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Article Excerpt
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. [...] Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists [...].
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
--George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress (We Will Prevail, 15, 17)
[T]he politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth and symbol--have become the norm in the modern world.
--Michael Ledeen, D'Annunzio: The First Duce (x)
The presidency of George W. Bush contains, at its very heart, a fundamental paradox and apparent contradiction. On the one hand, this is arguably the most outspokenly religious president in U.S. history, a man who claims not only to have been saved, but called by God to lead our country. Religious conviction informs virtually every aspect of his presidency, from his domestic Faith-based Initiative to his equally faith-based foreign policy announced in a "crusade" against the "Axis of Evil" and a promise to bring freedom as a "gift from the Almighty" to benighted regions of the world like Iraq. Indeed, much of Bush's success in the last two elections has been credited to his image as a man of sincere faith, straightforward honesty and moral conviction.
Yet on the other hand, this is also by many accounts the most secretive administration in U.S. history, displaying an intense preoccupation with information control. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been described by various observers as having an "obsession with secrecy" or a "secrecy fetish"--one that Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, has called "the most secretive of our lifetime" (Elsner) and one that former Nixon legal advisor, John W. Dean, concludes is "worse than Watergate." This preoccupation with secrecy began with Bush's first days in office, as he fought to conceal his own Texas gubernatorial records and the presidential records of Reagan and then-Vice President H.W. Bush; and it continues to pervade virtually every aspect of this administration, from the highly secretive National Energy Development Policy to the bewildering flurry of dissimulation surrounding the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. As Walter Cronkite aptly put it, "This administration--the most secretive since Richard Nixon's--suffers from a deepening credibility problem" and reflects a disturbing "pattern of secrecy and of dishonesty in the service of secrecy." In sum, this administration has gone to great lengths to cover over, mask and obfuscate a number of other interests that are far less spiritual and far more material in nature.
However, the apparent contradiction between Bush's intense display of religiosity and his administration's equally intense concern with secrecy ultimately turns out to be only that--an apparent one. Indeed, religion and secrecy are not only coexistent in this administration; they are intimately intertwined.
A careful analysis of Bush's use of religious discourse shows a complex mingling of at least two major currents in the current presidency: the millenarian rhetoric of the far Christian Right and the imperialist ideology of the neoconservative movement. Bush's powerful and repeated rhetoric of "freedom" as the gift of the Almighty and the "goal of history" reflects not only a kind of messianic faith in God's plan for humankind; it also hints strongly at the aggressive foreign policy of neoconservative theorists such as Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and think-tanks such as the Project for the New American Century. In Bush's discourse, the religious ideal of God's plan for human history is fused with the neoconservatives' more practical and material plan for a "New American Century" or what Irving Kristol calls "an emerging American imperium."
One of the most influential neoconservative theorists is Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has been called the "driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement" and a key advisor to Karl Rove (Beeman). Ledeen is in fact quite frank about the need to employ both religious rhetoric and deception as vital political tools. Calling for a return to Machiavelli as a model for modern government, Ledeen observes that religious discourse is among the most powerful ways of generating patriotic devotion and mobilizing popular support for acts such as war. But he also suggests that an effective leader must not be afraid to engage in deception or even "enter into evil" if it is in the service of a higher cause (Machiavelli 101).
Bush's relatively vacuous figure, I would suggest, serves as the key structural link that helps bind these two, otherwise very different, factions together. As a sort of religio-political ligament, Bush brings together the Evangelicals' push for a Faith-based government with the neoconservatives' intense concern with secrecy, military power and imperial expansion. His display of piety thus provides a sense of divine justification and messianic certitude for the neoconservatives' political agendas, while at the same time concealing and obfuscating their deeper motivations.
This is not, however, a simple matter of material interests being masked beneath a narcotic cloud of religious illusion, in Marx's sense. Rather, it involves a more complex sort of "double-coding" of spiritual and material interests within the elegant fabric of the discourse produced by Bush's biographers and speech-writers (Lincoln, Holy Terrors 30). Hence, it is closer to what political philosopher Leo Strauss--himself a major influence on the neoconservatives--called a form of esoteric discourse or "writing between the lines" (Persecution 25). As such, it is a sign that American citizens need to learn how to "read between the lines" and discern the deeper material interests that lie encoded in spiritual rhetoric.
Secrets of the Kingdom: A Divine Calling and the Mantle of Moses
The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables.
--Mark 4:11 (NIV)
I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president.
--George W. Bush, to televangelist James Robison (Carnes)
The use of religious discourse and spiritual imagery by U.S. Presidents is surely nothing new, nor is their connection to powerful religious organizations. This has been particularly true since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who offered the mix of conservative social and foreign policies desired by fundamentalist leaders and won the support of Christian conservatives in the 1980s. Often fusing sacred and secular rhetoric in his public discourse, Reagan portrayed the Cold War world in "stark good versus evil terms, with the United States as the divinely chosen defender of freedom and liberty" and supported domestic policies that appealed to the evangelical community (Domke 8). Yet no president has ever made such an explicit display of his religiosity or perceived his own political office in such deeply spiritual terms as George W. Bush: "We have had other 'religious' presidents, but no other President has so clearly perceived his calling in such epic biblical terms" (Siker).
Yet as Bruce Lincoln observes, Bush's use of religious discourse is often subtly "double-coded"; that is to say, to most Americans, his rhetoric is often taken as relatively benign and innocuous presidential jargon, but to those who have "ears to hear" and are steeped in scripture, there are coded references to specific biblical passages and Christian hymns (Holy Terrors 30). Bush's chief speech writer, Michael Gerson, is himself a born-again evangelical Christian with a degree in theology from Wheaton College (the "evangelical Harvard"), and his carefully-crafted speeches reflect his religious training with frequent allusions to scripture. Coached by Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God minister, Bush and his speech-writers adopted the strategy of "signal early and signal often," by giving repeated cues that he is among the faithful (Lawson 394). (2)
Bush's sense of divine calling is apparent even in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, which contains one very telling anecdote about his decision to run for the office. At a Church service in January, 1999, then-governor Bush heard a sermon by Pastor Mark Craig. The subject of the sermon was the famous story in Exodus 3-4, in which God appears to Moses in the burning bush, and despite Moses' lack of experience or skill, calls him to free Israel. The Pastor went on to link this passage to contemporary history, suggesting that, like Israel then, America today needs strong leaders with faith, integrity and moral values. While Bush himself downplays the incident, suggesting that the Pastor could have been talking to anyone, his mother, Barbara, knew better: "He's talking to you," she said (8-9). As Lincoln suggests, this anecdote from Bush's well-timed autobiography contains a powerful, but subtly double-coded message ("The Theology of George W. Bush"). While most readers might pass over it without much thought, an evangelical reader will recognize in this...
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