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together in the Oval Office before the Iraq war. “I know that whenever we have visited him in the White House he says before . . . let’s pray. He says you never know who’s gonna call, bang on that door,” Robison said. “He kept one president waiting for twenty minutes outside while we continued to pray together.” OK, so it was probably the president of Cameroon or one of the members of the Coalition of the Willing who signed the pledge card to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of preachers have prayed with presidents in the White House. Billy Graham himself has prayed there hundreds of times.

But James Robison? The guy who lives and prays on the fringe of the religious mainstream in Texas. In the White House? It’s enough to make you miss Billy Graham holding Dick Nixon’s hand. You always had the sense that Nixon was worldly enough to know where to draw the line when it came to biblical apocalypse and foreign policy.

Rove’s road to Damascus was more political than spiritual. It led straight through Fort Worth, where in 1994 evangelical extremists seized control of the Texas Republican Party just as Rove was previewing Bush’s first statewide campaign. Rove is a secular Republican, a Barry Goldwater disciple converted to the pragmatic politics of Richard Nixon, but he quickly realized that his candidate’s religious beliefs were an asset, not a liability.

Rove was right. By the time Bush was invoking God’s name to order troops into Iraq, The New York Times reported that 46 percent of Americans had identified themselves in a Gallup poll as born-again evangelical Christians; 48 percent of Americans believe in creationism, while 28 percent believe in evolution; and Americans are twice as likely to believe in the devil as in the theory of evolution. Laura Bush has said her husband always had good timing. The recent polling on religious belief in America suggests she’s right again. The first nonsecular presidency coincides with what looks like yet another Great Awakening in America.

It’s painfully obvious to us—and to the foreign press and foreign leaders who worry constantly about it—that President Bush’s religious beliefs have shaped his foreign policy. It is a policy often defined in the Old Testament language favored by fundamentalists. Saddam Hussein was not a tyrant but an “evildoer,” like that evildoer in the Fifth Psalm, “Break thou the arm of the wicked and evildoer.” Or those evildoers in the 125th Psalm: “But those who turn aside upon their crooked ways the Lord will lead away with evildoers. Peace be in Israel!” Odd how one line from a psalm reads as though it had been lifted from Douglas Feith and Richard Perle’s blueprint for preemptive wars in the Middle East—on the literal road to Damascus. Bush and the administration’s resident war council seem to be developing the first overtly biblical foreign policy the country has ever known.

It’s also a foreign policy that has produced alliances as peculiar as the Michael Jackson–Lisa Marie Presley union. Consider this outline of Middle East policy. “Jerusalem belongs to Israel; the West Bank belongs to Israel; the Temple Mount belongs to Israel; the U.S. Embassy should be in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv; Yasir Arafat is a terrorist with whom one cannot negotiate; and unconditional support for Israel is the only foreign policy option.” Toss in the plan to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and you have an exact summary of the position paper written in 1996 by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., et al. for Israel’s Likud Party in 1996. Perle and others wrote the report on how to break with Israel’s previous foreign policy for the newly elected Bibi Netanyahu. The paper pushes the idea of regime change in Syria and suggests a major way to achieve that is by going after Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The same group of hawks pushed Clinton to invade Iraq in 1998, but he declined. Rejected by Clinton, the “Clean Break” for Israel report became Bush’s blueprint for his invasion of Iraq. Here you have it outlined by the Reverend James Hagee of the Cornerstone