even more powerful politicians' sins.
....As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.
George W Bush's "Close Ties" To Neo-Confederate Groups Questioned
Award-winning Southern journal documents Republican front-runner's support of far-right neo-Confederate organizations and causes. As Texas Governor George W. Bush enters the South Carolina Republican primary this weekend - a state rocked by controversy over the Confederate battle flag's presence over the state house - evidence is mounting of a questionable relationship between Bush and far-right neo-Confederate groups, according to an article published today by a leading Southern journal.
The story, published on the website of Southern Exposure magazine, and which will be featured in the print version of the magazine in early March, reveals that Governor Bush has "long-standing close ties with - and offers financial support to - neo-Confederate groups and causes.
Black History Month in Bush's America
Dubya's antipathy towards blacks goes back a long way. According to author J.H. Hatfield in his book, Fortunate Son, Bush was behind the Willie Horton smear campaign along with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. This was an attempt to portray presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as the architect of a furlough program which would release black criminals into society to kidnap and murder. Never mind that the furlough program was instituted by his Republican predecessor, this was a blatant attempt to play to the bigots and racists in order to get votes.
(4) Brief history of the Christian right political movement [Summary of Chapter 7 of Godfrey Hudson, The World Turned Righ Side up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996; with some material from James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,1991, Susan B. Thistlethwaite, "The math of martyrs"; James Zogby, Understanding America's Right Wing]
Hodgson entitles his chapter on the emergence of the religious conservative movement in the US, "Tributaries: The River of Jordan." The biblical reference is intentional, of course. In the 1950s, Hodgson claims, American conservatism was a narow stream, but in the next half century, it transformed into a broad river, coursing widely through America's political and social life. The conservative religious uprising, the Christian Coalition [ link is only one of many on the Web, and many of the state-based CCs have ther own websites] or the Moral Majority movement [this link is to religious movements in general] of the 1970s is best understood "against the background both of the long history of evangelical Protestantism in America, and of the changes in society that made evangelicals and fundamentalists decide to abandon their long tradition of standing apart from politics and commit themselves instead to political, as well as social, conservatism." At the last decade of the 20th century, it became clear that in every Gallup Poll from 1944 to 1989more than 90 percent of Americans said they believed in the existence of God, and three-quarters also believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ and in life after death. Nine out of ten Americans say they have prayed to God, two out of three claim to be church members, while two out of five attend a religious service at least once a week. Basically, following the findings of Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown, Americans have "become more religious than their grandparents were."
There was an extraordinary increase in membership of Protestant denominations: the evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches. Between the 1960s and 1980, in fact, the traditional mainstream Protestant churches were losing influence, and self-confidence. The regions where fundamentalists were concentrated was/is in a great crescent from Virginia south and west through the old Confederacy across Texas to Southern California.
By the 1970s evangelical America was building institutions of all kinds: Christian summer camps, retirement homes, hospitals, universities like Bob Jones University in South Carolina, Oral Roberts University, Criswell Center, Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Pat Robertson's Regent University in Norfolk. Suspicious of the "mainstream, " the first instinct of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians was still to separate themselves from a secular culture that, they believed to be not only wicked, but also doomed to destruction, at no late date, by the Second Coming foretold in the Scriptures.
School prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights, abortion - all of these issues aroused evangelical and other conservatives and helped to forge a new political coalition on the right. In 1978 the New Right had already demonstrated its political muscle by targeting and defeating several prominent liberals, especially those who could be portrayed as supporting abortion. There were a number of personal links between the political operatives of the New Right -men like Paul Weyrich 01 the Committee for a Free Congress and the Heritage Foundation, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, and Richard Viguerie, the direct mail fund raiser - and the religious right.
It remained only for Ronald Reagan to ask the evangelicals for their help. He did that brilliantly at a National Affairs Briefing in Dallas on August 22. For good measure Reagan distanced himself from the theory of evolution. "It is a scientific theory only," he said, "and it has in recent mars been challenged in the world of science, and it is not now believed in the scientific community to be infallible as was once believed." Thus, says Hodgson, "by a speechwriter's deft touch, conservatism was made to sound like the philosophy of the future: scientific evolution was relegated to the status of one theory." However, along with both the Bushs, Trent Lott, and others, as noted in (3), Reagan himself was not above raising the race card. And the race card is code in the fundamentalist camp.
Three themes, Hodgson claims, define the motivations of the religious right.
(1) decline of the country's influence and reputation in the world and by their desire for a more assertive foreign policy, especially resulting by the Vietnam war debacle, by increasingly aggressive Soviet behavior in Africa, the Middle East, and even in the Pacific, by the revelation of American vulnerability to the Middle East oil embargo. They saw on the nightly television news that the United States was no longer treated with the same respect in the world as in the past. These, he says, are the issues of the flag.
(2) A second, the stream of economic concerns, basically "dollar-and-cents issues": (a) the impact of the twin energy crises, the first after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the second after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, (b) widespread concern about inflation, known as "stagflation", the devaluation of the dollar twice in 1971. Says Hodgson, conservative economists such as Milton Friedman [the link is to just one of many websites on Friedman] began to emerge as anti-Keynesian oracles.(c)rising unemployment and falling productivity and even more with the rise of Japanese and European competition.
(3) The third category were/are the "social issues," perhaps more accurately called ethical and religious issues: the "cold war and godless communism", civil rights legislation, such as voting rights, desegregation, school busing, abortion, changing 'mores' and changing morals, school busing, school prayer, homosexuality, the "decline" of the traditional family, and "all the questions attendant on the new assertiveness of women." For conservative Christians, says Hodgson, these were "issues of God".
Hunter. ch 4: (Section IV, "Fields of Conflict" contains over one hundred pages of discussion and documentation of Family, Education, Media and the Arts, Law, and Electoral Politics)
This vision of America's past contains an implicit vision of America's destiny. In language reminiscent of nineteenth-century [American] [E]xceptionalism, a pamphlet published by Students for America announces that "America has a unique mission to extend the boundaries of liberty and righteousness." [Not much on the web about SFA. Founded by a Chuck Edwards, it is definitely conservative, definitely religious, but has no website, evidently.] But from the conservative evangelical perspective, the only hope for achieving this end is for the United States to stay the course. If change is necessary, it should only be undertaken to more perfectly fulfill the ideals established at the nation's founding. So warns Pat Robertson: "Either we will return to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this nation ... or we will give ourselves over more and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior, to political apathy, and ultimately to the forces of anarchy and disintegration that have throughout history gripped great empires and nations in their tragic and declining years." [ Pat Robertson, America's Dates With Destiny (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1986), p. 297.] Along the same lines, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart has asserted, "We believe the salvation of the United States of America is still the old-fashioned principles laid down in the Word of Almighty God ." [Reported in Broadcasting Washington, D.C., 10 February 1986.] And from Jerry Falwell comes the argument that "only by godly leadership can America be put back on a divine course." [Falwell, Listen America, p. 17.]
Others have also picked up on this theme, i.e., a culture war, caused by the polar opposition of the two major worldviews currently struggling for dominance in America, yates and fonte
Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary. "The math of martyrs"
Has the U.S. unwittingly entered into the business of producing terrorists because the Bush administration discounts the power of religion?
Author Samuel P. Huntington described an escalating conflict between the rational, democratic West and a so-called premodern Islamic world as a "clash of civilizations" in his popular book by the same title. However, it is not a clash of civilizations we face, but a "clash of fundamentalisms," a conflict between a zealous Christianized worldview of President Bush and an increasingly fundamentalist Islam.
The theology of Bush has been described as a rigid Christian evangelicalism. This theology produces its own kind of premodern zeal for pursuing evildoers, even by violent means.
This was nowhere more evident than in President Bush's unguarded use of the medieval word "crusade" following Sept. 11 to describe the fight against terrorism, a word he quickly abandoned after the outcry it precipitated. The president's religious worldview is one in which all good is on one side (that of the U.S.) and absolute evil is on the other. Evil is the devil. The devil is Saddam Hussein. Pre-emptive strikes are good and right when one is fighting the devil. It has become an ideology of conquest.
This kind of Christian zealotry mirrors the apocalyptic rhetoric on the other side. Osama bin Laden has carefully played into the extreme elements of Islam that can be marshaled to paint America as the devil and therefore justify jihad. This too is an ideology of conquest.
When religious zealotry meets religious zealotry--watch out. You have a prescription for holy war on both sides where ordinary diplomacy is irrelevant; actually, diplomacy itself becomes wrong because it involves compromise with the forces of evil.
James Zogby "Understanding America's Right Wing "
While a small band of influential neo-conservatives have played a significant role in shaping the foreign policy outlook of today's Republican Party, it is the religious right that has come to set that party's domestic agenda. It was during the Reagan Administration (1981-1989) that these two currents came together in a new social and political movement that transformed the outlook of Republican politics.
(5) This section gives excerpts and links to the fundamentalist Christian theme in President Bush's recent bellicose military rhetoric. At the bottom of this piece is a fragment of Bush's Press Conference, March 6, 2003. Intent here is to highlight Bush's allegation that that our freedom in America comes from God and note how much [link to Bush's text below] However, the snippet directly below, from the press conference, part of Bush's response to a reporter's question, contains the 'smoking gun' evidence of his underlying fundamentalist beliefs:
One of the things we love in America is freedom. If I may, I'd like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union: Liberty is not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to each and every person. And that's what I believe.
ROGER EBERT, "... Bush's theology depends upon partnership with a God who is directly involved in the affairs of man--a God who lets us know His will, who speaks to us, who takes sides. Bush has not an atom of doubt, I believe, that he knows God's will, that God wants regime change in Iraq, and that God approves of Bush's decision to bring that about, by war if necessary...." Praying is fine, but Bush should make up his own mind," Chicago Sun-Times, March 13, 2003
JACKSON LEARS, "This conviction that he is doing God's will has surfaced more openly since 9/11. In his State of the Union addresses and other public forums, he has presented himself as the leader of a global war against evil. As for a war in Iraq, [fromState of the Union address, January , 2003] "we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them." God is at work in world affairs, he says, calling for the United States to lead a liberating crusade in the Middle East, and "this call of history has come to the right country." Mr. Bush's speeches are not the only place one finds this providentialist spirit , everyone from Christian fundamentalists to interventionist liberals is serving up missionary formulas: bogus analogies to the war against Hitler; contrasts between American virtue and European vice; denials that sordid material interests could have anything to do with the exalted project of exporting American democracy. To those who worry about the frequent use of religious language, Mr. Bush's supporters insist that the rhetoric of Providence is as American as cherry pie. ..." in "How a War Became a Crusade," NYT, March 11, 2003
ANTHONY LEWIS, "The history and the theology of the men whose advice now dominates Mr. Bush's thinking point to much larger purposes. I think this president wants to overthrow the rules that have governed international life for the last fifty years," in "Bush and Iraq," The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002
FRANCES FITZGERALD, "The Bush administration has clearly broken with the internationalist premises that have been accepted by every other administration since World War II, with the exception of Reagan's first. " in "George Bush & the World," The New York Review of Books, September 26, 2002 [not available on line, but, at your library, use a full-text database such as Proquest]
HOWARD FINEMAN, "While Rove and Hill leaders work the domestic side, Bush is dwelling on faith-based foreign policy of the most explosive kind: a potential war in the name of civil freedom—including religious freedom—in the ancient heart of Arab Islam. ... People appreciate his devotion to faith, but, in the context of war, there is a fine line, and he is starting to make people nervous,” says Steve Waldman, the editor and CEO of Beliefnet, a popular and authoritative Web site on religion and society. “They appreciate his moral clarity and decisiveness. But they wonder if he is ignoring nuances in what sounds like a messianic mission," in "Bush and God," Newsweek, March 10, 2003.
STAN CROCK adds to our info about Tim LaHaye [the link below is one of many hits from a google search using "tim lahaye" "left behind"]
The "Left Behind" series of best-selling books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins has updated and popularized this dogma. While millions of people in the U.S. and abroad may accord these prophesies no more credibility than they grant to Lord of The Rings or Harry Potter, many others fear that they're a call to action for the President and the fundamentalists among his followers -- just as many Americans imagine that the Koran provides a blueprint for Islamic fundamentalists.
PAUL BOYER an emeritus professor of history, University of Wisconsin argues,
Does the Bible foretell regime change in Iraq? Did God establish Israel's boundaries millennia ago? Is the United Nations a forerunner of a satanic world order?
For millions of Americans, the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration's go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan. ... [much more text, liberally laced with links]
[also as noted by Stan Crock in Businessweek online, above]
"Beyond the President's broad-brush notions of good and evil lies a more complicated fundamentalist dogma that many of his supporters -- and indeed, more than 40% of the American public -- subscribe to... . [For Boyer], "the school of biblical prophesy, formulated by 19th century British churchman John Darby, [a google search yields numerous additional hits] foresees a series of events signaling the last days of the world as we know it. These events include war, the emergence of a new world economic and political order, and the return of Jews to the land God promised Abraham." ...Such logic is quite a stretch, of course, given Darby's unearthly version of how the world will be reshaped. According to Boyer, that starts with a "dispensation" phase, loosely defined as the here and now, which will evolve into the Rapture, when true believers "will join Christ in the air." Then will come Tribulation, when the Antichrist will arise and seize world power. From the days of Saladin, a medieval Islamic ruler, to the Ottoman Empire, and now to the era of Saddam Hussein, Christian fundamentalists have viewed Islamic leaders as a possible Antichrist or its forerunner.
After seven years under this satanic figure's tyrannical rule, Christ and the saints -- presumably represented by George Bush & Co. -- will return and conquer the powers of evil at Armageddon, an ancient battlefield outside of Haifa in northern Israel, not far from Iraq. Ensconced in Jerusalem, Christ will then reign peacefully for a thousand years, the Millennium. (Darby's theory has the Antichrist slaughtering most Jews, as Saddam probably would like to, with the rest converting to Christianity. In the eyes of a non-American, this might explain why Jewish neo-conservatives are among the strongest supporters of Bush's Iraq policy).
From the Progressive: Bush's Messiah Complex
Call it messianic militarism....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."
Like other Presidents before him, Bush believes the United States is the greatest country in the world, and he is not afraid to use theological language to justify the empire, says Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. "The ideology is there to cover the militarism," says Johnson.
"What I hear is a holy trinity of militarism, masculinism, and messianic zeal," says Lee Quinby, professor of American Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. "It does follow the logic of apocalyptic thought, which has a religious base but is now secularized in the militaristic mode. Apocalyptic thought always has an element of instilling helplessness and promising victory in the face of that powerlessness. In this instance, Bush plays up the vulnerability we feel because of terrorism or Saddam Hussein and then accentuates the military as the assurance that our helplessness will be transformed." This kind of thinking, says Quinby, is "dangerous because it prepares a nation for war without thinking about the impact on civilians and on the U.S. soldiers."
In a Wash Post op ed Fritz Ritsch, pastor of the Bethesda (Md.) Presbyterian Church, argued that Bush had become the "theologian in chief." [also check Mike James blog, March 2]
From Stan Crock, Business Week Online Bush, the Bible, and Iraq... It may confound people that some mainline Protestant churches continue to resist the president's call to arms. After all, it is couched in theological language: The term "axis of evil" was coined to give the war on terrorism a religious edge; President Bush speaks of giving the people of Iraq not democracy, but freedom, harkening back to both the biblical Exodus and the Civil War. "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war," he assured us after Sept. 11, "and we know that God is not neutral between them." If God is not neutral, and the choices are so straightforward -- almost the literal embodiment of a spiritual battle -- it seems perverse for mainline religious leaders to withhold support for war against Iraq. ...
"What scares so many people outside the U.S. is the President's religious, apocalyptic rhetoric.... Two reasons have surfaced for the deep divisions over Iraq that have created a political chasm between the U.S. and allies such as France, Germany, and Russia. One is that other nations oppose what they see as an unprovoked war. The second is that they view the threat Baghdad poses to the world as far less ominous than the one the Bush Administration imagines.
A third factor is also at work, though: religious rhetoric, perhaps even fervor, which divides the President and many of those who voted for him from leading thinkers abroad, including those in some Western democracies. As European nations become more secular, they're increasingly suspicious of a country with a born-again Christian President, whose political base includes the majority of non-Arab fundamentalists in the U.S. British playwright Harold Pinter spotlighted this suspicion when he recently called Bush "a hired Christian thug."
Iraq plays into these concerns like no other issue. One reason is that fundamentalist Christian doctrine envisions a horrific conflict, the Biblical Armageddon, as the way to hasten the return of Jesus and the Millennium -- not the 21st century, but a thousand years of enlightenment that Jesus will return to preside over, according to the Good Book.Speaking to reporters about the deteriorating regional conflict on Monday, 7 January, President Bush said,
I don't believe the situation is defused yet, but I do believe there is a way to do so, and we are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there's a way to deal with their problems without going to war....
In their article, Clark and Parsia go on to show that, as the White House claimed, Bush was not aware of the implication of the term 'Paki', he should have. They conclude, however, that "Bush has -- intentionally or no -- made life more difficult for them, and that he's done so without the slightest interest in or attempt at redress, is simply intolerable."
Fragment of Bush's March 6 press conference transcript begins here:
Terry Moran
Q. In the past several weeks your policy on Iraq has generated opposition from the governments of France, Russia, China, Germany, Turkey, the Arab League and many other countries; opened a rift at NATO and at the U.N.; and drawn millions of ordinary citizens around the world into the streets in antiwar protests. I ask what went wrong? That so many governments and peoples around the world now not only disagree with you very strongly but see the U.S. under your leadership as an arrogant power.
A.I think if you remember back prior to the resolution coming out of the United Nations last fall I suspect you might have asked a question along those lines: ``How come you can't get anybody to support your resolution?'' If I remember correctly there was a lot of doubt as to whether or not we were even going to get any votes. Well, we'd get our own, of course. And the vote came out 15 to nothing.
And I think you'll see when it's all said and done if we have to use force a lot of nations will be with us. You clearly named some that - France and Germany have expressed their opinions. We have a disagreement over how best to deal with Saddam Hussein. I understand that. Having said that, they're still our friends and we will deal with them as friends. We've got a lot of common interests.
Our transatlantic relationships are very important. While they may disagree with how we deal with Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, there was no disagreement when it came time to vote on 1441, at least as far as France was concerned. They joined us. They said Saddam Hussein has one last chance of disarming. If they think more time will cause him to disarm I disagree with that. He's a master at deception. He has no intention of disarming, otherwise we would have known.
There's a lot of talk about inspectors. It really would have taken a handful to inspectors to determine whether he was disarming. They could have showed up at a parking lot and he could have brought his weapons and destroyed them. That's not what he chose to do.
Secondly, I make my decisions based upon the oath I took, the one I just described to you. I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat, is a threat to the American people. He's a threat to people in his neighborhood. He's also a threat to the Iraqi people.
One of the things we love in America is freedom. If I may, I'd like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union: Liberty is not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to each and every person. And that's what I believe.
I believe that when we see totalitarianism that we must deal with it. We don't have to do it always militarily, but this is a unique circumstance, because of 12 years of denial and defiance, because of terrorist connections, because of past history. I'm convinced that a liberated Iraq will be important for that troubled part of the world. The Iraqi people are plenty capable of governing themselves. Iraq's a sophisticated society. Iraq's got money. Iraq will provide a place where people can see that the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds can get along in a federation. Iraq will serve as a catalyst for change, positive change.
So there's a lot more at stake than just American security and the security of people close by Saddam Hussein. Freedom is at stake as well. And I take that very seriously.