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Newsweek's cover: "Bush and God"
The last few weeks have seen so many articles on President Bush's faith and how it affects his policy that it's hardly news anymore. We've linked to a bajillion of them, but in case you missed them all, here's the summary:

Gee, Bush sure is using a lot of religious imagery and language these days. Yep. A whole lot of it, too. A bunch of experts (mainly liberals like the head of the Interfaith Alliance, which was created to counteract the Christian Coalition, and Princeton University's Elaine Pagels) are worried about it, saying it "demonizes" opponents. After all, you know, we can't say that God is on our side. But conservative evangelicals like the language and will repay him with votes. But it scares potential allies overseas, and American enemies (oops, there's that dangerous "us and them" language) can use it to say Bush is on a "crusade" and stir up more anti-American foment. Besides, who's to say God's on our side, anyway?

There are variations on that theme, but that's the basic tune. Fortunately, the main article in Newsweek's "Bush and God" cover package has enough original notes to keep it interesting. For the most part, the magazine lets Martin Marty and religion editor Ken Woodward take note of the debate over Bush's religious language in sidebars and lets Howard Fineman concentrate on Bush's spiritual biography.

Of greatest note is Fineman's revisiting of Bush's conversion story. "In campaign biographies, ghostwriters highlight the role that Billy Graham played in launching Bush on … his 'Walk.' The truth is more prosaic, and explains far more about Bush's evolving views, not only of faith but of government."

More influential than Graham, Fineman writes, was Bush's involvement in Community Bible Study. The "scriptural boot camp … gave him, for the first time, an intellectual focus," he says. "Here was the product of elite secular education—Andover, Yale, and Harvard—who, for the first time, was reading a book line by line with rapt attention. And it was the Bible. … A jogger and marathoner for years, Bush found in Bible study an equivalent mental and spiritual discipline, which he would soon need to steel himself for his main challenge in life to that point: to quit drinking."

Fineman also dismisses the idea that Bush's sure-mindedness (and what critics call his arrogance) is a direct result of his Christianity: "Faith didn't make Bush a decisive person. He's always been one. His birthright as a Bush gives him a sense of obligation to serve, and a sense of an entitlement to lead. … Still, faith helps Bush pick a course and not look back."

Woodward's sidebar takes up Fineman's comments on Bush's small-group spirituality. Presidents who found God in denominationally affiliated churches were more predictable, he said. Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter, for example, wasn't much different from other Southern Baptist Sunday school teachers.

"There is … nothing in the personal piety of small-group Christianity that can ground a faith-based vision for governing the body politic," he writes. "Translating faith into political principles is what denominations try to do. But Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' could not be less like the United Methodist Church's relentlessly liberal social creed." (Bush is a Methodist.)

In another sidebar, Martin Marty complains that Bush's faith is sinfully prideful. "The problem isn't with Bush's sincerity, but with his evident conviction that he's doing God's will," he says. "Christian theologians are wary when Bush uses the words of Jesus to draw neat lines and challenge the whole rest of the world: if you are not for us, or with us, you are against us. … The Bible presents a more nuanced God." Still, Marty credits Bush with having historically corrected his mistakes.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47