In his God he trusts

In 1992, during prime time, the bumptious fringer Pat Buchanan frightened the Jesus out of Democrats and a hardy survivalist remnant of Republican moderates with this famous-cum-notorious invocation at the Republican convention in Houston: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.”

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He meant George H. W. Bush, daddy Bush, of course. Buchanan may have ditched the jejune crusader who moved into the White House in 2001, but today’s Junior Bush is playing the religious war for all it’s worth, which, electorally, is a lot.

In a 2 June speech to a gathering of “faith-based” folks that he calls an “army of compassion,” young Bush declared proudly: “we’re changing the culture here in America.” He referred to abortion but more to the general passions of religious activists saving souls. “Faith programs,” he said, “do a better job than government can do.” Accordingly, he peppered his speech with little digs at the government. (“I came from a – what we call a roundtable – the table happened to be square, but it’s one of those government things – (laughter) – where I met with some healers, and doers, and community changers.”) He was silent on Christian teachings about war and social justice for workers. In Bush’s Bible are many uncut pages.

Arousing the faithful, Bush couched his domestic crusade as an effort to “end discrimination against faith-based groups.” This locution permitted him to declare that he believes in the separation of church and state. Wink wink. Then on to the deep message, which is that Christian believers – and oh, by the way, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus – have a caring, compassionate friend in the White House.

This month, Bush is carrying this message to the American faithful in every way he knows how – even hoping to enlist a Pope who has been, in other respects, less than enamored of the president’s godliness. The Methodist president, who once declared Jesus his “favorite philosopher”, has not been heard brimming with pungent sayings on the subject of rich men and the eyes of needles. But he thinks he knows where to troll for votes.

According to John L. Allen, Jr., the Vatican correspondent of America’s National Catholic Reporter: “During his 4 June visit, Bush asked the Vatican to push the American Catholic bishops to be more aggressive politically on family and life issues, especially a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.”

In the curious jargon of conservatives, of course, “family and life issues” do not include care for the Third World poor, or medicine for AIDS sufferers, or war in Iraq. But never mind.

Allen continued: “A Vatican official told NCR 9 June that in his meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano and other Vatican officials, Bush said, ‘Not all the American bishops are with me’ on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism.”

The Bush forces know what they’re doing, let there be no doubt of it. They aim to divide the country in two and ride back to power on the backs of the bigger part. This entails starting with cultural differences and thickening them into wedges.

They are not inventing the differences. There is surely a culture clash – if not the overused, over-inflated “war” – roiling America. In 2000, about 60% of Americans who say they attend religious services once a week or more voted for Bush, while more than 60% of whose who say they never attend voted for Gore. A recent Time poll reports that those who call themselves “very religious” favour Bush over John Kerry, 59% to 35%, while those who are “not religious” support Kerry, 69% to 22%. Time’s Karen Tumulty writes: “Catholics are particularly important in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, making up 25% to 30% of the vote in that part of the country, says Bush campaign strategist Ralph Reed. ‘In a very close election, if you increase or swing that constituency by 10%, that’s 100,000 votes in every one of those states.’”

And Catholics, according to Time, are split down the middle this year. Whence the significance of Bush’s appeal to the Vatican to leap over the church-state wall and come to the aid of his power. He’s enlisting the big legions.

Thus, too, the significance of the recent move within the American Catholic hierarchy to cut Kerry and other pro-choice politicians out of their circles of the saved. Some in the church indeed want to go for broke. Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis has proclaimed that he would not grant Communion to the pro-choice Kerry. Bishop Michael Sheridan of the right-wing capital of America, Colorado Springs, Colorado, goes further, proposing that unrepentant Catholics who dare vote for a pro-choice politician should forego Communion:

“Any Catholic politicians who advocate for abortion, for illicit stem cell research or for any form of euthanasia ipso facto place themselves outside full communion with the Church and so jeopardize their salvation. Any Catholics who vote for candidates who stand for abortion, illicit stem cell research or euthanasia suffer the same fateful consequences. It is for this reason that these Catholics, whether candidates for office or those who would vote for them, may not receive Holy Communion until they have recanted their positions and been reconciled with God and the Church in the Sacrament of Penance.”

The Catholic bishops are discussing these notions this week, but may not issue an official decision until after the November 2 election.

In the meantime, President Reagan’s younger son Ron, at his father’s burial 11 June, sent an unmistakable message about the crusader in chief: “Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage.”

So the soul of America is still in play after all. With his entreaty to the Pope and his rejection of precisely the stem-cell research that the Reagan family endorses, Kerry’s supporters can hope that Bush may be driving a wedge just where he least wants it – among the believers.