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07/11/2004:
"Fathers and Sons"
An interesting articleby David Greenberg The New Yorker
George W. Bush and his forebears.
...But a dynastic sense of “unfinished business,” though it may have partly motivated the Iraq war, doesn’t explain why George W. has waged it with an abandon wholly uncharacteristic of his father. Indeed, the differences between the Bush Administrations now loom larger than the continuities. Brashness, for example, isn’t a quality associated with the elder Bush, who always displayed the ingrained modesty of the old establishment. Politically, he was self-effacing to a fault. When the Berlin Wall fell and his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, urged him to make a speech, Bush seemed puzzled. “The last thing I want to do is brag about winning the Cold War,” he said. The trait could bleed into opportunism, too: he swallowed his pro-choice record and his scorn for “voodoo economics” (a phrase he coined) when Reagan tendered him the Vice-Presidential slot,in 1980.
George W. showed little of his father’s caution as he barrelled ahead with his controversial appointments and extravagant tax cuts, convinced that he was doing the right thing. The signature act of his Presidency, targeting Saddam, defied his father’s judgment that deposing the tyrant would alienate the Arab allies whose support had been essential to the first Gulf War. And, where the elder Bush struggled to articulate a well-defined world view, few doubt the younger Bush’s ideological consistency.
The difference between the Bushes is starkest in the area of religion. The father had the traditional Yankee unease about introducing religion into political life. During the 1988 campaign, when he recalled floating on the life raft in the Pacific after his wartime crash, he said, “I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them, and God and faith”—and then became so worried about the implications of his words that he added, “and the separation of church and state.” Even in avowing his faith he sounded strained. “If by ‘born again’ one is asking, ‘Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?’” he said, “then I would answer a clear-cut yes. No hesitancy. No awkwardness.”
George W.’s devotion to evangelical Protestantism, by contrast, is well known. Although Christianity didn’t play a strong role in his early life, he found God when he turned forty. At the time, he was drinking heavily and his marriage was collapsing. Laura told him that if he didn’t stop drinking she would leave him and take their daughters with her. For a year, Bush had been consulting with the Reverend Billy Graham—pastor to Presidents since Eisenhower—and he began exploring the evangelical message. He joined a Bible-study group—an especially significant commitment, in the Schweizers’ view, because it met at the same time as “Monday Night Football.” “With W. no longer drinking,” the Schweizers write, he and Laura “became intimate once again.”
The news media have been prone to underestimate the importance of George W.’s evangelicalism. Perhaps it’s because the religious right has perfected the art of what used to be called Mau-Mauing, rendering the press corps fearful of broaching the subject. Maybe reporters genuinely believe that George W. plays it up for political purposes; they often describe him as behaving cynically when he takes actions that please the Christian right. But this reading stems from an assumption of continuity between the son and the father, who did pander to evangelical conservatives. “I always laugh when people say that George W. Bush is saying this or that to appease the religious right,” his first cousin John Ellis told the Schweizers. “He is the religious right.”
George W. has been active in evangelical politics since his father’s 1988 campaign, when he served as the campaign’s liaison to the religious right. Working with Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God pastor and a longtime Bush associate, he forged personal alliances with influential ministers, broadcasters, and activists. In the Iowa caucuses, the televangelist Pat Robertson outpolled the elder Bush (who explained, comically, that his supporters were off that night golfing or at air shows and débutante balls). But the son’s aggressive networking paid off in the Southern primaries weeks later, when his father, once distrusted by born-again Christians, trounced even Robertson within that constituency. In the younger Bush’s own Presidential bid, in 2000, he got a minority of the over-all vote but eighty-four per cent of highly observant, white evangelicals. “For the first time,” Phillips notes, “a Republican presidential victory rested on a religious, conservative, southern-centered coalition.” For the first time, the President of the United States was also “the de facto head of the Religious Right.”
Phillips attributes Bush’s success to demographics, in particular the surge of evangelical Christian denominations as a proportion of the faithful. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans who attended weekly services fell from thirty-eight per cent to twenty-five per cent. At the same time, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention grew from ten million to seventeen million, and membership in the Pentecostal churches from less than two million to nearly twelve million. “Liberal religion was being routed,” Phillips concludes. Bush shared the values of this growing bloc and enjoyed its overwhelming support.
Bush has not been shy about displaying his faith. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the President came across Proverbs 21:15: “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Soon, “evildoers” became his favorite term for Al Qaeda. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: “whirlwind,” “work of mercy,” “safely home,” “wonder-working power.” Phillips refers to a study by the religion scholar Bruce Lincoln, who identified, in Bush’s speech to Congress announcing the invasion of Afghanistan, allusions to Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. In private, Bush has been even more explicit. “George sees this as a religious war,” a family member told the Schweizers. “He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.” Phillips says that Bush has spoken of himself as an instrument of divine will.
full article
