After the Republicans lost both houses of Congress in the midterm elections in 2006, the inside the Beltway consensus was that President Bush would implement a strategy for phased withdrawal of American troops based on recommendations made by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. But Bush demonstrated once again that the usual methods for analyzing and predicting decisions made by American presidents tend to produce null results when applied to his decisions in the war on terrorism. In the speech in which President Bush articulated what had been widely advertised as his new strategy in Iraq, he said that the global war on terrorism is the "decisive ideological struggle of our time" and that the mission in Iraq is to transform this country into a "functional democracy." The only substantive difference from the old strategy was that President Bush has now decided that accomplishing this mission will require 21,500 additional American soldiers and hundreds of billions of additional taxpayer dollars.
Numerous attempts have been made over the last four years to arrive at a coherent understanding of how President Bush makes decisions in the conduct of the war on terrorism and all of them have failed rather miserably. The usual explanation for this failure is that Bush has chosen not to fully disclose the reasons why he made these decisions or that he is not capable of communicating them in coherent and convincing ways. The intent in this discussion is to demonstrate that Bush has consistently revealed the rationale behind his decisions in the war on terrorism in the religious beliefs used to justify them in conversations, interviews, news conferences, and public speeches. The primary reason why this is not widely known is that decoding the messages contained in this religious language requires an improved understanding of the gospel according to George W. Bush.
Articles about this gospel have appeared in magazines as diverse as Esquire, Spin, Christianity Today, Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Time, and this subject has also been extensively explored in numerous books and hour long documentaries on the PBS and A&E television networks. But what those responsible for these efforts have apparently failed to realize is that the gospel according to George W. Bush is a strange blend of religious fundamentalism and a quasi-religious belief system known as the market or Washington consensus. When the Bush gospel is understood these terms, there are no inconsistencies between religious truths as this president conceives them and the legislative agenda and domestic and foreign policies of his administration. But the most menacing conclusion that will be drawn in this discussion is that the gospel according to George W. Bush also seems to function as a theology of empire that sanctions unilateral aggression by the United States.
The Bush Gospel and the Market or Washington Consensus:
The primary article of faith in the market or Washington consensus is that the process of economic globalization will necessarily result in a new global order in which all national economies will be free market systems and all governments will be based on the principles of democratic capitalism. This view of the human future is predicated on the assumption in mainstream economic theory that forces associated with the "natural laws of economics" will necessarily result in the growth and expansion of free market systems. The economist that was most responsible for articulating this alleged consensus, Milton Freedman, became the principal architect of the economic policies of the Reagan administration. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this quasi-religious belief system became something like an American state religion and massively contributed to the success of the "Republican revolution" in the decades that followed.
George W. Bush was repeatedly exposed to the market or Washington consensus by his father, his father’s political friends and associates, and by his professors at Harvard Business School. After completing an MBA at Harvard, Bush attempted to make his fortune in the oil-rich Permian Basin of West Texas and ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Following a series of embarrassing business failures and a number of even more humiliating incidents caused by excessive drinking, Bush talked to several evangelists, including a family friend named Billy Graham, and became born again in 1985.
During the years that followed this conversion experience, Bush spent a great deal of time with politically active leaders on the religious right who firmly believe, as the texts of their books, articles, and sermons attest, that the natural laws of economics are created by God and are part of a sacredly ordained scheme or plan. When Bush was part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, he remained in close contact with politically active leaders on the religious right and the linkage in his mind between the laws of God and the natural laws of economics was firmly established by the time he became governor of Texas in 1995.
Governor Bush issued an executive order that allowed private and religious charities to deliver welfare services previously provided by the state. He then made Texas the first state to permit a prison unit to be operated by a ministry and established an alternative state licensing procedure for faith-based programs. Bush was also responsible for creating a state sponsored program for unwed mothers run by faith-based groups and pushed a law through the Texas legislature which required state agencies to work with other faith-based groups to develop welfare-to-work programs.
In a book written a few years into his first term as Governor of Texas, A Charge to Keep, Bush said, "I could not be governor if I did not believe that in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans." During the period when then Governor Bush was deciding whether to run for president, he listened to a sermon by the pastor of Highland Park Methodist Church in Dallas in which the theme was the reluctance of Moses to lead God’s people to the promised land. As the minister forcefully argued that Americans are "starved for leaders who have ethical and moral courage," Bush experienced what he would later describe as a "call." Following this sermon, his mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, turned to him and said, "He was talking to you." A few weeks later, Bush told one of the country’s best known evangelists, James Robison, "I’ve heard the call. I believe that God wants me to run for president. I can’t explain it, but I sense that my country is going to need me. I know it won’t be easy, on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
The Bush Gospel and the Global War on Terrorism:
A great deal of evidence also suggests that Bush believes that he was chosen by God to become president to deal with events that transpired after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer quote a Bush cousin as saying, "George sees this as a religious war. He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we as the Christians will strike back with more ferocity than they will ever know." The authors also note that on the morning after September 11, Bush read Proverbs 21:15: "When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to the evildoers."
Close friends later said that President Bush quickly concluded that the role of commander-in-chief in the "war on terrorism" was "his mission in life" and that he experienced a radical transformation in both thought and behavior after coming to this realization. According to Michael Duffy in an article published in Time, Bush spoke of "being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." In his first State of the Union Speech after September 11, Bush vowed that America would lead the war on terrorism "because this call of history has come to the right country." Theologian Martin Marty expressed the concern of many Americans at this time when he said, "The problem isn’t with Bush’s sincerity, but with the evident conviction that he’s doing God’s will."
In a speech given during a religious service at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, Bush said that although "God’s signs are not always the ones we look for," the "world He created is of moral design." America, he continued, has a "responsibility to history to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Bush then identified the United States as the "good" nation that must suffer in the war between good and evil "because we are freedom’s home and defender." He also began to habitually refer to Saddam Hussein as an "evil doer," to label anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq as "an enemy of freedom," and to describe the global war on terrorism as a "battle between good and evil."
A few weeks later, the Bush administration released a thirty-three page document, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," which declared that the president would take preemptive action against hostile nations and terrorist groups developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. In another warning, the document stated that United States would never allow American military supremacy to be challenged in the way it was during the cold war. One of the more memorable phrases in this document was, "We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively." According to one of the senior officials involved in drafting this document, "The publication of the strategy was the signal that Iraq would be the first test, not the last."
It is no accident that the most ardent believers in the market or Washington consensus, the so-called neoconservatives, have consistently promoted the war on terrorism and defended the decisions made by President Bush in the conduct of this war. The most influential neoconservative think tank is the American Enterprise Institute and the house organ for their publications is the Weekly Standard. The editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, published an article in Time that appeared a week before President Bush went public with his "new policy" in the war in Iraq. In this article, Kristol said the following about a proposed new strategy for winning this war: "Former Army Chief of Staff General Jack Keane and military expert Frederick Kagan, working with other experienced military and civilian planners, have laid out a new strategy for victory, supported by a sustained and substantial (but feasible) troop increase."
Kristol did not indicate that this strategy had already been embraced by President Bush and he also failed to include some interesting background information. Frederick Kagan works for the American Enterprise Institute and the article in which he first articulated a surge strategy in Iraq was published last fall in the Weekly Standard. After Kagan learned that a surge strategy had failed in a military operation in Iraq called Operation Forward Together, he asked another neoconservative, General Keane, to help him develop a more robust strategy and to sell that strategy to President Bush.
The Bush Gospel and the Theology of Empire:
Political analysts and news commentators have been understandably reluctant to conclude that George W. Bush actually believes that the natural laws of economics are created by God and part of a divinely ordained scheme or plan. But when we examine the record of the Bush administration from this perspective, it is easy to understand why this president firmly believes that privatization and market-based initiatives can resole virtually all human problems, why he has consistently supported faith-based government sponsored programs, and why he has favored tax policies for the rich that could undermine the capacity of the federal government to fund Social Security and other entitlement programs. There is, however, another more menacing prospect that we should consider—the gospel according to George W. Bush also seems to function, as the religious language this president has used to justify his decisions in the war in terrorism attests, as a theology of empire.
The only author to my knowledge who has convincingly made the case that President Bush has embraced a theology of empire is not a member of the liberal eastern establishment or a practitioner of what politically active leaders on the religious right call "secular humanism." He is an evangelical minister named Jim Wallis who founded a progressive religious organization for social justice known as the Sojourners. In an article entitled "Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush’s Theology of Empire," Wallis argues that the president’s understanding of religious truths is "bad theology," and he concludes this argument by saying that to "confuse the role of God with that of the American nation, as George Bush seems to do, is a serious theological error that some might say borders on idolatry and blasphemy." But the statement made by Wallis that is most relevant to this discussion is, "The real theological problem in American today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalist religion of the Bush administration—one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American empire."
It may be politically correct to assume that the religious language used by this president is not problematic because previous American presidents have habitually used this language to weave the ideals of democracy into a secular religion of state. But this politically correct view could be dangerously wrong for a now obvious reason—a great deal of evidence suggests that the gospel according to George W. Bush is a religion of state in a very literal sense and that the truths of this religion constitute a theology of empire. One irony here is that the evil terrorist organizations that the 'good' country of the United States is attempting to defeat in the war on terrorism are also true believers in a theology of empire.
The other is that President Bush has consistently violated two truths that the vast majority of Americans, including religious conservatives, regard as self-evident--bad theology and good politics do not mix and the line separating good and evil runs not between nation-states but inside every human heart.