Sitting on both sides of the fence
nytimes.com
Personal and Political, Bush's Faith Blurs Lines
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: October 26, 2004
On Sundays when President Bush goes to church in Washington, he chooses the 8 a.m. service at St. John's Episcopal Church Lafayette Square. A short stroll from the White House, St. John's has been the parish for many presidents, but it is still a surprising choice for Mr. Bush.
A president who has been typecast as the champion of Christian conservatives, who has proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, finds fellowship in a church where the priest and many congregants openly support the blessing of same-sex unions.
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When it comes to understanding the president's religious convictions and the role they have played in his presidency, there appears to be a disconnect between Mr. Bush's personal beliefs and his public policy.
On his personal faith, the president appears to be far from doctrinally dogmatic, and even theologically moderate. It is not hard to find evidence that he is out of sync with the conservative evangelical Christians who make up his political base.
Besides worshiping in an Episcopal church that welcomes gay couples (and in Texas, in a Methodist church where many congregants support abortion rights), Mr. Bush has prayed with Jews and Sikhs and volunteered that Muslims worship the same God as Christians - a comment that stunned evangelicals. Mr. Bush uses evangelical terms to convey his devotion to God and to prayer, but he is not the Bible-thumping fundamentalist that some of his opponents have made him out to be.
When it comes to policy, however, his opponents and supporters agree that he has done more than any president in recent history to advance the agenda of Christian social conservatives. On domestic issues, he has opposed same-sex marriage, favored restrictions on abortion and imposed limits on embryonic stem cell research. He has promoted vouchers for religious schools and shifted money for sex education and reproductive health programs to those that instead promote abstinence.
Mr. Bush also sought to redress a complaint common among religious conservatives that government discriminates against religion. What he calls his faith-based initiative lifted regulations that barred government money from flowing to overtly religious charities, challenging advocates of the church-state separation.
In foreign policy, Mr. Bush responded to appeals from evangelicals like the Rev. Franklin Graham to promote causes they cared about, like the civil war in Sudan, AIDS in Africa and the international trafficking in female sex workers.
When he took the nation to war in Iraq, he refused to meet with delegations of religious leaders who opposed a pre-emptive war. To their dismay, he has repeatedly justified the war in theological terms, repeating a favorite axiom, as he did at a rally in Colorado this month: "Freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world."
But on the causes most sacred to many Christian conservatives, the president has gone only as far as he needed to pacify his base, and sometimes only after sustained prodding by vocal religious leaders. His stem cell decision was a compromise. On abortion, he has signed what was put in front of him. On gay marriage, it took him months to speak publicly in support of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and when he did he explicitly supported a moderate version that would allow states to recognize civil unions.
Nevertheless, in recent interviews, dozens of conservative religious leaders, including evangelical Christians, Catholics and Jews, exulted at the unprecedented access they had had to this White House and the ways in which Mr. Bush had found common cause with them. Christian conservatives have won White House appointments - among them Attorney General John Ashcroft, who brought more conservative evangelicals on board at the Justice Department, and Kay Coles James, who did the same as director of the United States Office of Personnel Management. Ms. James is a former dean of the school of government at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson, and served in less powerful positions in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
"By and large evangelicals are very pleased, more pleased than they expected to be with this president," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "I'm not, because I knew him. And I knew he was the real deal."
Studying Politics of Religion
Last May, the president sat down in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with a group of journalists and editors from the Christian media for the kind of lengthy, wide-ranging interview he has not granted reporters with the secular media.
"The job of president," he told them, "is to help cultures change."
Twice during the interview, he praised one of the men interviewing him, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who edits First Things, a conservative journal on religion and public policy. "Father Richard helped me craft what is still the integral part of my position on abortion, which is: every child welcomed to life and protected by law," the president said.
In an interview, Father Neuhaus said that in the summer of 1999, before Mr. Bush declared he was running for president, he was invited to visit Mr. Bush in Texas at the governor's mansion for what turned out to be a breakfast tutorial in Catholic teaching on the "culture of life." The concepts were somewhat unfamiliar to Mr. Bush then, but he was eager to learn how the church connected opposition to abortion, euthanasia, family planning, stem cell research and cloning, Father Neuhaus said.
On his first working day in office, President Bush issued an executive order reinstating a Reagan-era policy that anti-abortion groups call the Mexico City policy but family planning groups refer to as the gag rule. It prohibits any organization that receives American aid from promoting, referring to or educating about abortion as an option in family planning overseas even if they do not use American money to do it.
The stem cell decision, now getting so much attention in the campaign, speaks volumes about Mr. Bush because he was so deeply, personally engaged in it. He consulted scientists, ethicists and theologians, summoning some to his ranch in Crawford, people who know him said. He used his first address to the nation to explain it, on Aug. 9, 2001, before terrorism set his agenda.
He made a Solomonic choice, permitting federal financing for research on a limited number of embryonic stem cell lines, but only those that already existed. Initially, some conservative Christian leaders were outraged. If the embryo is a human being, stem cell research is murder, they said.
But within 24 hours, most conservative evangelical leaders were praising the decision as a victory for the "pro-life" cause.
On abortion, too, Mr. Bush has done enough to keep the base committed, without going out on a limb. He has not promoted a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, as a Republican Party platform plank calls for. Instead he has backed measures that chip away at abortion rights, or that reinforce the argument that life begins at conception.
"He is keenly and rightly aware that there's only so much that can be done through politics," Father Neuhaus said. However, he said, "On every issue of concern to the pro-life community, and every issue touching on the protection of unborn life that has come to his desk, he has consistently been supportive."
At a celebratory ceremony attended by anti-abortion leaders in November 2003, he signed a ban on a procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion, which restricted a type of abortion performed in the second or third trimester. It was the first ban on an abortion procedure since 1973, when Roe v. Wade institutionalized the right to abortion, but even many Democrats had supported the ban and it cost the president little to sign it. The president also signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which means, as he explained in the second presidential debate, "If you're a mom and you're pregnant and you get killed, the murderer gets tried for two cases, not just one."
Many anti-abortion leaders said in interviews that they were content with his record and the expectation that in a second term, Mr. Bush would appoint at least one Supreme Court justice committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. In the third presidential debate, Mr. Bush said he had no "litmus test" issue for judicial appointees. But none of the appointees in his first term have been outspoken in favor of abortion rights, and some are vocal opponents.
Despite Mr. Bush's professed reverence for the "culture of life," he has not used the bully pulpit afforded a president to change the American culture on abortion, said Clyde Wilcox, a professor of government at Georgetown University.
"Think about his enthusiasms - the Iraq war or tax cuts," Professor Wilcox said. "He's not out on the stump like he is on those issues, pushing for more laws to limit abortion, saying now that we've got 'partial birth' behind us, let's do something else.
"Maybe he does it in narrowly communicated messages that the evangelicals understand, like when he talks about the dignity of life. But when he does that he's not persuading the culture, he's just wooing his voters."
The 'Faith-Based Initiative'
In interviews with more than two dozen religious leaders who have met with the president, the startling thing that emerges is that Mr. Bush has managed to convince the most traditionalist believers of almost every stripe - Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and even Sikhs - that his beliefs are just like theirs. He charmed a group of Muslims when he said he could understand their concern about shutdowns of Islamic charities, because Christians are also required to tithe. He gave a bear hug to a visiting rabbi who had told the president in a meeting earlier that day that Israel was the Holy Land given to the Jews by God.
"The only Jews he doesn't seem to like," said another rabbi, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "are the ones who aren't religious, because he can't understand them." Above all, Mr. Bush appears to have faith in faith.
"Prayer and religion sustain me," he said in the third presidential debate. "I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency."
He has often recounted how his genuine religious awakening came after he hit bottom at age 40. In unscripted moments, Mr. Bush speaks in Alcoholics Anonymous vernacular of a "higher power."
"I had a drinking problem," the president told a group of clergy members visiting the White House, according to a book by a former White House aide, David Frum. "There is only one reason I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God."
Asked in the final presidential debate how his faith had affected his public policy Mr. Bush singled out only one concrete domestic policy: the religion-based initiative.
The personal and the political for Mr. Bush come together most clearly in that effort. The idea is to encourage overtly religious groups, previously excluded from government contracts, to apply for government financing to serve people who are jobless or mentally ill or are drug or alcohol addicts. His passion for the initiative is grounded in his personal experience that people in trouble need faith to recover. He began the initiative the first month of his administration with great fanfare, establishing the first White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
When the initiative ran into interference in Congress, the president used a series of executive orders to create a network of offices inside eight federal departments (education, agriculture, justice, labor, health and human services, housing and urban development, veterans affairs and commerce) and two federal agencies (the United States Agency for International Development and the Small Business Administration) to award grants and contracts to religious charities. Agency representatives have traveled around the country in the last few years, holding sessions for local congregations and religious groups to train them in how to apply for and administer government grants. All together, the White House says that $1.1 billion in discretionary funds has been awarded to religion-based social service organizations.
But the president's grand vision has fallen short. A report being released today by the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York says that during the Bush administration, the funds most accessible to religion-based organizations "tend to be small and have shown little real growth in recent years."
A Private Matter
Mr. Bush often says his faith is a private matter. The White House refused any interviews for this article, and it is impossible to understand a person's spiritual beliefs without his willingness to discuss it. Even then it can be impossible.
Mr. Bush was born an Episcopalian, attended a Presbyterian church as a youngster and joined a Methodist church when he married - a denomination-hopping that is common among many Americans.
Evangelicals claim Mr. Bush is one of their own, but he has intentionally been vague about whether he actually shares their beliefs. In his last presidential run, Mr. Bush granted a brief telephone interview with this reporter on his faith. Asked whether he regarded the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God, Mr. Bush said: "From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life's lessons. That's what I believe, and I don't necessarily believe every single word is literally true." |
