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Cross Fire
President Bush is a Christian. Why does that bother people?
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, April 21, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Easter Monday is an apt time to note that President George W. Bush has been taking darts as a born-again Christian. This tells us something about today's president, and something more about today's religion.
The president comes by his faith, of course, because he stopped drinking and found God at age 40. As a Methodist, he's not exactly a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal, but he clearly does believe that good and evil walk the world. He also says things such as, "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God." This comes from the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, where other presidents have said similar things. But both friend and foe have the sense that Mr. Bush really means it.
The surprising thing is how much of the carping about the president's religion, especially in the context of war against Saddam Hussein, comes from the ranks of those who represent religion. Thus prominent theologian Martin Marty pens a piece in Newsweek entitled "The Sin of Pride," complaining about the President's "evident conviction that he's doing God's will."
The Christian Century, similarly, devoted most of its March 8 issue to a barrage of war criticism. "Imperialism, American Style," was the title of the salvo by eminent sociologist Robert Bellah. "Americans may not have thought of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon as the symbolic headquarters of a world empire," he explained, "but the men with the box cutters certainly did, and so do numberless millions who cheered their terrifying exercise."
The Christian Century editors complained that Mr. Bush's actions, such as a hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, give "tacit support" to the wrong religious perspective. They are "in line with end-times scenarios imagined by some conservative Christians and fictionalized in the 'Left Behind' series that has sold over 50 million volumes since 1995. Up to 40 percent of Americans believe that we are living in the last days, says historian Paul S. Boyer, and that history is racing toward an apocalyptic clash between the forces of good and evil. Millions of Americans believe that the Bible foretells regime change in Iraq, that God established Israel's boundaries millennia ago, and the United Nations is a forerunning of a satanic world order."
Holy Cow, Mr. Bush is caught in the cross fire of a religious civil war. These are the voices of liberal Protestantism, which once again finds itself out of step with the pews. The pope has the same problem, of course, in declaring the war "a crime against humanity." In March the Pew Research Center found that 62% of both Catholics and mainline Protestants backed the war, compared with 44% of non-believers and 77% of evangelicals.
In contrast to The Christian Century, commentary in Christianity Today, launched by Billy Graham, ran toward a sermon by Philip Jensen, dean of Saint Andrew's Anglican Cathedral in Sydney, Australia. To wit, "Apocalypse Again and Again: The Bible doesn't tell us when to go to war but how to live in a war-ridden world." And Marvin Olasky's World Magazine ran a headline "Onward Christian Soldiers," over a movie review noting that troops headed to Iraq previewed the Civil War epic "Gods and Generals."
Ardent religions are growing, while liberal ones are declining. The leading study, "Religious Congregations and Membership: 2000" by the Glenmary Research Center, found that the Mormon church grew 19.3% in the 1990s. Also gaining were evangelical churches; the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ up 18.6%, and the Assemblies of God, up 18.5%. The Roman Catholic Church, no doubt helped by burgeoning Hispanics, grew 16.2%. Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church USA shrank 11.6%. Trailing the list was the United Church of Christ, which has rewritten its hymnal to eliminate masculine pronouns and other politically incorrect language. Over the decade it lost 14.8% of its membership.
On net, religious impulses are probably growing. September 11 persuaded others besides George Bush that evil is an active force in the world. The science of the Big Bang and DNA looks much more like the work of a creator than the cold world of Newtonian Laws and Darwinian evolution. And at least indirectly the horrors of the 20th century showed that the latter provides no moral compass.
The Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, the great defeat of the fundamentalists, has in particular come in for reassessment. Noting for example that the ACLU advertised for a plaintiff, a 2002 PBS documentary let the people of Dayton, Tenn. say that they were not the dolts depicted by the news dispatches of H. L. Mencken and the 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind." And in his new Mencken biography "The Skeptic," Terry Teachout points to the unlovely side of the philosophy animating his account: A disdain of democracy, for example, in favor of credo of Social Darwinism, applying survival of the fittest to human communities, and its corollary of eugenics, shortly later discredited by the Third Reich.
As for the Iraq war, what do the pope and liberal theologians make of the cheering crowds in Baghdad and Saddam's torture chambers? The president's success has confounded his critics. His decision, whatever role Divine Guidance played, clearly was what psychologists call inner-directed. His war cabinet meetings did not include people such as Karl Rove, Karen Hughes or Ari Fleischer. Somehow it's better, I suspect, for a president to talk to God than to talk to pollsters.
Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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