Understanding the President and His God

Thursday, April 29, 2004

By Alessandra Stanley

New York Times Writer

The Houston Post, Ken Herman, recalls that Mr. Bush said he believed that a person had to accept Christ to go to heaven, a view that Mr. Herman published. "The political ramifications of that were huge," Mr. Doug Wead explains. "And so he doesn't talk about that anymore."

An image from "The Jesus Factor," about President Bush's religious beliefs.

Image Credit: The New York Times

NYT
The question is not, “When did George W. Bush accept Jesus as his personal savior?” The Frontline documentary "The Jesus Factor," on PBS tonight, raises a different issue: Do most Americans realize just how fervent the president's evangelical faith really is?

"The Jesus Factor" is a little like those illustrated anatomy books where transparent plastic pages can be flipped to reveal the muscle, bone and organs beneath the skin. Stripping off the layers of patrician pedigree, Yale and his Texas business pursuits, the documentary lays bare Mr. Bush's spiritual conversion and its consequences.

It is not a disrespectful look. Yet by pulling together well-known and long forgotten incidents and remarks, the program reminds viewers that this "faith-based" president has blurred the line between religion and state more than any of his recent predecessors: a vision that affects the Iraq conflict as well as domestic policy.

In the wake of Sept. 11 of course the religious influence seems obvious, since Mr. Bush has invoked a higher authority who has led him to battle "the evildoers."

And at a time when Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" is one of the top-earning movies, and the "Left Behind" series of books, apocalyptic Christian thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (the Antichrist heads the United Nations), has outsold John Grisham, the evangelical Christian movement is highly visible even in places like New York and Los Angeles.

But like the evangelical movement, the president's born-again faith was not as striking to outsiders in 1987, when he moved to Washington to work on his father's presidential campaign. At the time reporters mostly saw him as the Bush family bouncer, someone who kept an eye on disloyal staff members.

Nor were his born-again evangelical beliefs much more than a biographical footnote in Mr. Bush's gubernatorial campaigns. Even in his 2000 presidential race most journalists placed Mr. Bush's religious beliefs behind his family lineage, career and political ideology. His faith was mostly examined in the context of a midlife crisis: a black sheep's self-styled 12-step program that helped him stop drinking and focus on a political career in Texas.

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Dan