The Christian Right's Humble Servant

Only a few days after 9/11, a shaken George W. Bush invited a small group of evangelical leaders to the White House to offer him spiritual counsel. There, they quietly discussed Scripture and the implications of 9/11 for a few moments. Then former Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president James Merritt turned to the president with a few words of encouragement.

"Mr. President, you and I are fellow believers in Jesus Christ," Merritt said.

Bush shook his head affirmatively.

"We both believe there is a sovereign God in control of this universe."

Bush nodded again.

"Since God knew that those planes would hit those towers before you and I were ever born, since God knew that you would be sitting in that chair before this world was ever created, I can only draw the conclusion that you are God's man for this hour," Merritt stated.

It was then that Bush lowered his head and cried.

Three years later, the nation was bitterly divided and God's pre-destined president was plunged in a fight for his political life. Without a domestic plank to run on and a staggering record of failure to run from, Bush's re-election was no longer the slam dunk it was once thought to be. Had Bush not cultivated the Christian right as his power base or courted its leadership as his informal advisors, re-election would have been impossible. Indeed, while the presence of Bush consigliere Karl Rove in the White House blurred the lines between policy and politics, the influence of the Christian right on Bush's domestic agenda formally wedded the familiar bedmates of conservative ideology and Calvinist theology. With a disciplined voting bloc at its disposal, the Christian right pushed for increased influence on the White House in a second Bush term, rallying support for his re-election behind church walls, at stadium-sized rallies and across radio waves – often away from the media's gaze but always in the shadow of the offical Bush/Cheney campaign. And when they helped carry Bush to an unlikely but overwhelming victory on November 2, he – and the Republican party, by extension – were secured as the Christian right's humble servants.

"Bush's victory not only establishes the power of the American Christian right in this candidacy, but in fact established its power to elect the next Republican president," lamented Arthur Finkelstein in an interview with the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Finkelstein, who is an advisor to New York's moderate Republican governor George Pataki, added that the "Republican party became the Christian right, the most radical in modern history ever."

To be sure, Bush is not a dyed-in-the-wool theocrat. When he kicked alcohol and became an evangelical Christian, it was the mainstream evangelical icon Billy Graham who oversaw his rebirth. And though he was involved in evangelical bible study groups in Midland, Texas in the 1980s, it was not until he declared a run for the Texas governorship that he was exposed to the hardline ideology of the Christian right. In 1993, as Bush groped for an approach to handling poverty that would set him apart from the mold of the mean-spirited, Gingrichian grinch, Rove invited self-described "social Calvinist" intellectual Marvin Olasky to join the campaign as Bush's social welfare guru.

In his influential polemic, "The Tragedy of American Compassion," Olasky put forth his theory that poverty is a spiritual problem that government policy has not caused and can not necessarily cure. Thus, Olasky argued, government should loosen its grip on the social sector and return it to the biblically-ordained care of the church. Olasky's theories were to a large extent derived from the teachings of 19th century neo-Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, (Olasky is a Kuyper Institute fellow) who declared, "The family, the business science, art, and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the state ... but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority that rules by the grace of God...." Bush took this essentially theocratic idea and with Olasky's help, repackaged it as "compassionate conservatism," a label that helped cast Bush as a moderate in the media spotlight.