This day 3,000 people turn out, most of them white, well-educated and suburban. A giant video screen displays the words our father. Summers had prayed it wouldn’t come to this, but she supports the war even so. “Bush and Powell and all those guys are Christian,” she says. “I do believe that God has blessed this country.”
When it comes to matters of might and right, Americans look to the heavens in a way that bewilders much of the rest of the world–especially Europe. A majority of Americans say religion shapes their lives, and it clearly shapes politics. Regular churchgoers are far more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, according to polls, and it’s well known that the religious right is the Bush administration’s political base. The president himself sometimes sounds like the nation’s commander in the pulpit. His State of the Union address last month repeatedly invoked divine power, declaring confidence in “the loving God behind all of life and all of history.” “May He guide us now,” George W. Bush beseeched.
The president has never shied from talking about his own embrace of born-again Christianity, at 39, a transformation that he says helped him kick a drinking problem. Bush attends regular Bible-study sessions in the White House. Others around him do the same; Attorney General John Ashcroft begins every business day with a prayer meeting. After a California court ruled the Pledge of Allegiance violated the constitutional separation of church and state for declaring “one nation under God,” indignant politicians filed out of the Capitol and loudly recited the pledge.
Invoking the Almighty is common among American politicians, who know well that voters in the United States prefer leaders who side with the angels. But with Bush, religious conservatives can for the first time fully claim one of their own in the White House. What detractors–at home as well as abroad–find most alarming is the president’s tendency to blur the lines between personal faith and policy. In fact, the White House often deliberately infuses its message with Biblical overtones. Bush’s famous denunciation of the Axis of Evil–Iraq, Iran and North Korea–was originally penned as the “Axis of Hatred.” The change came about, according to former speechwriter David Frum, when senior White House staff opted for a more “theological” formulation. “If people want to know me,” Bush said during his campaign for president, “they’ve got to know that’s an integral part of my life–my acceptance of Christ.”
Faith increasingly seems to affect the administration’s decisions. Just last week the president named a doctrinaire Christian, Dr. W. David Hager, as head of an advisory committee on reproductive-health issues for the Food and Drug Administration. Hager, who describes himself as pro-life, refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women and has written that women should treat premenstrual syndrome by reading the Bible and praying. In the Congress, the House Republican whip, Tom DeLay, refers to disputed Middle East territories as Judea and Samaria, as they were known in the Bible. Last year House Majority Leader Dick Armey suggested that Israel is entitled to the West Bank, on Biblical grounds, and that “Palestinians should leave,” a claim he later tried to qualify.
Such religious rhetoric is not as out of step as it may seem. According to polls, 80 percent of Americans say a belief in God shapes their views. Conservative, evangelical churches have seen strong growth across the country in recent years, while more liberal denominations struggle to fill their pews. A popular wristband reads wwjd, or “What would Jesus do?” Many Americans today want prayer in schools and sex-education campaigns to consist solely of teaching abstinence. The Boy Scouts of America excludes gays and atheists. Pro-football players point to the heavens in gratitude for scoring a touchdown, then praise Jesus in post game television interviews.
From across the sea, it might seem that the United States is a nation of religious zealots, united in crusade. The truth is that America itself is divided. Fewer than half of all Americans attend church regularly. Much of the country, like Europe, is growing more secular, especially on the coasts and in the metropolitan centers of the upper Midwest. These are the regions where Al Gore prevailed in the 2000 presidential election–and which in fact gave him a plurality of votes. Even among the faithful, religion scarcely speaks with a single voice, especially when it comes to war. Polls show the nation is largely split on attacking Baghdad, and opponents of war, too, often draw on faith.
And in the shaping of American values, there is more than God in the details. Capitalism, like sports–a sort of secular religion in America–takes as an article of faith that competition is the fairest arbiter, a way to yield winners and losers. Americans may see war as a last resort, but it is a resort–a decisive way to settle a contest. As Robert Kagan, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has noted, Americans see the military as a perfectly acceptable tool of foreign policy.
Europeans may cringe at the “cowboy ways” of President Bush. But in America, the cowboy is sacred in the nation’s mythology, a symbol of youth, strength and self-reliance. Capital punishment, seen as barbaric by most other Western societies, derives from the time-honored code of frontier justice. Bad people–including leaders like Saddam Hussein–need to be hunted down and dealt with harshly. It is not a matter of might for its own sake, or even necessarily for narrow self-interest. Americans tend to see their country as being on the side of mercy and righteousness. What is good for America, the thinking goes, is good for the rest of the world, whether it realizes it or not.
This notion of American exceptionalism was the underpinning of Manifest Destiny, the mid-19th-century idea that America had a right and duty to extend its reach of power. The self-image of benevolence, with regard to international affairs, was burnished by America’s role in the two world wars of the 20th century. Given that –Americans sent millions of men to fight tyranny in Europe, and then helped rebuild war-ravaged nations, the voices of pacifism coming from the Continent ring painfully hollow.
Many Americans agree with the White House that the looming war with Iraq is a battle against tyranny, a righteous act of liberating an oppressed people. “When Americans see a picture of a woman who is suffering, they say simply, ‘I want to help’,” says Zainab Salbi, a 33-year-old Iraqi immigrant who founded Women for Women in Washington. “This is not something I see in the rest of the world.” The flip side of that generosity, she adds, is the sometimes naive view that America “can fix everything–and always knows what’s best.” Benevolent or arrogant, perhaps some of both, Americans are praying for peace in the eleventh hour. But their faith may also bring them war.
