WASHINGTON (ABP) — While many of President Bush's opponents and critics alike have pointed to his evangelical Christian faith as his defining characteristic, several intimately acquainted with Bush recently told a gathering of journalists the president considers himself in the mainstream of American religious life.
Speaking to the Religion Newswriters Association annual conference in Washington, experts familiar with Bush's much-talked-about faith said the president does not use it improperly in his work in the White House.
“He's all business in the Oval Office,” Jim Towey, the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told the group of religion journalists Sept. 10. “He does not talk about his personal faith with staff, at least not with me.”
Towey and Houston minister Kirbyjon Caldwell, one of Bush's spiritual confidants, both described Bush's view of his own faith as being squarely in the mainstream of American religious life.
“He does not believe God told him to run [for president] and he certainly does not believe that God told him to drop bombs anywhere — that's not his theology and not his ethos,” said Caldwell, pastor of the nation's largest United Methodist congregation.
Bush, who said during his 2000 election campaign that Jesus was his favorite philosopher “because he changed my heart,” has been lauded by conservative evangelical Protestants as one of their own. Born into a family with Presbyterian and Episcopal roots, Bush is widely reported to have had a faith-deepening experience similar to an evangelical conversion around the time he turned 40, in the mid-1980s. He was a member of United Methodist congregations in Dallas and Austin during his Texas years.
However, according to a journalist who wrote a sympathetic book on Bush's faith, he is not a typical evangelical. “It's not easy, although the temptation is there, to pigeon-hole this guy,” said David Aikman, a former Time magazine reporter and now head of an international fellowship of Christian journalists. “He does not like to be called an evangelical. He does not like to use the language 'born again.' This is no-no language in the White House.”
Aikman's book is on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign's suggested reading list, according to a Sept. 12 e-mail notice from the campaign.
Speaking to RNA journalists on a panel discussion about faith in the White House Sept. 11, Aikman said Bush is “very ecumenical” compared to most conservative Protestants, and that he is comfortable with people of all faiths. “He is a Methodist, but he is comfortable with Baptists and Catholics and Episcopalians,” Aikman said.
The reporter also noted that Bush “has worshiped in mainstream Episcopal churches, which evangelicals may think are liberal,” including the gay-friendly St. John's Episcopal Church, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Bush's parents attended St. John's while they were in the White House, and the younger Bush and his wife, Laura, have attended there on many of the handful of occasions when they have been in Washington on a Sunday morning.
Aikman also noted Bush's openness to people of minority faiths, such as Islam and Sikhism. “He has had prayer sessions with followers of the Sikh religion in the Oval Office,” he said. “What's a born-again Christian doing praying with Sikh religionists? I don't know, but the Sikhs were very honored and very happy with that.
“So, although the cliché is this is the president of the Christian Right … in fact, he's a far more complex
and subtle individual in his faith orientation than many people have been led to believe,” Aikman concluded.
However, Bush has embraced positions on several divisive social issues — such as abortion rights and gay rights — congruent with those of the Religious Right. Shaun Casey, president of Washington's Wesley Theological Seminary, told the journalists that such actions are part of the way that Bush was “exploiting religion brilliantly in this campaign.”
Casey noted recent reports that the Bush campaign had attempted to organize voters through conservative churches in important “battleground” states. “They have been directly reaching out to churches in a very, I would say, unseemly manner,” he said. “The Bush hagiography apparatus has marketed in a very Machiavellian way, in a very effective way, their message among the press corps.”
Nonetheless, Casey said, he didn't question the authenticity of Bush's personal piety. “I think we need to separate between the faith of the president and how religion is being used in the campaign,” he said.
Towey joked that Bush was not consumed at work by esoteric religious talk or practices. “I haven't walked in the Oval Office and seen him lost in prayer or levitating,” he said, to laughter.
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