shrub...the New Ager...
Our Magical President
Believing, it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief. Jesus Christ’s particular teachings -- well, those are good, too. But what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can.
What Suskind misses, and what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion.
A common aspect of many New Age schools of thought (though not all) is a gentle disdain for perceived reality. That's different from the fundamentalist aversion to worldliness; rather, this approach views the "real world" as that which is within the mind or heart or spirit of the believer. That idea is often dismissed as a modern bastardization of psychology, but many New Agers argue that their beliefs are actually ancient; and, despite the fact that the superficial characteristics are often of a recent vintage, there’s some truth to that assertion. New Age religions are, literally, reactionary, responses to what’s been called the disenchantment of the world. Another word for that process is the Enlightenment, with its claims of empirical accuracy. New Age movements attempt to revive -- or create anew --pre-Enlightenment ideas about magic, alchemy, ghosts, and whatever else practitioners can glean from a record for the most part expunged by institutional Christianity.
Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is the child of the Enlightenment, a functionalist view of faith that’s metaphorically “scientific.” It's scripture as read by a cranky engineer who just wants to know how God works. The Bible, for a fundamentalist, isn’t powerful literature demanding our ever-changing discernment; it’s an instruction manual. And fundamentalists think that's a good thing.
But Bush, we’re told time and again by supporters and detractors, is not a details man. Not much of a reader, either. He is a “heart” person, as pollster John Zogby’s Wizard of Oz characterization of the candidates would have it (Kerry the Tin Man, all brains and no heart, vs. Bush the Scarecrow, nothing but heart and straw).
Suskind begins his accounting of the President’s faith with an encounter between Bush and Senator Joe Biden. Biden ticks off the ominous portents of potential failure in Iraq, many of them, apparently, news to Bush. Bush unfazed, replies that all will be well. “‘Mr. President,’” Biden recalls asking, “ ‘how can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?’”
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