Matt Bivens, The Daily Outrage
In his late 30s, soon after an evening of talks with evangelist Billy Graham, George W. Bush declared himself a born-again Christian.
Does he therefore believe -- as born-again Christians often do -- that even good and kind people are doomed to Hell, unless they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior?
Does he believe that Jews and Muslims are ultimately damned? If he doesn't believe that, then is he saying one can reject Jesus Christ -- yet still go to Heaven? If he does believe that, then does the inevitable damnation of the majority of humanity ever enter into his Earthly calculations?
Does the President believe that he's doing God's work?
Has he been telling other world leaders that God told him to invade Iraq?
Does he actually hear God's voice? If so, when does this happen for him, and what does it sound like? Does he just receive a message, or does he have actual two-way conversations?
We journalists rarely get a serious crack at this particular President, and so we're all quite excited at the prospect of one of our own sitting down for a full hour with him this weekend. The questions we would ask are piling up (my colleague David Corn has an excellent list here), and interviewer Tim Russert will no doubt assemble a menu of narrow facts-and-headlines-driven inquiries about deficits, desertion and the like.
Me, I want to hear the President explain his exact relationship with his God. He has been talking more and more about God lately; he seems quite sincere, and yet no Washington journalists are interested -- they automatically assume it's a calculated pose. But Bush has made some amazing Moses-and-the-burning-bush assertions in private, apparently, and these ought to be explored. He has never disputed the story, recounted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that he himself told the Palestinian leadership, "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam"; and now we have a similar account, courtesy of The Globe and Mail, of Bush telling a bug-eyed Canadian Prime Minister he was carrying out divine commands:
"Though it wasn't publicized at the time, Prime Minister Paul Martin got a sense of [the White House's] sanctimony when he met with Mr. Bush in early January in Mexico. Mr. Bush let the Prime Minister know that he believed himself to be on the side of God and tending to God's mission. The Canadian side, while aware of the President's penchant for religiosity, had been expecting to talk more about softwood lumber than the Ten Commandments. The Canadians didn't expect the morality play. Nor did they expect that, almost in the same breath, Mr. Bush would be filling the air with the f-word and other saucy expletives of the type that would surely leave the Lord perturbed. ... Mr. Martin was somewhat taken aback by what he heard. After the meeting, he was barely out the door before he was asking someone in his entourage what was to be made of all the God stuff. ..."
Let's find out what is to be made of all the God stuff. We've got the prime ministers of Palestine and of Canada saying, via the media, that Bush tells them he and God have some sort of understanding. When the President of Macedonia visited the Oval Office, he and Bush knelt and prayed together. When Bush met Russia's Vladimir Putin, the first topic of discussion was, as Bush described it, their Christian faith (which they each wear on their sleeves).
But as Ira Chernus has observed, "In a democracy, it is the people, not God, who make the decisions." And, "If he truly believes that he hears the voice of God, there is no telling what God might say tomorrow."
