God and Mr. Bush

By Jeffrey Hart | Friday, April 22, 2005

Editor's Note: The following article ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 17, 2005. An expanded version is printed here by permission of the author.

Courtesy the White house

During the 2000 Republican primaries, in the third televised debate, the candidates were asked by a panelist to name the political philosopher who had most influenced them. Most replied in a conventional way, Tocqueville always a safe bet. No one would say Machiavelli, of course. But George W. Bush answered "Jesus Christ."

Silence. That answer wavered in the air like a knuckle ball; the panelists were afraid to whiff.

Too bad, because Jesus teaches little or nothing about politics. His focus is inward, to the purity of the soul. We are not to be whitewashed tombs, white paint outside while corrupt within. Even to gaze at a woman with lust is to sin in the heart.

No doubt Bush meant that to be a good man is to be a good president. But that would have been a subject for debate. Jimmy Carter was widely thought a good man, as was the first George Bush. Neither ranks high as a president. Franklin Roosevelt was thought deceptive and disingenuous but was elected four times and usually ranks in the top ten among presidents.

One thing everyone can agree upon about Bush is that as president he has brought religion into politics in a way unknown to recent memory. And he has owed both of his electoral victories to his Evangelical Christian base. This indispensable base has profoundly affected his policies, foreign and domestic.

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.

William Jennings Bryan, also an Evangelical, won the Democratic nomination in 1900, 1904, and 1908, but he brought the Democratic Party into disrepute and never came close to winning. His inflationary cheap money platform, good for debtors, was otherwise widely unacceptable. His biblical fundamentalism did not stand up under examination. His pacifism made him as unfit as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State. And one of his legacies was Prohibition, fourteen years of folly (1919-1933). One characteristic of Evangelicalism has been that it tries to outlaw sin, for instance alcohol. A good maxim might be, "Wherever there is Prohibition, there will be a bootlegger." Al Capone undoubtedly grieved when Prohibition was repealed. Oddly enough, in the view of the campaign against alcohol, there is no scriptural basis for outlawing alcohol. Drinking is commonplace in both the Old and New Testaments, it is clear that Jesus' disciples drank (Acts 2:13), and wine certainly was served at the Last Supper.

About prohibitions in their various forms, a qualification is in order. Ronald Reagan was certainly a believer in a non-denominational way. Yet, like Barry Goldwater, he was an American Western individualist, temperamentally leaning toward Libertarianism. In his eight years as President, Reagan did nothing about "social issues." Zero. His American Protestantism trusted the individual American. In contrast, Bush's Evangelicalism, Southern in its roots, might fairly be called moral-authoritarian. Reagan's refusal to divide the nation on "social issues" allowed him to be a coalition builder, winning a second term by the largest margin ever; Bush won by 2.5 percent.

To understand what Bush's evangelicalism consists of, a glance at its history in America will be useful.

Evangelicalism has always been based upon a sense of personal sin, which its preachers tend to excite, and recovery through a discovery of Jesus. Paul on the road to Damascus would be an early example of this. George W. Bush appears to have overcome his earlier alcohol problem by experiencing the influence of Jesus in a milder version of Paul's experience. Of course such an emotional experience proves nothing about central and necessary Christian doctrines, certainly nothing about the Resurrection. Just because you believe that Jesus rose from the dead does not mean that he did. As Paul says (Corinthians 1:15), "If Christ has not risen our preaching is groundless." Emotion does not enable you to agree with that. Paul uses witnesses, almost five hundred of them, who are reading his Epistle and could refute him. The fact is that individual emotional experience, even powerful, is not proof of anything in the realm of fact.

Historically, American Evangelicalism has had three stages, or Awakenings. This tells us something immediately about Evangelicalism—that it rises up and then subsides and must be repeatedly revived.

The first great "Awakening" began in the first third of the eighteenth century, and is associated with John Wesley in the South and Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher, in the North. Both of these men possessed professional theological training, Wesley at Oxford, Edwards at Yale. Wesley was a friend of Dr. Johnson; even Edwards's Yale undergraduate essays are startlingly impressive. They were to be the exception on that point. Bryan, Sinlair Lewis's Elmer Gantry, and Jerry Falwell awaited down the road. Such American Evangelicalism typically has a homemade quality because of its "faith" in Scripture, a "faith," as it is today, often based on wild misreadings of the text of Scripture itself.

Though Edwards was an educated man, his preaching of sin, damnation and the possibility of salvation through Jesus drew large crowds, often filled with emotion and showing it in sometimes bizarre ways, rolling on the ground, fainting, having spasms. The same with Wesley's immensely popular preaching here and in England. The emotions raised by this first Awakening are held by historians to have energized the beginnings of the American Revolution. Its scenes of mob violence and property damage tend not to be stressed in our histories; but are well represented by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his story "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." The populist spokesmen of the period, such as Tom Paine, Sam Adams, and Patrick Henry, faded from the scene by 1787 when it came to nation-building and the writing of the Constitution. Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and the rest were very far from populism. The last populist effusion during this period, the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania (1794), was crushed by the militia.

The Second Awakening occurred during the period leading up to the Civil War, and energized the Abolitionist movement in New England. From there, it spread west along the wagon trails after the war. Its Cromwellian strains can be heard in Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," where the Lord is stamping out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored—in the South. But Lincoln and Grant were not New England Evangelicals, far from it, and fought to save the Union, as Lincoln made unmistakably clear in his famous letter to Horace Greeley. The American military strategists recognized that a divided America would not be able to resist the naval power of France or England; indeed, England sided with the South to cripple a rising United States but was kept from active measures by the Gettysburg Address, which defined the war as a struggle against slavery. English opinion would not permit intervention on the side of slavery.

After the Civil War, Evangelicalism rose in the West with the poor farmers and eventuated in William Jennings Bryan and his Cross-of-Gold campaigns for cheap silver. After reports spread about tent meetings and revivalist preaching, with people screaming and writhing on the ground as a sign of release from the claws of Satan, a Boston Episcopalian remarked, "I think they are creating more souls out there than saving them." But though the Democrats nominated him for president three times, Bryan was an ignorant man, considered by Theodore Roosevelt a mere "trombone" orator of no worth at all. Imagining that Darwin's account of evolution contradicts Genesis, Bryan made a fool of himself at the Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925). Darwin offers only an account of the "origin of the species," not the origin of everything, and Genesis in fact provides a nice representation of evolution, from the lower to the higher. Bryan might have saved himself the trouble.

Some Evangelicals today even believe that the universe was created in six solar days of twenty-four hours, through the sun was not even created until the third day. Obviously the account of the Creation in Genesis is a theological poem based on the seven-day workweek, with a day of rest on Sabbath, and God metaphorically an artisan. Yet fundamentalists, flummoxed by the evidence of great age in fossils and erosion, try to explain them as put there by God to test our faith.

The present or Third Awakening of Evangelicalism believes all sorts of bizarre things, such as the imminent end of the world, the second coming of Christ, the sudden elevation of the just to heaven, and the final struggle of Good versus Evil in Jerusalem: Armageddon. We thus have the immense popularity of the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which first appeared in "Christian," that is Evangelical, bookstores, but have now gone mainstream on the basis of Evangelical sales. I once turned on my car radio and heard the Rev. Jerry Falwell preaching this imminent end of the world doctrine from his pulpit in Lynchburg, and Falwell is not an isolated exception.

The whole thing is based on two visionary books of the Bible, Thessalonians and Revelations. Cast in poetic imagery, these often are highly allegorical, for example alluding to events of the late Roman Empire, and hardly to be taken literally. Such visionary literature was frequent enough in the ancient world, as in Plato and Cicero, and continued to be written as late as the seventeenth century, when in Milton's Paradise Lost Eve's visionary experiences endow her with greater authority than Milton accords Adam. Thessalonians and Revelations have long been understood by learned commentators such as St. Augustine as visionary compositions. The term "Armageddon" does not even refer to Jerusalem, but is an English translation of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew har geddon, "at" or "near Geddo." This was a large town at a considerable distance from Jerusalem. That it was the juncture of two caravan routes where brawls were likely could have led to its use as a metaphor for battle.

In any case, Ariel Sharon can rest easy on this point, and you yourself can safely make a date for lunch without fear of being wooshed up to heaven. People have kept a lot of lunch dates since those visionary books were written twenty centuries ago.

The reason that religious populism in the form of Evangelicalism cannot work is that it is very difficult to cross from the world of the five senses, in which we live, to the realm beyond it, if any, with which the higher religions of course are concerned, since they posit a God who was there before the beginning. If we did not believe in the evidence of our senses, we would walk into walls and fall down stairs. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) used the metaphor of the fly in the bottle, the bottle representing the wall between empiricism and the realm, if any, beyond its walls. In his surprisingly brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein used logical-empirical analysis to push empiricism as far as it could go, to the walls of the bottle—and knew that there is more. He called this "more" das mystiche, Hocheres. Other than that, he offered no means of representation.

In a parallel way, astronomers have calculated the age of the universe by measuring the radiation from the Big Bang. The universe turns out to be about 17.5 billion years old. But what was there before the beginning? There we are at the walls of Wittgenstein's bottle: why is there something rather than nothing at all?

Traditional Christianity sees the Resurrection as linking our familiar world of empirical fact with the realm of the beyond-time: Jesus inhabits both. Therefore Jesus is the crux (not to make a pun) of Christianity. To quote Paul again, "Unless Christ is risen, our preaching is groundless." On that point, supported by other evidence in the four narratives, the entire structure of Christian theology rests, and its representation of such theology in language (such as the Apostles' Creed) in ritual, in art, in music. The linguistic formulations in the Creed took about one thousand years to reach finished form, but their origins can be traced back to the generation of the apostles themselves. No individual can push ahead alone in such an effort of thought and representation as this exhibits. Populism falls on its face, trusting in emotion. Nor is Scripture enough, unless you know how to read these ancient texts.

Because Evangelicalism is not sustained by a structure of ideas, and, beyond that, has no institutional support in a continuing church, it flares up in repeated "Awakenings" and then subsides as the emotion dissipates. Because it is populist and homemade, its assertions tend often to be ridiculous, the easy targets for the latest version of H.L. Mencken. The grandchildren of the original Evangelical believers often wander away from Christianity altogether, Evangelicalism having discredited all religion. If we recall Leo Strauss's formulation that "Athens and Jerusalem"—science and spiritual aspiration—are the core of Western civilization, American Evangelicalism is a threat to both, through ignorance of both.

Except for that major qualification, Evangelicalism would not matter much if it were a private superstition, a sort of hobby, except that the Evangelicalism of the Bush variety has real and often dangerous effects on the world in which the rest of us, and even they, live.

During the 2004 presidential election perhaps the most scandalous of these, stem-cell research, arose as a campaign issue. In August 2001, Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for such research involving fertilized cells created after that year's end. This severely inhibited research which had indeed proved promising. Bush claimed to have issued his order for "moral reasons," but all the moral reasons seem to support the research.

The fertilized cells in question are left over and frozen in fertility clinics, in fact doubly doomed because they are frozen and have a finite shelf-life, and also because a fertilized cell will not develop unless implanted in a woman. Instead of wasting them, why not use them to, it seems possible, treat an entire array of dreadful diseases?

One opponent of the research put the objection crisply: such cells "must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause." Really? Substitute any cause you might imagine, up to saving the entire population of the world from extinction, and that formula does not work. More within the possible, how about the "noble cause" of curing childhood diabetes, often fatal? Of course you would treat the sick child even at the cost of doubly-doomed cell. Does the right to life end at birth?

It seemed clear that Bush's objection to the research was driven by his Evangelical base, indefensible as his position was. Private universities, however, trying to counteract the mischief of the Bush order, but unable to match the kind of federal funding customary for promising and important research, were moving to support the research, with Harvard in the lead; and in the 2004 election, California easily passed a ballot initiative that allotted three billion dollars for research over the next ten years. California may become the biomedical capital of the nation, but Harvard is not without its resources, though even these are not comparable to those of the federal government. No doubt, Bush would turn away completely from the research, if he could. Meanwhile, South Korea and Beijing reported major breakthroughs; Cambridge University and Harvard were poised to test results of diabetes research on patients; and scientists in Texas reported striking results as stem cells attacked tumors.

Someone taking a political position should, morally speaking, take responsibility for the results of that position. Following the time-line out from the present, if stem-cell research is blocked, how many people will unnecessarily die early of painful diseases that otherwise would be cured? Try tens of millions.

Other Bush-inspired policies with severe implications for public health began to form a list as long as your arm. In fact, despite their potentiality for real harm, they possess a comical sort of zaniness. As reported in the Washington Post, they include: information about safe sex was removed from the Centers for Disease Control web-site; the posting on the internet of a bogus claim that abortion may cause breast cancer; and the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research prohibited over-the-counter sale of a "morning after" contraceptive as encouraging promiscuity and thus spreading disease—clearly outside the mandate of the FDA. Moreover, the Bush administration has devoted millions to faith-based organizations promoting abstinence, but in doing so is telling flagrant lies: that condoms fail to prevent HIV 31 percent of the time during heterosexual intercourse (3 percent is accurate); that abortion leads to sterility (elective abortion does not); that touching a person's genitals can cause pregnancy; that HIV can be spread through sweat and tears; that a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person"; and that half of gay teenagers have AIDS. Some grants for faith-based programs stipulate that condoms be discussed only in connection with their failure.

Apparently Evangelical "morality" condemns both abortion and birth control, without which there would be more abortions. You figure it.

You would think that such Halloween science would be impossible in federally funded programs. Isn't bearing false witness prohibited by the Ten Commandments? But, as we see, Evangelicals make up their own scripture. And this is the Bush administration.

Then there was that book the federal bookstore at the Grand Canyon was obliged to carry, maintaining that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's Flood. Geology shows that the canyon took millions of years to form by erosion. No problem. Geology is wrong.

Or the strange case of Lieutenant General William Boykin, who came to public attention by speaking in full uniform before Evangelical audiences and claiming that we will win the war against Islamic terrorism because our God is bigger than their God. That is in clear violation even of Bush administration policy, which holds that we are not at war with Islam as a religion, but Boykin was never punished for insubordination. Then there is that smudge on one of Boykin's photographic negatives. He claimed that is Satan zooming around in the sky over Mogadishu. One can hope that Boykin does not order up a Patriot Missile to knock Satan down; yet Boykin is now in the Bush Pentagon with duties in—no kidding—intelligence.

And, again no kidding, this is the time in our history when former Attorney General John Ashcroft draped the naughty Greek nude statues in the Justice Department, to protect public modesty. Stop this man before he goes to the Louvre and strikes again. That Venus de Milo has to go, he probably thinks. The saints, they are marchin' in. H.L. Mencken, where are you when we need you?

But some of that represents the comic side of the Bush administration. No one should be laughing about its stem-cell policy. Welcome to Evangelical Land. Today, it's us.

God and Mr. Bush

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