George W. Bush: Cardboard Christian Part 2
Bush is no devout Christian. In fact, he may not be a Christian at all. – Ayelish McGarvey
"It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious ... (right) and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it ." --Billy Graham
Part One: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Part Three: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Related Dairies:
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God and GWB Politics
More on Irreparable Harm Below the Fold...
Millions of Americans are social conservative individuals, the vast majority believe that the real problems of the nation stem from its failed morals and its ungodly behaviors.
George W. Bush is to receive due credit for developing an understanding of what it takes to use Evangelicalism as a successful political tool.
Bush 43 made it very clear that he would not be "out good ol’boyed or Christianed again" early in his quest for public office. And with the expert aid of Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, Doug Wead, and a cast of others, GWB struck out to remade himself as the "Christian" candidate for office as he climbed the successive rungs of the ladder to the 2000 Presidency. How he did it, and to what degree he was actually a genuine Evangelical witness to his own born-again testimony will be debated by historians far into the future.
Bush’s Masterful Use of Religious Symbolism and Language In Partisan Campaigning
"If it wasn't for the son, George Bush the father wouldn't have received as much support as he did in the evangelical community," says Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News and author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. "George W. Bush reached out to some key evangelical ministers, reassuring them about the values of his father in a way his father, an Episcopalian, never could."
The younger Bush's evangelical credentials would later help him in his campaign for governor of Texas. After a failed run for Congress in the 1970 -- during which he was portrayed as a partying, rich-boy outsider -- Bush's new found faith enabled him to connect with Texans in a whole new way, observers say.
"I saw George Bush in church settings -- and he was a master," Slater says. "He was marvelously successful in talking their language, reinforcing their values, and appealing successfully to the kinds of people who not only would vote for him, but would tell the neighbors to vote for him. Not only organize phone banks for him, but would call prayer lines and talk about George Bush as a campaigner."
Snip
"The Jesus Factor" concludes by assessing the importance of the evangelical vote to George W. Bush's reelection campaign strategy. "Evangelical Protestants are an absolutely critical part of the Republican base," says Dr. John Green, director of the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and author of Religion and the Culture Wars. "The first stone in building the wall of re-election are evangelical Protestants."
Source: The Jesus Factor, http://www.pbs.org/...
What It Really Means to Be Evangelical
The evangelical leader in the faith-based left speaks out: "I'm an Evangelical Christian and I find 3,000 verses in the Bible on the poor, so fighting poverty is a moral value too, or protecting the environment -- protecting God's creation is a moral value. The ethics of war – whether we go to war, how we go to war, whether we tell the truth about the war – are fundamental moral and religious questions. So the right wing narrows and restricts, and a broader, deeper conversation would really challenge the agenda of the right which values wealth over work, and favors the rich over the poor, and basically in foreign policy, sees war as a first resort and not a last resort."
Source: Jim Wallis Talks About "God's Politics" and Values...by Which Wallis Doesn't Mean Hate, Greed, and War Mongering. Feb. 22, 2005
"Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. "Now let me get this straight," I said. "Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq." With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, "Bush! Bush! Bush!" So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.
. . . We have become a mean, vicious people, what the (B)ible calls "stiff-necked people." And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God. . . . Every religion, including Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, is rooted in nonviolence, but I submit that the only thing we know for sure about Jesus is that he was nonviolent and so, nonviolence is the hallmark of Christianity and the measure of authentic Christian living."
Source: John Dear, "Pharisee Nation" Common Dreams, Feb. 15, 2005: www.commondreams.org/views05/0215-21.htm
Bush’s Evangelicalism Betrays It’s Christ
"George Hunsinger gives the lie to the Right's caricature of progressives as anti-religious zealots. As a minister, the McCord professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and coordinator of Church Folks for a Better America (CBFA), Hunsinger is working hard to reframe the "moral values" debate by raising tough questions about how torture, pre-emption, unjust war, and poverty can be tolerated by people of moral and religious conviction. Hunsinger has tapped into a rich tradition of religious progressive activism--from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Father Robert Drinan to Rev. William Sloane Coffin. He shared his thoughts on Iraq, torture, and the challenges facing progressive religious leaders in a recent email interview."
Snip
Church Folks for a Better America is dedicated to the idea that the word "Christian" does not necessarily go with the word "Right." Our motto, taken from Martin Luther King, is addressed first to the churches: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." We are a rallying point for many Christians who are appalled when the churches remain silent. If the churches cannot speak out against something like torture, what good is it to have tongues?
Source: Katrina vanden Heuvel: Church Folks for a Better America, The Nation, @ http://www.thenation.com/...
The Tragic Legacy of George W. Bush
Evangelicals had hoped to achieve the "moral high ground" with the election of George W. Bush. Their goals included a restoration of family values, strengthening a code of conduct most identified with the 10 Commandments, and a return to solid biblical principles in the life of the nation.
Their view was that Washington would become a place of truth, prayer, fair play and genuinely good government—albeit smaller and less expensive. The co-option of the concept of an evangelical president in the persona of George W. Bush was to bring in a moral and spiritual awaking. That did not happen.
Evangelicals saw the environment despoiled, an unnecessary and preemptive war of choice careened out of control. Evangelicals winched at the bravado of an arrogant politically motivated Bush when he declared "mission accomplished," his framing the wars in terms of a "crusade", his blessing the use of torture and then his sping on his fellow Americans. These Bush actions redound to un-American dishonor.
Further, Bush ignored the national economy and the rampant fraud in the financial sectors spent the national debit into the trillions while financing this record breaking burden via the Communist Chinese and paying scant, if any attention to pervasive corruption and greed by Ken Lay--Enron, and a host of others Bernie Madhof included.
Bush turned his oblivious self away from New Orleans for four days while thousands suffered and an unknown number drown without his proper attention and intervention. And here is much more to the record of moral failure by George W. Bush.
For over one year, ardent partisan Republicans and the failed Administration of George Bush sought to avoid acknowledging that the country was in a serious recession. During that time elements accumulated which worsened and exacerbated what now has become a very, very serious and deepening U.S. and International financial crisis. Transparency and honesty were lacking and that was from the presidency on down.
The tragic worldwide failure of banks and the economy will in and of itself label the politician Bush a tragic and monumental failure. Bush's claims to real religion, to a transformed life and a moral basis for his presidency has undermined and eroded the world’s understanding and conception of what an "evangelical, born-again Christian example" of leadership is.
Because of the blatant misuse of the Evangelical movement to gain and advance a partisan laissez-faire conservatism by political means, has come at the expense of the Christian Evangelical movement. There may have been created a situation, as one defender sees it, where "we will be living with the division and mockery for years to come." The religious goals and objectives of these church people have suffered grievously at the hands of those who schemers who invited them into politics without regard to the values they hold or the goals they seek by means of the spirit and not the coercive power of government—which Evangelicals abhor.
For them:
The family stands at the center of this world, representing the building block of society. The family’s role as moral authority is essential; the family instills children with moral values and restrains the pursuit of self-interest. Implicit in this image of the family is the social conservative conception of human nature. Humans are creatures of unlimited appetites and instincts. With restraint, the world would become a chaos of seething passions, overrun by narrow self interest. Only the moral authority of the family or religion tames human passions, transforming self-interest into the larger good.
The ideal society, then, is one in which individuals are integrated into a moral community, bound together by faith, by common moral values, and by obedience to the dictates of family and religion; a world in balance, based on a natural hierarchy of authority.
Source: The Complexities of Conservatism: How Conservatives Understand the World, Rebecca Klatch, America at Century’s End, Edited by Alan Wolfe. @
http://www.enotes.com/...
Several high-profile evangelical Christians are criticizing the evangelical movement for its close alliance with the Republican Party. These voices - scholars, clergy and laypeople - say that evangelicals have sacrificed the message of Jesus at the altar of political influence, throwing over their biblically mandated mission to the poor and disadvantaged in favor of trying to affect decisions about gay marriage, abortion and other issues laden with "moral values." Evangelicals, many of these critics contend, have forgotten Christ's admonition to wage peace in favor of waging the culture wars.
Since the 1980s, evangelical Christians have made up a large chunk of the Republican Party. In the 2004 presidential election, 78 percent of evangelical voters backed George W. Bush, according to the report "The American Religious Landscape and the 2004 Presidential Vote."
Of course, there have always been dissenting voices within conservative Christianity - no religious movement is monolithic - but recently those voices have grown louder and more high-profile. Examples include:
• A half-dozen books by evangelical authors are calling for major reform. The authors include such evangelical notables as religion historian Randall Balmer, former President Jimmy Carter and theologian Obery Hendricks Jr.
• Baptist bloggers discontented with the conservative alignment of the Southern Baptist Convention were instrumental in the election of Frank Page, a younger and potentially more progressive pastor, as the denomination's new president.
• Recent speeches by Walter B. Shurden and J. Brent Walker, two prominent Southern Baptist leaders, warn against the close alliance of religion and politics.
• A gathering of African-American pastors, led by Dallas pastor Frederick Haynes III, criticized some megachurches and their pastors as being more concerned with politics and wealth than with the poor.
• In May, a group of conservative Southern Baptist pastors signed the "Memphis Declaration," a document that calls for repentance and remorse for "triumphalism" in pursuing Baptist causes and for turning "a blind eye to wickedness" within the denomination.
If there is an anti-political push within evangelicalism, it may reflect a broader and growing unease Americans have with government's involvement in moral values. According to a recent Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans who believe the federal government should promote "moral values" has fallen 12 points in the last decade, from 60 percent in 1996 to 48 percent in 2006.
ELECTIONS 2006, Evangelicals: Divisible after all?, JULY 10, 2006@ http://www.religionlink.org/...