SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE AND WALKING THE TALK

WHY RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES LOVE BUSH AND WHY THEY'RE RIGHT

During the 2000 campaign, when George W. Bush was just a governor, I remember the moment I knew I would be voting for him.

It was in the middle of a primary debate, and the question to the panelists was "Who is your favorite political philosopher?" Without apology, yet with deep humility, the Texas governor replied, "Jesus Christ, because he changed my heart."

My conservative antenna went way up. I knew Bush was considered a favorite, but I didn't know all that much about him. I had though that the clear religious candidate was Alan Keyes, who had no chance to win. But here--here was a man unafraid to start a storm of controversy by openly declaring his allegiance to the "hateful" philosophy the Democrats and the ACLU had spent 8 years trying to bludgeon us away from.

And it wasn’t just that he said it. It was the way he said it. The words he used. The humility. The simplicity. The sincerity.

My discernment went on high alert, and I knew that statement came from his heart. It certainly wasn't going to come from any political advisor worth his or her paycheck.

And so I started to watch George W. Bush. And, more importantly, to listen to him.

That phrase, "changed my heart" is a telling one. It's the phrase of the evangelical, because it carries the evangelical assumption that being born again (or "born from above," "of the Spirit," as the Bible says) is not something you inherit or fall into. It's a moment or an evolution of moments that you can identify as a definite change of your very being. A new birth.

It rings truer than "changed my life," because people can change their lives through diet and exercise, having children, or watching Oprah (so I'm told.) But your "heart" only changes in a religious conversion. He was talking in code, and he was talking to us. In the center of the secular political arena, he had let the secret out. It was like drawing a fish in the dust of the coliseum.

When Bush had to face the question of letting Karla Faye Tucker die for her crimes, Pat Robertson lobbied to save her. After committing the horrific crimes for which Texas had given her the death penalty, Tucker had found Christ and led Bible studies. I have no doubt that she was sincere. But Governor Bush, following his own discernment, used his authority and meted out the justice she had earned. And even she didn't disagree with him.

At that point, I knew he had instincts beyond the political, because if he wanted to pander to a religious base, he would have done the easy thing and given in to Pat's pleadings. Pat was wrong on Karla Faye, as he was wrong to assume that just because God prompted him to run for president meant he was to win. As he later admitted, that might not have been in the plan. God had a plan for Pat's candidacy, and it would be a powerful force in political history--but it was Pat's flesh that expected victory. God wanted obedience.

When George W. carried out his duty as the governor, he took a small political hit, but he preserved the authority of the office he held. It would not be the last time that George W. Bush would fight for a principle against the winds of political expediency. He has developed a history of making unpopular decisions and sticking with them. And that makes us love him more.

When President Bush started talking about compassionate conservatism, few understood the ramifications of this grand vision. If you were in the Christian conservative camp, however, and politically aware (admittedly not that big a group), you recognized the influence of Marvin Olasky (The Tragedy of American Compassion--click below to buy through amazon.) If you listened to him talk about prison reform--even if you weren't all that political--you recognized the outlines of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, which had introduced rehabilitative religion into the prison system.

Al Gore tried to talk about his religion, and it rang hollow from a pro-choice politico whose sole driving force seemed to be the need to become president. Bush wanted it, seemed to think he was called to it--but he didn't ravenously desire it, he didn't need it to complete himself. He was comfortable in his own skin, the way Christians are when they have faced down their demons and moved on.

His inauguration speech was a masterpiece of spiritual exhortation. He called us to follow our American destiny, linking that destiny to something huge and unknowable to which we are called by God. Time and again, he acted as our national prophet/priest, evoking Biblical imagery as we dealt with the explosion of the space shuttle, and, of course, the tragedies of 9/11. Over and over, he told the citizens who met him on the rope lines, when they told him they were praying for him, "That's the most important thing you can do for a president." He didn't just talk the talk. He walked the walk.

One of the reasons we religious red folk love this president so much is that he truly is a praying man. We know from interviews he's done with "our" press that President G.W. Bush is a man of faith and prayer. (By "our" press, I mean the Christian media, not the ordinary kind, in whom we have little--you'll excuse the expression--faith.) We know that he is genuine pals with Billy and Franklin Graham--not just because he's president, but way before that. We know that he prayed about starting the war, and, unlike Dan Rather and Michael Moore, we find it reassuring, not alarming.

We know it from the people he's surrounded himself with--Vice President Cheney, whose wife Lynn is well known to us; Andrew Card, whose wife is a minister; Karen Hughes, who is so traditional she left her job with her president and her friend to be in-house mom to her teenage son; and, of course, John Ashcroft. And we even know it from the testimony of other familiar faces of the religious red--Franklin Graham, James Robison, Pat Robertson, J.C. Watts, Charles Colson, Rick Santorum, Michael Reagan, and John Danforth, to name just a few.

We also know that he prays for the nation on a daily basis, that he is driven to his knees by the weight of the office, just like Lincoln. As a friend of mine likes to say, "I feel good knowing that not only am I praying for my president--he's praying for me, too."
This is a feeling we did not have while the former resident of the Oval Office was there. It's not that we didn't pray for President Clinton, too, though. We did, though I confess I suspect much less enthusiastically than we do for Bush 43, and some of our prayers were likely along the lines of the "blessing for the Czar" from Fiddler on the Roof--"May God bless and keep the Czar…far away from us!"

And we know it from the people who oppose him, from the unreasoning, visceral hatred spewed by Hollywood actors, pro-choice and pro-gay activists, and the ever-more-obviously liberal media. If you look at the box office, you'll soon discern that for a nation of 250 million people, it would seem that there is no statistical majority going even to one movie a year. The media may be obsessed with Hollywood's comings and goings, with the couplings and de-couplings of people paid to pretend to be someone else--but the heartland really isn't listening.

The religious red have had it up to here with Hollywood and its horrible language and values leading our children into the abyss. We are doing all we can to protect them from the culture of hip-hop and lyrical hatred of America, its institutions, and its president. We are, as my pastor says, "different." We don't wear the latest fashions. We don't read the hot new novel. We don't see the movie that brings in millions and glorifies adultery or homosexuality or child prostitution or drug addiction, no matter how many academy awards it gets nominated for. We see movies we have to buy to get. We rent our movies at Christian stores, where statistics aren't collected.

You wouldn't know it from the media, by the way, but Christian bookstores (which are not counted in the New York Times best seller calculation) make up one-third of all bookstores in the nation. And Christian books make more money than all but the most over-paid secular authors (like Bill Clinton.) Think what that means for Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, authors of the end-times Left Behind thrillers. Those books repeatedly went to the New York Times list, even excluding their number one position on the Christian best-seller list. That means they are even more popular than the New York Times can imagine. And the New York Times hates that.

We don't care who Whoopi Goldberg wants us to vote for, or whether Ben Affleck will be appearing with John Kerry. We won't be swayed--except those who weren't really planning to vote, who will now be driven by piety and citizenship to the polls--by the caterwauling of ridiculous singers trying to rock the vote out of the hands of Republicans. We don't take our life cues from them. We flee them.

We don't believe what the liberal elites say about our president. We note that most of the actors, activists, and singers that want to tell us how stupid the president is didn't themselves graduate from college--some didn't even make it out of high school. President Bush, on the other hand, went to Yale (like Kerry and Bill and Hillary) AND Harvard (like Jack Kennedy). He was also a fighter pilot, which you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know takes no small intelligence. (Imagine if strings were pulled to get an unqualified son of a Congressman into a position as dangerous as flying F-102 fighter jets--and he DIED. Is there anyone crazy enough--even the scandalously corrupt Ben Barnes--to do that? No, far more likely that Yalie Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard because he was good enough to do the job.)

So, the snippy elitist mantra that "Bush is a moron" doesn't play in Red country.

And we don’t get our news from the mainstream media. We get it from the Christian media. We get it from FoxNews. We get it from the Internet and from specialized publications. We don't trust information coming from an institution in which better than 80% of the reporters oppose our core beliefs.

So we don't care what happens on 60 Minutes, or how many Kitty Kellys might be out there waiting to hamstring the president. We heard early in the campaign of Dean backers' willingness to spread malicious rumors that Bush had taken part in an abortion. These rumors were expected to appear in pro-life chat rooms, a stealth attempt to deliberately spread falsehoods in cyberspace. The singer (I think he's a singer--I don't know much about modern music) Moby encouraged people to lie about the president if it would achieve the objective of defeating president Bush.

Now, we are told, the same smear-merchant gossip-monger that tried to claim our beloved President Reagan's wife had an affair with Frank Sinatra is trying to claim that our President used illegal drugs at Camp David while his dad was in the White House. And that he paid for some girl's abortion. Well, look at that. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?

We don't buy it.

And even if we did, it wouldn't matter. Because the other thing about us that the president can count on is that we believe in redemption. As far as we are concerned, what George W. Bush did before that change of heart when he was forty is irrelevant. We know he was a drunk (we don't usually buy "alcoholism" as a "disease." We consider it a sinful behavior, as destructive and as changeable as any other). We know he was a party boy, an unserious person uncertain of what to do with his life. Did he do harder drugs? Maybe. But that's the old nature.

We pick up George W. Bush when he becomes a born-again Christian. After the DUIs, and after any of the behavior the left is trying to insinuate he engaged in. We take him for who he is today. Jesus changed him. He became a serious person, a good husband and father, a strong Christian and a sober and thoughtful man.

And even beyond that, we take him as president for who he became after the terrorist attacks of September 11. His character as president was built on that mound of rubble from which he thundered through that megaphone and forged with the twisted steel of the Twin Towers. That moment of murder and mayhem is more than an event; it has become a part of his character. It shapes his destiny, and he knows it.

And so do we.

We believe in President Bush because he believes in God, the people of America, the family, and freedom. And he sees how they all fit together in the plan God has chosen him to fulfill.

God has a plan for each of us, not just the ones in "big power" positions. Every person on earth has a purpose for being here, a fact made evident by the fact that the Almighty God, Creator of the universe, the most powerful entity there is, cared enough for each one's potential to create them in the first place. Part of George W. Bush's destiny has been to carry the mantle of the presidency for four years in obedience to God. Another part is to engage this electoral battle again.

We have seen George W. Bush in the dark night of the morning of September 11. We have seen him rise above the ashes in the bright future he leads us toward as we continue to recover from attack and drive to ground those who would attack again. He has laid out his credentials, and he awaits our decision.

President Bush has his destiny. You have yours. I have mine. Part of your destiny, and mine, is to determine, in consultation with God, whom we most trust to shepherd this good nation into the bright future or the dark night that the next four years may bring

And the final poll to be taken will have a universe of One. Our "right track/wrong track" scores will be 100% or nothing. We won't be able to deny our voting record. We won't be able to spin it.

And it won't just be about the next four years.

So, please. Vote. But if you're a Christian, vote like one. Don't vote based on selfish interests and economics. Sure, the President has a great economic plan, too. But that's not what God's looking at.

Vote for the ones who can't speak for themselves, and vote for the values God gave us. Vote for the children yet unborn this president pledges to protect. Vote for the marriages yet unmade that this president will fight to preserve. Vote for the children yet to be adopted that the President, to no fanfare, held a summit meeting to help. Vote for the young who will yet grow old, whose lives this president will protect from involuntary euthanasia.

And vote for the billions of people of the world who labor yet without hope under despots and dictators and strong-men and tyrants. Whether liberty spreads through their lands will have a grave impact on how safe we can be. They can continue under the yoke of the self-serving bureaucrats of the UN and the murderous maniacs that have hijacked their religion or be released through the international spread of freedom in what the President has pre-emptively declared "Liberty's Century."

Vote as if billions of lives and the hope of the future depended on it.

Because they do.




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