Gary Wills takes on Bush and the Xtianists
posted at 12:32 pm on October 31, 2006 by Bryan
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KP sends along a link to this article by Gary Wills, famous for being a former conservative who now attacks conservatives. Wills blazed the path that Andrew Sullivan has been treading for the past couple of years.
The thrust of the article is that George W. Bush is a religious zealot without peer as president in American history and that he has packed the government with like-minded wingnuts. Wills ought to get together with David Kuo and compare notes. Wills believes Bush to be a Methodist mufti; Kuo thinks Bush is an evangelical poseur and the apparent religiosity of the administration is a sham. As for Sullivan, it’s clear to me after reading Wills for the first time in a while that Sullivan isn’t merely treading the path Wills blazed. Sullivan is borrowing Wills’ entire worldview. There is no surer path to MSM praise than to have a pedigree that includes public rejection of conservative values you once held. For Sullivan that’s doubly so, given the purple poetry he once wrote to George W. Bush.
But back to Wills. The entire article is rife with the kind of paranoid thinking that typifies the left nowadays. Conspiracies to fill the government with Christians abounds, as though that’s an evil agenda in and of itself. Wills begins with a curious comparison between GW Bush and Ike, both of whom accepted Christianity relatively late in life and both of whom were led to faith by that dangerous radical preacher, Rev. Billy Graham.
George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham’s ministry to the powerful. He was converted during a stroll with Graham on his father’s Kennebunkport compound. It is true that Dwight Eisenhower was guided to baptism by Graham. But Eisenhower was a famous and formed man, the principal military figure of World War II, the leader of NATO, the president of Columbia University—his change in religious orientation was just an addition to many prior achievements. Bush’s conversion at a comparatively young stage in his life was a wrenching away from mainly wasted years. He joined a Bible study culture in Texas that was unlike anything Eisenhower bought into.
So which was it–late, or early? And why the comparison to the steely Eisenhower? Mostly because Ike’s seen these days as a “good Republican” by the left, while Bush is the personification of evil. Ronald Reagan gets a similar treatment by Wills, and even U. S. Grant comes in for some faint praise, leading to the interesting thought that perhaps in the world of the hard left, the only good Republican is a dead one. Wills can’t find it within himself to praise any living Republicans in this piece.
As an aside, I happened to work in George W. Bush’s NASA for several years. I worked in Clinton’s NASA before that, and Clinton’s Air Force before that. There were good appointments and bad appointments by both presidents, some based on merits and some on ideology and by both presidents, but any fair minded observer would be hard pressed to find a better person to lead NASA than Michael Griffin, whom Bush appointed last year. And during the transition from Clinton to Bush, there was remarkably little turnover in the agency’s upper echelons. There wasn’t enough turnover in my opinion, as Clinton-appointees used their posts to thwart the Bush administration from the first day it took office.
But back to Wills. Given the chance, I would like to ask him a simple question: Do Christians deserve a place at the table in American politics? Yes or no will do. Qualifiers count as a “No.”
To me, it’s simple. There are between 50 and 100 million evangelicals in this country, depending on how you count and which questions you ask. That’s an awful lot of people to discount, and if you’re going strictly by numbers, it’s foolish for people like Wills (and Sullivan) to continue to demonize us. Put us up against any individual voting bloc and we outnumber them. This is a republic, where majorities tend to vote in the government they want. Demonizing us, as Wills does in this article and Sullivan does every single day, turns off millions of voters en masse.
If we don’t deserve a place at the table, and it’s clear that Wills thinks we don’t, what are we to do except keep voting against everything Wills wants? Which means that we keep voting against his ideology and his party. And as he insists on demonizing us, we just become more convinced that we have to keep voting against Wills and his party in order to protect ourselves. That increases turnout among the very voters Wills despises, whether the Republicans happen to be any good or not. Additionally, there are evangelicals in both political parties. But if Wills’ secularist, conspiracy-minded worldview dominates one party, pretty soon the evangelicals in that party will defect to the other one. Who wants to support a party that serves as the base of operations for people who despise your core beliefs?
At any rate, read the article if you have a few minutes to kill. Wills engages in historical revisionism, line-blurring and mind-reading throughout, all to build a rather flimsy case that George W. Bush is doing anything that his predecessors haven’t. Unless you think Wills is right, and that no other president has appointed people to government who share his own views. What has been standard American politics for centuries is, to Wills, worth several hundred words of scorn and whispers.
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Is this a requirement of all Republican presidents?
So if I run and I’m jewish, do I have to be guided through baptism by Graham?
Defector01 on October 31, 2006 at 12:41 PM
Quick! Somebody gets Harold “Republicans only fear God” Ford, Jr.’s opinion on this! As the premier theologian of our day, I’m sure his comments will be insightful. (Probably on the order of: “So how about this religion thing?”)
ReubenJCogburn on October 31, 2006 at 12:58 PM
Bryan,
I go to Oregon State University, where I just got a job copy editing for our school newspaper. It’s almost completely liberal, and last week they printed this little number, which dovetails with people like Sullivan and Wills.
Structrued religion and society’s reaction
PaisleyCow on October 31, 2006 at 1:06 PM
Structured*, not structrued.
PaisleyCow on October 31, 2006 at 1:07 PM
HAHAHAHAHAA that’s great.
And yes, you will have to be baptized to get the Republican nod. One of those unwritten rule things. Kind of like you have to pretend you like poor people to be a Democrat.
Enrique on October 31, 2006 at 1:11 PM
PaisleyCow: Interesting article. The author is not only a sophomore in English, but in life as well. He struck me as exemplifying the type of college student who really ought to learn how to think, research, construct an argument, and avoid parroting fashionable opinion before he begins bloviating about matters about which he clearly knows nothing.
Athanasius on October 31, 2006 at 1:16 PM
I’m outraged! Where is the expected Catholic bashing?
Godless liberals!
DannoJyd on October 31, 2006 at 1:22 PM
You mean to tell me that George Bush and his cronies filled all kinds of government positions with people who agree with his beliefs?
Scandalous! After Clinton set such an inclusive example by making sure his cabinet and agencies were staffed with a number of conservative evangelicals proportionate to their population, one would think Bush would surround himself with secular humanists, wouldn’t one?
/sarc off
NellE on October 31, 2006 at 1:26 PM
Danno,
Let’s elect a conservative Catholic in ‘08, and we’ll see bashing that will make Bush abuse look like playful teasing.
NellE on October 31, 2006 at 1:28 PM
“Ike’s seen these days as a ‘good Republican’ by the left, while Bush is the personification of evil.”
It wasn’t always that case–despite (a) having successfully planned the monumental D-Day Invasion and (b) bringing World War II to a successful conclusion, Ike was portrayed as an intellectual lightweight by the left of the time (with Stevenson as his Brianac superior) in very much the same fashion that Reagan and Bush #43 would be.
Ed Driscoll on October 31, 2006 at 1:42 PM
Yup, that’s entirely true Ed. The left castigated Reagan 24/7 when he was president, only to use him as a basis point to denigrate Bush now. Which is why it seems to me that to leftists like Wills, the only good Republican is a dead Republican.
Bryan on October 31, 2006 at 1:48 PM
NeIIE
Run a Jewish presidental candidate (me :-D)
I want to see if they have the gaul to call me a fake jew or a pawn of hte Christians.
Defector01 on October 31, 2006 at 2:04 PM
I never trusted Wills. I rremember when he was both a talking head and a speech writer for Regan. There was a clear conflict of interest in that he was running commentary on the speech he wrote with out pointing out that he wrote them. Highly unethical.
EF on October 31, 2006 at 2:13 PM
PaisleyCow,
I Lived in Corvallis for 2 years. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t handle the daily 5pm protesters at the courthouse and this was BEFORE we went into Iraq.
Leave now and regain your sanity! Central Oregon is beautiful, but there’s somethin’ in the water.
-FFOG
Fogpig on October 31, 2006 at 2:19 PM
Defector01–trivia: the USA has already produced a Jewish president–a lady from Chicago who was elected president of Guyana in 1997 or ‘98. Kind of interesting.
-Barnabas (born-again Christian)
Barnabas on October 31, 2006 at 3:21 PM
I’m not being snarky, but is there a series of questions that help determine if a person is evangelical or not?
If so, I’d love to read them.
EFG on October 31, 2006 at 4:08 PM
And Golda Meir grew up in Milwaukee before emigrating to (the British Mandate of) Palestine in 1921, and eventually became the first female Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974).
ReubenJCogburn on October 31, 2006 at 4:25 PM
Fogpig, as a followup, I may soon be fired from my position. I made a stupid move and anonymously criticized the paper on its own website. Actually, in the comments section, I’m the one who wrote the ‘Not an idiot’ stuff. The editor in chief figured out it was me. He emailed me suggesting that I shouldn’t do that if I don’t want to be fired (which he rightly ought to tell me). Anyway, I just emailed him back, listing some of my concerns, including the insanely liberal bias of the paper.
We’ll see soon enough if they want me at work tomorrow night.
PaisleyCow on October 31, 2006 at 4:38 PM
Fogpig, as a followup, I may soon be fired from my position. I made a stupid move and anonymously criticized the paper on its own website. Nobody there listens when I say anything, so I turned to the website. Actually, in the comments section, I’m the one who wrote the ‘Not an idiot’ stuff. The editor in chief figured out it was me. He emailed me suggesting that I shouldn’t do that if I don’t want to be fired (which he rightly ought to tell me). Anyway, I just emailed him back, listing some of my concerns, including the insanely liberal bias of the paper.
We’ll see soon enough if they want me at work tomorrow night.
In any case, Corvallis may be beyond saving…
PaisleyCow on October 31, 2006 at 4:39 PM
…actually, that *WAS* a criticism levelled at the Bush Administration once upon a time not long ago…and against his choice of Supreme Court justices…insufficient diversity of opinion….
…that coming from the “party of intellectual diversity”…ask Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller about that one….
Puritan1648 on October 31, 2006 at 5:34 PM
All Christians are supposed to be evangelicals, born again too. Those terms properly belong to all believers, not just some….
ScottG on October 31, 2006 at 5:41 PM
…props to Bryan for again finding an interesting thing to chat about…and also, if I may be so bold, for yet again enlivening the blogosphere with some pretty well-crafted prose and reason of his own….
/suckup
…I could only get about 10 paragraphs through the Wills piece before my gag-reflex kicked in. Sorry….
I want to know something: what dirty little personal habit does Wills practice which he feels that Christianity (and Christians) would A) prohibit, and B) talk about behind his back.
We know about Sullivan and his habits. In fact, I for one would like him to stop being so frank about his dirty little habits. I already know enough, Andy…you’ve made it crystal clear.
So…evangelicals are to be disenfranchised. That would go handily into the Lib/Dem/MSM/bitter-former-conservative-pundit campaign of redefining the electorate by paring down just who should and should not be considered a citizen. Conservatives are out. People who support the present or any subsequent wars we’ll be foreced into by Leftist navel-gazing are out. Blacks who don’t know what’s good for them are definitely out. Oh…a nod to Sullivan…homosexuals like Tammy Bruce are definitely out…HERETIC!
…so, my new Democrat/John-Kerry-esque-arrogance-flavored slogan du jour comes into play:
“Democracy is too important a business to be entrusted to peasants.”
Puritan1648 on October 31, 2006 at 5:44 PM
Bryan: Excellent commentary! You’re right: they can try to marginalize the evangelicals, but they really only hurt themselves in the end. Most Americans consider themselves religious in some fashion. That’s a vast majority of people to overlook in the form of government the ilks of Sullivan or Wills would wish to form.
thedecider on November 1, 2006 at 12:35 AM
EFG, what’s being said here is that the numbers you end up with depend on the questioning format. Some people decide you qualify as evangelical if you go to church more than twice a month, others if you go more than once a week, still others based on how closely you believe the Bible, or a myriad of other inappropriate criteria. It tells more about the characterization of Christians by the pollsters or analysts, than anything about Christians themselves.
Yes, by Scripture all Christians ought to be evangelical. However, sadly, many of them today don’t know that. A great many Christians today think that since their “conversion experience” they can just go on having a “normal” life with no expectations of service to God. But that slides off-topic.
Bryan is on the nose regarding his analysis of Wills’ spew, and that Sullivan has done no more than grab hold of the ride. Sullivan pontificates about how Christianists (his slur against any evangelical who thinks there are absolutes to life that Sully disagrees with) are all wrong and don’t really serve God because they can’t really know Him. Then he tells us all to vote Democrat or abstain, because this is how we’ll save the conservative movement in America.
With a nod to Tony Blankley’s column of October 25th, voting against the Republicans who are closer (if not close enough) to your own ideals to “teach them a lesson”, fails on its face because teaching them the lesson fires them from their job, and gives it to the Democrats who will not think a lesson was offered.
Voting for the greater of two evils to punish the lesser, as if we the voters are indignant parents trying to spank the naughty RINOs, will put incumbency in the hands of worse than RINOs. And the suggestion that there isn’t enough difference between RINOs and Democrats must be answered with:
- A ground military action underway with troops at hazard
- As-yet pending judicial appointments that need up/down votes
- Border security
- Immigration enforcement
- Anti-terrorism
- North Korea
- Iran
- Israel
And for the Christians among us, factor in the indifference toward us from RINOs, compared with active contempt and spite from the socialists.
Freelancer on November 1, 2006 at 1:34 AM
Volunteer to get out the Vote!!!!
sonnyspats1 on November 1, 2006 at 2:29 AM