27.10.2004

God on our side

There is only one reason that I am in the Oval office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found god. I am here because of the powers of prayer.”

The words of George W Bush, 43rd president of the Unites States of America, speaking to his biographer, David Frum. So, believe it or not (and you certainly will not), Bush’s 2000 election ‘victory’ had nothing whatever to do with widespread disenfranchisement of ‘felons’ (most of whom were black Democrat voters), intimidation or dirty tricks in brother Jeb’s state of Florida, nor anything to do with the fact that it took a rigged hearing by the five-four majority of conservatives on the Supreme Court of the USA to deny Al Gore the chance of a manual recount of Florida votes that might well have given the Democrats the presidency.

No, it was god who did it. And the scary thing is that Dubya himself appears to believe it. In fact here is a man with a mission. Long before the election he called in ‘televangelist’ and high-profile religious rightist James Robison, whose programme Life today attracts millions of viewers, and confided in him that something “big” was going to happen and “God wants me to be president”. He claimed to be reluctant but what could he do? He had no choice but to answer god’s call.

Some would cynically suggest that Bush was just trying to garner the votes of rightwing christian bigots like Robison, who was once banned from the airwaves for the intensity of his anti-gay rhetoric. But the truth may be more complex. Others - among them some communists of a certain age and background - would say, ‘Who cares whether this obvious simpleton believes in god or not?’ According to their point of view, founded on a vulgar and mechanical approach to Marxism, the relentless advance of science and technology has already made god virtually redundant. Religion does not matter, they say, and are confident that the forces of progress will soon mean the end of the whole thing. Irrationality and superstition will just fade away under the impact of scientific dialectical materialism.

These comrades live in a dream world. Their view is not just foolishly complacent, but dangerous. Real Marxists would reply that historically religion, in one form or another, has been and still is being used as a justification for wars and other mass crimes against humanity in which hundreds of millions of people have died; religion, they would say, even in 2004, is still a powerful force of oppression and alienation that emasculates humankind and prevents us from becoming really human. And at a time when the president of the world’s only superpower - one which can exert its military and political muscle right across the globe (and really does possess weapons of mass destruction and has proved itself capable of actually using them) - is a born-again christian; when the Republican ‘grand ol’ party’ seems to be increasingly under the control of organisations and people who have a christian-theocratic and apocalyptic agenda, it is time to take notice.

If you aggregate the various statistical surveys available on the net, for example, you find that around 80% of US citizens defined themselves in 2000 as christians - getting on for 160 million people. Taken together, the protestant denominations and sects comprise the majority of this number, but the Roman catholic church accounts for one in four American christians and its proportion is growing fast - although revelations about priestly paedophilia and associated legal suits supposedly affect the continued existence of some dioceses. Tens of millions go to church or chapel every Sunday and every day of the week their christian ‘faith’ is buttressed by scores, if not hundreds, of national and local religious TV stations enforcing the message. Only on American TV can you see hundreds of people miraculously ‘cured’ every night. And if the televangelist turns out to have been spending his congregation’s donations on booze and prostitutes, he comes on TV, almost like a Tory MP, with his forgiving wife, who has been doing very well out of the credulity of the faithful, and cries his eyes out for sinning and whoring. The donations, a proportion of which find their way into the coffers of the Republican Party, keep flowing in, for god loves a repentant sinner. As I say, time to take notice.

To start with Bush himself. We know that this scion of a wealthy east coast family of what passes in the US for an aristocracy is, despite the ranch, the cowboy boots, the Texan drawl and the folksy philosophy, an ersatz cowboy. But is he an ersatz christian? Like any other bourgeois politician he tailors his public statements to suit his audience. But the evidence suggests that the private Bush did undergo some kind of religious ‘conversion’ back in 1985, when the Baptist evangelist, Billy Graham, was a weekend house guest at the Bush mansion in Maine. Bush has told biographers that what Graham said to him sparked a change in his heart. By the spring of the following year, he had “accepted christ into his life” and from being a hard drinker (though not, he insists, an alcoholic), he became a bible-reading, prayerful teetotaller, who went to bed at nine o’clock and prayed on his knees for guidance in his role as governor of Texas, telling friends that he would not be able to carry out the duties associated with the post if he did not believe in a divine plan which superseded all other plans.

Dubya still gets up early and reads the bible every day. He presumably subscribes to the born-again christian philosophy which says that the bible is without error and literally true; that salvation comes from faith in Jesus Christ alone; that every adult must personally and specifically accept Jesus into their lives; and that it is the duty of all christians to evangelise and convert the world to christianity. When it comes to getting the vital jewish vote, if you say that only christians can be ‘saved’ (and only those christians who are ‘born again’), you have a real political problem, so this has had to be softened many times in public utterances, but belief in god and following ‘his’ commandments is the bottom line.

Of course, Bush the politician, like the Republican Party itself, has had to walk something of a tightrope. You need to capture the powerful religious bigots’ vote but you don’t want to alienate other, more sane (many of them mainstream christian) people who might vote Republican. Hence Dubya’s ambiguity on quite a few issues, like creationism, is therefore understandable. He has attested to his personal belief that god created the world and has argued that creationism should be taught alongside evolutionism in schools, because religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism - a classic political fudge, but with a hard centre. One wonders whether Bush would share the view of millions of US protestants that the world is speedily and inevitably moving towards an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil in which the destruction of the earth will herald the ‘second coming’ of christ, glory for the ‘saved’ and damnation to hell for the rest?

The same unfortunate people say that regime-change in Iraq represented the biblical affirmation of various prophetic texts in the old testament that refer to the final fall of Babylon; that the borders of Israel were decreed by god thousands of years ago; that the UN is a forerunner of a final satanic world order that will produce the antichrist. What does Dubya think of all this? We can only guess.

But we can judge from his record as president. One of his first acts was to sign an executive order creating the White House office of “faith-based and community initiatives”, which was subsequently to be headed by a succession of rightwing protestant ‘virtuecrats’, currently the ‘faith tsar’, HJ (Jim to his Republican friends) Towey. This nest of radical rightwing christians at the heart of the administration has been lavish with tax payers’ money. In 2002, for example, $568 million was doled out to some 680 self-identified “faith-based” groups, the majority of them from the religious right. Another $477 was spent the same year on similar projects. More than $1 billion in one year and all of it on the basis of deceit. Surely christians do not tell lies?

But look for a moment at American history. In 1802 Jefferson received a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association asking him why he would not proclaim national days of fasting and thanksgiving like his predecessors, Washington and Adams? In his thoughtful reply, Jefferson speaks of his desire to create “a wall of separation between church and state”. It was not the place of the congress or the executive to do anything which might be construed as the establishment of religion. For Jefferson, religion was solely a matter which lay between “a man and his god”, and it was this sentiment which implicitly informed the first amendment to the constitution of the United States, which says, in part, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. In the same amendment, freedom of speech, the press and peaceable assembly are also guaranteed.

To answer my rhetorical question, yes, the christians of the religious right, backed up by Bush, do indeed tell lies. The administration says that no public money can or should be spent for religious purposes, but more than $1 billion finds its way in a single year into the hands of groups that Bush calls “armies of compassion”, who boast about the religious basis of the programmes they run. All of this is unconstitutional, obviously, and the height of hypocrisy.

Let us take an example of “faith-based” programmes in action. The Republicans are big on anti-drug campaigns. But whereas Nixon and Reagan - not exactly lily-livered liberals - were content to found their policies on secular messages (‘War on drugs’ and ‘Just say no’ respectively), Bush has turned the whole thing into a religious ‘crusade’ - a word he is very fond of. He tells us that only through god’s will may one be ‘saved’ from the temptations of illegal drugs and ‘substance abuse’. If drug addicts turn over their lives to Jesus Christ, then they will find a cure through prayer. Faith in christ is the ultimate ‘anti-drug’. No comment needed. It seems that Dubya’s solution to the ‘narcotics problem’ is to lock up the five million Americans arrested every year (many of them for possession of small quantities of soft drugs) and let them find ‘redemption’ behind a penitentiary wall.

Of course, for some criminals and outcasts of christian society in the US, the question of redemption has to be left to god alone. We are talking about those who get electrocuted, gassed or drugged into the ‘next’ world, the victims of capital punishment. Bush has a proud record here. In his time as governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000 he declined mercy pleas in more than 120 cases, which represented more than a third of executions which took place in the US as a whole in that period. He also objected to a bill trying to stop the execution of people who had been judged to be suffering from mental disorders at the time of their crimes. Poor old Dubya talked about the restless night he spent before sending a born-again christian to the chamber. Better for god to decide. As the good book says, “Blessed are the merciful”, but Bush’s idea of mercy is to let them burn.

Serious as these issues are, the territory where Bush and the religious right really get together is the ‘pro-life’, ‘pro-family’ lobby, which is interdenominational, has millions of members and a wagonload of bucks and voters. Abortion is at the centre of the issue always, but especially right now, because John Kerry, whatever his faults, has, as a catholic, risked his ‘immortal soul’ to say that women should have the right to choose.

Meat and drink to Bush - for example, in August, when he was invited to address the Dallas convention of the Knights of Columbus, a catholic organisation which has a worldwide membership of around 1.6 million and is the most influential catholic men’s organisation in America. Before he got on his feet, Bush and some 2,500 ardent rightwing catholics watched a video about a woman who chose to die rather than end a pregnancy that threatened her life. Tears all round. Then Dubya spoke about pope John Paul’s doctrine on abortion and described him as “a true hero of our time” and repeatedly used the pope’s catch phrase - “a culture of life”.

Directly asked about abortion in interviews before and since, Bush has equivocated for obvious political reasons. During the 2000 election campaign he just said that the nation was not ready for a ban, without revealing his own thoughts. But if he gets re-elected to a second term next week, then it will be in his power to appoint two, maybe four, Supreme Court justices before 2008, making it possible for the Supreme Court to amend or even overturn the historic Roe v Wade abortion rights ruling. Would Bush really have the guts to make abortion illegal once more (except perhaps in certain exceptional circumstances)? It seems to be part of the deal with the religious right in exchange for their cash and votes and it maybe represents the president’s personal conviction. Certainly, ‘pro-life’ issues have been dominant in the campaign - not just abortion but root and branch rejection of associated questions like stem cell research, IVF solutions to infertility and a wide range of issues, all based on the fact (shared right across the conservative religious spectrum) that life begins and is sacrosanct from the moment of conception and that termination amounts to murder.

Significant in this respect was the passage of what was popularly called ‘Laci and Conner’s law’ in April this year. Laci Peterson and her unborn foetus died in a violent crime. In the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, the Senate passed by a majority of one a piece of legislation which defines the killing of a foetus in the course of violent crime as a murder. The future implications of this decision are obvious. The foetus, the embryo, has a right to life and to take away that right - for example, by abortion - must constitute unlawful killing.

Again the protestant and catholic trends of religious rightwing thinking coalesce when it comes to the question of homosexuality and stand foursquare behind Bush. Gay relationships are bad enough, but same-sex marriages? No way. The Bush administration already has moves in place to outlaw them on a federal basis, nullifying the laws of those states whose democratic assemblies have given such liaisons their approval.

Just who or what comprises the religious right? Looking at the net and satellite TV, they seem ubiquitous. They are. If you look at top televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, for example, who have made millions in their own right as messengers of god, you can trace their pedigree through the Moral Majority into the Christian Coalition, an overtly Republican christian organisation that tells you what you cannot do under the present constitution and federal law, and then tells you how to get round it. This is a serious campaigning organisation - prayers and piety, yes, but it is votes that count, votes that will allow the Christian Coalition to determine core aspects of the Republican agenda if Bush is re-elected. Last September Falwell boasted that evangelical christians now control the fate of the Republican and Bush, saying that if you are not pro-life and pro-family, you are not going to win. You cannot be a sincere, committed, born-again believer who takes the bible seriously and vote for a pro-choice, anti-family candidate.

I recall that the bible says something like “By their fruits shall you know them”. Not just fruits, perhaps, but also friends. A look at the career of one of Dubya’s closest political friends and senior ministers in the current administration should illustrate the case. US attorney general John Ashcroft was from 1976 to 1993 successively Missouri attorney general and state governor, during which time he strenuously resisted repeated court orders to implement desegregation in St Louis and Kansas City. He said that rape and incest were inadmissible as grounds for abortion.

In 1994 he became senator for Missouri, blocking the appointment of a black man to the Supreme Court of Justice and allying himself with the Southern Partisan, a racist confederate rag that regarded neither slavery nor racism as immoral. So unpopular was Ashcroft by this time that he was defeated in the 2000 election in Missouri by a corpse - that of Mel Carnahan, who had died three week’s earlier in a plane crash. It took Pat Robertson’s dollars and sermons to ‘resurrect’ his political career. Now he is one of the most powerful politicians in the USA. His US Patriot Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, represents a radical assault on human rights and, as the ‘war on terrorism’ gets more and more bogged down in Iraq, it looks like just the first stage in a campaign to limit or destroy constitutional rights. Ashcroft is a good political friend of the Christian Recontructionists sect, who preach a sort of ‘dominion theology’ advocating the superiority of christianity over all religions and a worldwide christian theocracy - which sounds uncannily like Bush’s version of pax Americana.

Bush himself is fond of saying, as he did in the state of the union address last year, “There’s power, wonder-working power in the goodness, idealism and faith of the American people.” The usual pious bunkum on one level, but behind it do we not see, all taken together, the beginnings of a fundamentalist doctrine of a world christian theocratic empire?