Religion in Bush’s America Jason C. Bivins from North Carolina State University looks at the rise of the New Christian Right in the USA and its support for President Bush.
In a rare interview on the American news program Meet the Press in 2004, President George W. Bush was asked, ‘Why is it that you – a man who campaigned for the Presidency as ‘a uniter, not a divider’ – are perceived by so many people as such a contentious figure?’ Bush responded, ‘Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m working so hard to unite the country.’ This improbable, almost surreal statement exemplifies this administration’s public discourse, subsisting on evasion and abstraction.
While evidence of the administration’s ineptitude, cronyism, and bull-headedness mounts – following the disastrous mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, criminal charges accumulating around Bush insiders, the everunfolding calamity that is the U.S. involvement in Iraq – the American public is either insufficiently outraged or seemingly placated by the most transparent nostrums from the Bush camp. How can this be? This President enjoys the tolerance of millions because, whatever his faults, he is seen as A Good Man; many believe that because Bush is a ‘person of faith,’ no permanent harm will come from his policies, no matter how ill-conceived.
Since the 2004 election, there has been considerable discussion of the role of ‘moral values’ in Bush’s victory.
Exit polling and surveys suggested initially that Bush supporters voted overwhelmingly on the basis of ‘values’ rather than policy. The immediate reaction was concern about the role of religion in the Bush administration. In particular, there followed rage and disbelief among liberals* and leftists, many of whom called petulantly for secession from ‘Jesusland.’ This reaction, however, reveals a flawed understanding of American public life. In fact, for the last three decades conservative evangelicals have constructed one of the most successful of their recurring entrances into politics.
Such mobilisations have occurred regularly in American history – usually stirring up tensions among evangelicals themselves, who are often nervous about the perceived corruptions and compromises political action necessitates – but the emergence of the New Christian Right (NCR) in the 1970s, and its subcultures and organisations arising since then, is among the more significant evangelical political engagements in American history.
Bush’s presidency is one sign among many of this coalescence of conservative evangelical powers.
American religions have persistently been involved in political matters, yet Americans nonetheless continue to wring their hands over the ‘proper role’ of religion in public life. Bush, however, is not the first President to have courted ‘the evangelical vote’: Jimmy Carter’s 1976 election drew political attention to evangelicalism, while Ronald Reagan’s victories revealed the growing power of conservative evangelicals in particular. Evangelicalism is an old tradition in the United States, yet since the 1960s it has become dramatically more public than in previous historical eras and its conservative constituencies have become politically quite powerful. And these conservatives have invested considerable hope in Bush’s Presidency. Bob Jones III, president of South Carolina’s much maligned Bob Jones University, wrote effusively to Bush in 2004 that ‘In your re-election, God has graciously granted America – though she doesn’t deserve it – a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.’1 Conservative figures including Charles Colson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson have expressed a like confidence not only in Bush’s own religious character but in the promise they believe he symbolises: a restoration of America’s mission as a beacon to the nations and as a polity of Christ-like citizens.
Bush converted in the 1980s, when – as a newlywed, recovering substance abuser and political newcomer – he claims Christ ‘changed’ his heart. During his political career, Bush has often professed that he is doing God’s will, that he has ‘prayed on’ policy matters, that he believes the United States is divinely favoured, and that Jesus is the thinker who has most influenced him (these convictions are garlanded by Bush’s proud assertion that he neither deliberates excessively about policy decisions nor feels any doubts about them). Bush’s aggressive courtship of evangelicals led him, in 1993, to assert that those who did not believe in Jesus (the unspoken subtext is that one must also believe in Jesus in the right way) could not enter heaven.2 None of these themes is particularly new in American political discourse. The notion that the United States enjoys God’s unique blessing traces its legacy back to the Puritan commonwealths. The rhetoric of moral revival, too, has long proven fertile in public affairs. What is significant, then, is not simply the This President enjoys the tolerance of millions because, whatever his faults, he is seen as A Good Man, a ‘person of faith’. * The term ‘liberal/liberalism’ here refers to generally ‘progressive’ policies and is the opposite of ‘conservative’. It is not to be confused with ‘liberal’ or, more often, ‘neo-liberal’ referring strictly to an economic free market policy. (Such a policy, vigorously pursued in the Free Trade Agreements NAFTA and CAFTA, is now also described as ‘neo-con’.) success of an evangelical President or the effect of certain beliefs on his governance (after all, Ronald Reagan’s piety arguably played a larger role in U.S. policy, particularly his apocalyptic outlook on international affairs). What is most noteworthy about Bush’s evangelicalism is the way it represents a consolidation of conservative evangelical power in the United States. This is the culture that spawned Bush, to which he speaks, and which legitimises his presidency. It also raises profound questions about the nature and the future of American democracy.
It is in some sense ironic that the United States – whose independence was inspired by the ideal of a secular state – should remain so vigorously religious.
Perhaps this is because, as some polemicists have suggested, the American historical memory is shaky. Yet this devotional zeal is perhaps one of American history’s few constants. Where historic American attitudes may vary considerably on matters like patriotism (the ‘my country right or wrong’ position currently taken for granted is actually of somewhat recent vintage), state power (Americans both befoul the state’s existence and, when it conveniences them, beg for its succour), or public education (once seen as the linchpin of civic allegiances, but more recently denounced as an incubator of immorality), Americans have always been pious. They may have been too restless to settle in an institutional housing, but they remained reverent; they may have differed greatly on how best to understand ‘God,’ but have insisted on a deity’s existence nonetheless.
What has contributed to this diffuse but continuous religiosity? Several factors are relevant here: long-standing pluralism, the ubiquity of immigration and mobility, and the historic importance of church-state separation. Each element helps account for the persistence of religiosity: the presence of multiple traditions forces all faiths to maintain their vitality in the face of ‘competitors’; the continued introduction of new religions, and the circulation of extant ones, contributes similarly to the vigour of American religions; and the protection of religious liberty, rather than privatising or diminishing religion’s role in public life, ensures that religions are allowed free spaces in which to develop.
While each factor is debated both as historical condition and contemporary phenomenon, such deliberation keeps religion at the centre of political conversations about the way Americans understand themselves. Erstwhile proclamations about the inevitable increase of secularism have proven empty; Americans are as religious as ever, and their religiosity provides not only ontological benefits but social capital as well. Sociologist Alan Wolfe has observed that American religions have become focused less on rigid behavioural regimens than on individualism or selfactualisation. This is only partially characteristic of American religion.3 For the religious cultures to which Bush speaks (and which legitimise him) have both appropriated long-standing American Christian tropes of messianism and exceptionalism, fashioning from them responses to their political circumstances.
These responses reveal much about the cultural and political conflicts that characterise Bush’s presidency.
Evangelicals have long been ardently patriotic, staunch supporters of free market capitalism, and committed to America’s role as a beacon to nations abroad. Yet the NCR emerged not during American culture’s purported Golden Age (the mid-1940s to the early 1960s) but in the 1970s, a hot point of a protracted legitimation crisis facing American democracy’s legitimation crisis.
Following WWII, Americans experienced hitherto unknown levels of both economic affluence and political stability but had questions about the moral costs of this flourishing: there were questions about the bureaucratic (and perhaps undemocratic) quality of American politics; about the persistence of racial and gender inequality in a society that trumpeted its freedoms; and about American dependency upon militarism (with specific focus on the ethics of nuclear weapons and of American intervention in Vietnam).4 It was ironically during this period of an apparently triumphant liberalism that conservatism began to regain power. The critical voice which emerged here – first articulated in the quasi-populist discontent of Barry Goldwater’s and George Wallace’s Presidential campaigns, and later successfully pursued by the Nixon administration’s ‘southern strategy’ – suggested that the rise of protest, the weakening of America’s image in the eyes of other nations, and the rapid restructuring of social life could all be adduced to the machinations of liberal elites.5 Anxieties about feminism and gender roles, about multiculturalism, about religious pluralism and ‘cults,’ and about America’s national autonomy were all at stake in this discourse. With the affluence and political stability of previous decades eroding steadily by the early 1970s, the conservative critique helped split old Democratic constituencies and re-orient political discourse in ways that facilitated the emergence of the NCR. As conservative evangelicals became ever more active in the public sphere – initially in response to the legalisation of abortion, and to the proposal of an Equal Rights Amendment – most became convinced that the disruptions of the 1960s required a reversal, the restoration of a purported Golden Age. Toward the pursuit of these ends, they established their own national political organisations.
Groups like the Moral Majority and Religious Roundtable proved initially successful in contesting specific policies and in influencing national politics, but they vanished by the late 1980s. However, the NCR quickly shifted its focus from national organising to Bush has often professed that he is doing God’s will. grassroots mobilisation, a strategy pursued effectively by the Christian Coalition in the mid-1990s.6 To conservatives, the Clinton administration provided powerful rallying points in the President’s peccadilloes, facilitated the creation of new ‘wedge’ issues like gay marriage, and allowed for the reassertion (initially by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich) of a declension narrative blaming social woes on the ‘permissive liberalism’ ushered in during the 1960s. And it was during this period specifically that George W. Bush began his political ascendancy.
Bush’s politics to some extent embody this declension narrative, which – despite his campaign promises of ‘compassionate conservatism’ – exemplifies what George Lakoff calls a ‘strict father morality,’ a form of disciplinarian correction of perceived socio-political deficiencies.7 The impulse to restore lost order both contextualises the sense of marginalisation frequently expressed by evangelicals and re-inscribes evangelical identity through its vigorous anti-liberalism.8 It is precisely this discourse which has so emboldened the Bush Presidency, and which has proven appealing not only to conservative evangelicals but to a broader public. It is through the forcefulness of his policy positions, the clarity (if not always the consistency) of his moral discourse, and the familiarity of his emotional tropes that Bush has won support.
Faced with concerns about the growth and moral valence of a bureaucratic state, conservative evangelicals espouse an ethos of personal responsibility; considering disparities of wealth, these practitioners advocate minimally regulated free market capitalism; angered by what they see as a secular, ‘activist judiciary,’ evangelical culture critics seek ‘the reconstruction of U.S. culture so that it is in tune with . . . the Ten Commandments and Judeo-Christian values.’9 There is the further suggestion that the 1960s paved the way for an unwarranted assault on heterosexual privilege, on ‘traditional’ gender roles, and on the status of the ‘conventional’ family as the crucible of morality. America’s divinely appointed status as beacon to the nations, critics continue, was compromised by introducing pluralism and ambiguity into the national narrative. These ideas are circulated not only by NCR political organisations, but also to some extent by the 200 Christian television channels, 1500 Christian radio stations, and vast print culture that conservative evangelicals support. Even if these media are not explicitly political in their purposes, their output frequently harmonises with the political worldview of conservatives.10 What defines this moment in American culture, then, is not simply the prominence of religious rhetoric but the role of religious convictions in shaping public policy.
Conservative evangelicalism has once again become a fighting faith, gaining energy from the way its politics dovetail with the current direction of the federal government, all three of whose branches are currently steered by conservatism.
This situation is gravely serious. While I do find that there are serious questions about religious interventions into government, and that the American separation of church and state requires vigilant defence, what is most troubling about the Bush evangelical gestalt is not its religiosity as such but the way it represents in some sense a rejection of the political in favour of the narrowly communitarian. The Bush ascendancy is not the product of a contest of ideas, of reasoned dialogue, of the messy halting steps of democratic procedure; instead, it turns its back on the politics of common purpose, of concern for one’s fellow citizens, and of the institutionalisation of fairness, even as it cynically appropriates this rhetoric.
American religions have always participated in the political process, often in ways entirely consistent with a democratic ethos. While there is an important good to be achieved in keeping religious influences from government, something integral to the political process is lost when Americans continue debating endlessly about whether religions should participate in politics rather than focusing more productively on how they should do so.
Conservative evangelicals have seized power by skilfully manipulating the terms of debate; the choice, they insist, is between ‘values’ or amoral technocracy. It is profoundly right to be outraged by this false choice and concerned by this coalescence of religio-political power. These developments should be challenged, not in the name of supplanting it with some alternative but equally narrow conception of public life (however understandable this impulse may be); rather, it should be contested in the names of politics itself, of a reaffirmation of a democratic process that allows for the pursuit of reasonable compromises to principled differences.
Americans have largely failed to see that these are the real issues in our ‘culture wars.’ While much of the rest of the world is understandably perplexed and disturbed by the blunt, lumbering course of this administration, it is troubling news that we Americans are so confused about ourselves as well. 1 Quoted in The Christian Century, December 14, 2004. 2 See Sylvia Topp, ‘Searching for Bush’s Jesus.’ The Village Voice, 12/23/2005. 3 See Wolfe’s The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003). 4 The story of 1960s political discontent is far more complex than this suggests, of course. See John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: Norton Books, 1992); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York:
Bantam Books, 1993); Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005); Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996); James Miller, ‘Democracy is in the Streets’: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Jason C. Bivins is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. His book The Fracture of Good Order:
Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press) was published in 2003. He is currently completing his manuscript The Religion of Fear:
Horror, Identity, and Politics in Conservative Evangelical Pop Culture.