Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [97]
Judicial appointments, faith-based social-welfare programs, and restrictions on stem-cell research all fall into the category that one watchdog of the religious right in Austin calls “throwing red meat and green dollars to the wolves in the fundamentalist Christian pack.” It keeps them in line, said Samantha Smoot of the Texas Freedom Network. “But it’s dangerous because they can never be satisfied.”
Rove hasn’t satisfied the evangelical Christians, who rightly complain that no substantial faith-based bill has passed both houses of Congress. Even the father of compassionate conservatism, University of Texas professor Marvin Olasky, said the faith-based bill that finally passed in April 2003 is “a shadow of what was hoped for.” But add George Bush’s religious beliefs to Rove’s pragmatic courtship of the Christian right, and you whip up enough religious fervor to keep the evangelicals writing checks and casting votes through 2004.
No modern American president has been as public about his personal religious beliefs as George W. Bush.* No modern president has tried so hard to impose his own religious beliefs on the American public, and no American president was ever so fluent in the language of the Christian right. To the evangelical extreme right, Dubya Bush is the real deal—a godly man who believes God made him president—not in the big “Divine Providence made me President” way, but in the sincere belief that God saved him from a life of drunkenness and dissolution. (And by “God,” Dubya Bush means Jesus Christ—as Franklin Graham made clear when he prayed “in Jesus’ name” at Bush’s inauguration.) Bush “witnessed” or related his saved-from-the-bottle story to Christian social workers in Nashville in February 2003. “I would not be president today,” Bush said, “if I hadn’t stopped drinking seventeen years ago. And I could not have done that without the grace of God.”
Bush found that grace in a small Bible-study group for men in Midland, Texas. He began with socials and services at Laura Bush’s Methodist congregation, but he found Jesus at a Community Bible Study men’s group. CBS was started by a group of suburban Christian women in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1957. The Bible-study/self-realization groups spread across the country and arrived in Midland in 1979, several years before Bush and his childhood friend and now secretary of commerce Don Evans signed on together.
All this (as we observed in Shrub) would normally be off limits to journalists, but Bush’s private beliefs are gradually becoming our public policy. Had Bush found salvation through mainstream Protestantism, his religion’s relation to our policy would be less important. How to discreetly say that a Christian religious extremist has seized control of the White House? We’re not alone in this reading. Two years into his presidency, even the staid and steady team Newsweek assigned to divine Bush’s religious beliefs warned us that Dubya Bush didn’t find his faith in your father’s (or his father’s) Protestant church. In a men’s Bible-study group in Midland, the guy who dodged the Western canon at Yale finally read and explicated one of its greatest works—the Bible.
Since then, Bush has been a sheep in the flock of some odd pastors. He’s still praying with the Reverend James Robison—the Fort Worth anti-abortion-rights fanatic given to quoting both sides of the conversations between him and God. According to what Robison told Jane Little of the BBC, he and Bush prayed