[Vision2020] 10-26-04 LA Times OP/ED: The White House Wasn't Always God's House

[Art Deco aka W. Fox]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schlesinger26oct26.story
COMMENTARY
The White House Wasn't Always God's House
By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a top aide to President Kennedy. His most 
recent book is a memoir, "A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings."

October 26, 2004

George W. Bush's presidency is the first faith-based administration in U.S. 
history.

The founding fathers did not mention God in the Constitution, and the faithful 
often regarded our early presidents as insufficiently pious.

George Washington was a nominal Anglican who rarely stayed for Communion. John 
Adams was a Unitarian, which Trinitarians abhorred as heresy. Thomas Jefferson, 
denounced as an atheist, was actually a deist who detested organized religion 
and who produced an expurgated version of the New Testament with the miracles 
eliminated. Jefferson and James Madison, a nominal Episcopalian, were the 
architects of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. James Monroe was 
another Virginia Episcopalian. John Quincy Adams was another Massachusetts 
Unitarian. Andrew Jackson, pressed by clergy members to proclaim a national day 
of fasting to seek God's help in combating a cholera epidemic, replied that he 
could not do as they wished "without feeling that I might in some degree disturb 
the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete 
separation from the political concerns of the general government."

In the 19th century, all presidents routinely invoked God and solicited his 
blessing. But religion did not have a major presence in their lives. Abraham 
Lincoln was the great exception. Nor did our early presidents use religion as an 
agency for mobilizing voters. "I would rather be defeated," said James A. 
Garfield, "than make capital out of my religion."

Nor was there any great popular demand that politicians be men of faith. In 
1876, James G. Blaine, an aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, 
selected Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, a famed orator but a notorious scoffer at 
religion, to deliver the nominating speech: The pious knew and feared Ingersoll 
as "The Great Agnostic"; a 21st century equivalent of Ingersoll would have been 
booed off the platform at the Republican convention of 2004.

There were presidents of ardent faith in the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson had no 
doubt that the Almighty designated the United States - and himself - for the 
redemption and salvation of humankind. Jimmy Carter, like Bush, was "born 
again." Ronald Reagan, though not a regular churchgoer, had a rapt evangelical 
following. But neither Wilson nor Carter nor Reagan applied religious tests to 
secular issues, nor did they exploit their religion for their political benefit. 
These are the standards that Bush has systematically violated.

The southernization of the Republican Party and the rise of evangelicals as a 
political force have restructured U.S. politics. When I was a young fellow, 
fundamentalists were a disdained minority, raw material that H.L. Mencken and 
Sinclair Lewis ("Elmer Gantry") used to make jokes about the Bible Belt.

But in recent years, the religious right has made alliances with right-wing 
Catholics over abortion and right-wing Jews over the Holy Land. Such alliances 
have given the evangelicals a measure of political respectability.

Statistics on religion are notoriously unreliable, but it may be, as the Pew 
Center for the People & the Press asserts, that evangelicals now outnumber 
mainline Protestants. The religious right constitutes Bush's political base, and 
the result is the first faith-based presidency in U.S. history.

Bush's first executive order was to establish the White House Office of 
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In fiscal 2003, as our president told a 
White House conference, the federal government gave more than $1 billion to 
faith-based organizations. And Bush is unique among presidents in his extensive 
application of religious tests to secular issues.

The opposition to stem cell research that so disturbs Nancy Reagan is typical. 
Stem cell research promises to expedite cures for Alzheimer's, diabetes, AIDS, 
Parkinson's and other diseases. But evangelicals are against it, and so is Bush.

Equally alarming is the use of churches for political purposes. A Bush campaign 
document, according to the New York Times, lays out "a brisk schedule for 
legions of Christian supporters to help enlist 'conservative churches' and their 
members, including sending church directories to the campaign."

There is no doubt about the authenticity of Bush's conversion. He would not be 
president today unless the born-again experience had charged his life with new 
meaning, purpose and discipline. Redemption through commitment to Jesus is what 
made him a man and a leader.

But, as author Bob Woodward said in "Bush at War": "The president was casting 
his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan." 
There is a messianic certitude about our president's pronouncements.

A fanatic, as Finley Peter Dunne's fictitious Mr. Dooley said, does what he 
thinks the Lord would do if he only knew the facts in the case. The most 
dangerous people in the world today are those who persuade themselves that they 
are executing the will of the Almighty.

Lincoln summed it all up in his second inaugural address. Both warring halves of 
the nation, he said, had read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each 
invoked God's aid against the other.

As Lincoln said, " . let us judge not, that we be not judged.. The Almighty has 
his own purposes."
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