Wilfred M. McClay: Bush's Calling

[Mr. McClay teaches history and humanities the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the author most recently of Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America ( Johns Hopkins).]

Among all the things that liberals loathe about George W. Bush, his religious fervor would seem to be at or near the top of the list. Some consider him a mere pretender, or a hypocrite, lashing out at his post-9/11 persona as a world-transforming warrior with bumper-sticker barbs like “Who would Jesus bomb?” For the most part, though, liberal animus toward Bush’s faith comes from the opposite direction. It is his religious sincerity that infuriates and frightens, especially when contrasted with the easy and empty Bible-toting of, say, a Bill Clinton.

One does not have to dig very deep to explain this hostility. There are the familiar issues of the culture war—the “values” divide between red states and blue. There is also Bush’s personal manner, seemingly perfectly calculated to grate on the sensibilities of worldly, secularist elites. But something more profound may be at work as well. What liberals find objectionable about Bush as a born-again Christian is the kind of politician he has become by means of and on account of his faith. But what may be most discomfiting of all is the degree to which, in this regard, he has successfully laid claim to so many elements of the liberals’ own discarded past, and thereby begun to reverse the polarities of American politics.

Everyone is familiar with the outlines of Bush’s personal story, which retraces the biblical tale of the prodigal son. The fortunate scion of wealthy and prominent family, he was born with the advantages of social position but, as a young man, was also intensely burdened by them. He was the class clown, his jaunty, towel-snapping manner concealing a sense of inner purposelessness. He also had a drinking problem, the exact dimensions of which remain unclear, although it was debilitating enough for Bush himself to consider it a nearpermanent obstacle in his life.

At forty, according to his cousin John Ellis, George W. Bush was “on the road to nowhere.” He had gone to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School, and run for Congress, and yet he had come up short every time, in his own eyes and the eyes of others. As Ellis summed up, “To go through every stage of life and be found wanting and know that people find you wanting, that’s real grind.”

What changed between being lost in a dark wood at forty and a presidential candidacy at fifty-two? As is well known, Bush underwent a religious conversion. It was the key to his transformation into a focused, determined, and remarkably selfdisciplined
man. This conversion followed the classic evangelical pattern and occurred under classic evangelical influences, not the least significant which was a private conversation in the summer 1985 with the Reverend Billy Graham.

The subsequent growth in Bush’s faith was fostered less by formal membership in or attendance at church than by participation in nondenominational Bible-study groups in his hometown of Midland, Texas. Such “parachurch” organizations, a growing staple of the evangelical subculture, have tended to absorb many of the characteristic functions of the institutional church. Typical in his indifference to denominational structures, and happy to worship in churches of every variety, Bush focused instead on the Christocentric aspects of evangelical faith, and the transformation of heart and conscience that comes with them. These, for him, have always been the core of the matter.

In December 1999, during a debate in Des Moines among the Republican presidential candidates, Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher. He shocked almost everyone present by responding, unhesitatingly, “Christ. Because he changed my heart.” Following up, Bush explained that “when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that’s what happened to me.” At the time, this was widely regarded as a boneheaded blunder. But there can be little doubt that it was also an honest answer—and smart politics, too. Bush’s emphasis on the need for personal change and redemption resonated widely and deeply, expressing needs that millions of Americans, including many having no affiliation with the religious Right, could recognize in their own lives.

This redemptive subtext was especially evident when candidate Bush employed generational rhetoric meant to puncture the inflated self-regard of the baby-boom generation. His acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention, which opened with a salute to the achievements of his father’s generation, was built around a remarkably critical consideration of his own generation—flush with prosperity and promise, but sadly lacking in a sense of larger purpose. “What,” he wondered, “is asked of us?” Would “we have grown up before we grow old,” and would we be prepared to respond to “our own appointment with greatness”? Such rhetoric had unmistakably personal roots. But it also created a bond between him and his audience that no poll could measure, and no New York Times editorialist was likely to comprehend...

...Where does this leave us? On the whole, an ambitious evangelical conservatism is assuredly a positive development in American life. But we cannot help acknowledging points of concern. To begin with, there is always sound reason to be wary of the injection of religion into politics of any stripe, even when its countenance is genial and tolerant and its immediate effects seem to be beneficial. Paradoxically, too, some of the most inviting features of evangelicalism—its warm embrace of individualism, its optimism about human possibility—are also among the most troubling.

In an insightful analysis of the woes of today’s Democratic party, Martin Peretz, the editor-inchief of the New Republic, lamented recently that liberals have lost touch with their intellectual roots. “The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened,” Peretz writes, conjecturing that this is “perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature.” But it is equally true that there is not much of Niebuhr, or original sin, or any other form of Calvinist severity in the current outlook of the Bush administration. In its case, this ref lects the energizing good cheer of evangelical conservatism, as well as, no doubt, the preferences of an American electorate with an aversion to bad news.

Optimism is, in most respects, a political strength, and an appropriate way for democratic leaders to present themselves to the public. But just as individualism needs the constraints of religion and morality, so optimism needs the ballast of memory and a sense of the tragic to give it resiliency and depth. There is a reason why the Christian tradition distinguishes between hope, which is considered a theological virtue, and optimism, which is not. Conservatism will be like the salt that has lost its savor if it abandons its mission to remind us of what Thomas Sowell has called “the constrained vision” of human existence—the vision that sees life as a struggle full of unintended consequences and tragic dilemmas, involving people whose noblest efforts often fail, sometimes miserably so.

As Abraham Lincoln reminded us in his own second inaugural address, the hand of Providence may be present in our reversals as well as in our triumphs. Hope can survive such reversals, even when optimism cannot. It strikes me that this remains a useful and important lesson, especially for a nation with, at the moment, so many charges to keep.