Quotes of the Day

It's only natural that a country founded by pilgrims would never let its politics wander far from its faith. As voters weigh the faith-based presidency of George W. Bush, they should note that his is hardly the first of its kind. George Washington ad-libbed the line "So help me God" at the end of his swearing-in, and Thomas Jefferson extolled Jesus as the most important philosopher in his life two centuries before Bush ever did. Abraham Lincoln, the President whom Bush says he admires most, called the Civil War God's punishment for the sin of slavery, and the presidency an office that drove him to his knees "by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go." William McKinley decided to invade the Philippines to "uplift and civilize and Christianize" its people. And Woodrow Wilson, a son and grandson of ministers, believed that God had ordained him to be President, inspiring Freud to wonder whether he had a Messiah complex.

And yet, and yet. . . The story of presidential faith throughout history is one of argument and mystery, as it was meant to be. A sense of independence was hard-wired into the nation so that all could worship as they pleased. Washington was a Freemason and a deist; no one knew what he truly believed. Jefferson read the Bible every day—even wrote his own version—but that was because he wanted to cut out all the miraculous parts, including the Resurrection. Lincoln worshipped faithfully but never joined a church, and was labeled an infidel by at least one congressional opponent. And it was Bill Clinton, viewed by his foes as the devil's disciple, of whom Billy Graham said in 1996, "He believes the Bible. He believes in Christ. He believes that he has been born again. He's got all the gifts an evangelist should have."

So what of the men who run for the presidency now, at a time when matters of faith have seldom played a more central role or divided voters more deeply? Church and state may be separate, but faith and politics are not. According to a Time poll, those who consider themselves "very religious" support Bush over John Kerry, 59% to 35%, while those who are "not religious" favor Kerry, 69% to 22%. Asked if a President should be guided by his faith when making policy, 63% of Democrats say no while 70% of Republicans say yes. The gap would probably be even wider if it were not for those black voters who tend to be socially conservative, attend church regularly but nonetheless vote for Democrats.

The battle is not so much between faiths as within them. The more traditionally religious that people say they are, the more often they pray and attend worship services, the more likely they are to vote for Bush, says Professor John Green of the University of Akron in Ohio. "Where we used to have antagonism between religious traditions, Catholics versus Protestants versus Jews," he says, "now what we have is liberal Protestants linking up with liberal Catholics and liberal Jews against an alliance of conservative Protestants, conservative Catholics and conservative Jews."

The Religion Gap presents both Bush and Kerry with special challenges. Kerry not only has to walk a line between his personal faith—that of the 11-year-old altar boy who used to write his sister to remind her to say her prayers—and the more secular leanings of his core voters. He also faces a small squad of conservative Catholic bishops who say they would refuse to serve Communion to politicians who, like Kerry, reject the church's teachings on issues such as abortion. One has gone so far as to suggest that any unrepentant Catholic who even votes for such a candidate should refrain from taking Communion (see following story).

For Bush, who promised to unite the nation after years of bitter partisan battle, the choices are also stark. As the country splits between the faithful and the secular, how does he continue to inspire the white Evangelicals, who support him in overwhelming numbers, while not alienating the independents or further inflaming the Democrats so that their turnout rises as well? And more important than the politics is the policy. How, for instance, does a devout President rally a country against an enemy that claims to fight in God's name without implying that this is a Holy War? "For every person who likes the way he talks about his faith and America, there's another who's repulsed by it," observes Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

All of which raises the question, Just what is the right amount of piety in the Oval Office? Americans have shown they want a believer in the White House, but how much do they care about what he believes in? Do they want faith to affect policy? Or do they just share a conviction, as Presidents all through history have affirmed, that the Oval Office is a lonely and humbling place whose occupants need all the help they can get.

Bush's Religious Journey
America is among the most religious, and the most religiously diverse, countries on earth, and you can argue that those two things go together. Competition keeps old faiths fresh and new ones growing, and the freedom to choose among them is etched in constitutional stone. So in a nation where 19 in 20 people say they believe in God and nearly two-thirds call religion very important in their lives, there arises a sprawling market of creeds and cults and congregations in which people like to shop. The Dalai Lama's books are best sellers; there are Metaphysical Episcopalians and Unitarian Universalist Pagans and, a bit further down the road, the Nudist Christian Church of the Blessed Virgin Jesus.

Politicians tend to campaign somewhere in mid-mainstream. In the past election, voters could choose between a candidate who called himself born again, argued for more federal funding for faith-based programs and promised to consider in policymaking the pop mantra "WWJD: What Would Jesus Do?" That candidate was Al Gore. Or they could vote for Bush, who was born to East Coast Episcopalian parents, was sent to Presbyterian Sunday school in Texas, converted when he married a Methodist, and was renewed in faith thanks to the evangelical witness of Billy Graham—a fairly typical American spiritual journey.

Bush is also typical in coming to Jesus as an adult in part through the intimate, therapeutic machinery of a men's Bible study. At a time in his life when his business was failing (the early 1980s saw the collapse of the oil industry in Midland, Texas) and his marriage was strained by his heavy drinking, Bush did not find the strength he needed in the emotionally austere rituals with which he had been raised or in the Sunday-morning services he and Laura attended regularly. Instead, he relied on a series of personal encounters, small group study and, most important, in the summer of 1985, a fateful beach walk with Graham—a man, Bush recalled in his memoirs, who "didn't make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved."

Once in office, the coping reflexes that brought Bush there have only grown stronger. He could trust Vladimir Putin because he looked into his soul, not consult his Secretary of State about going to war and not need to look for strength from his father, the former President, because he was consulting "a higher father," as he famously told Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack. It is at this point that his faith becomes more than a matter of conscience for some critics, who wonder whether his particular set of spiritual instincts both lift him up and close him off to conflicting points of view—"bypass the mind and go straight to the bloodstream," as Princeton professor Elaine Pagels suggests. "I think that part of the blockage is that he thinks, I've experienced the truth in religion because it's changed my life, and I don't need to know a variety of other things because I know what's true for me," argues Charles Kimball, a Baptist minister and professor of religion at Wake Forest University. In other words, the approach of a Christian in Bible study searching for the small inarguable nugget of scriptural truth that will enable him to understand God's love for him, ignore all distractions and stay sober, may not be the best one for deciding what to do next in Iraq.

As in so many other aspects of his presidency, Bush's faith played different roles before and after 9/11. The original promise to empower faith-based social-service groups, a core piece of Bush's domestic policy, was very much in keeping with the self-help trajectory of his spiritual journey and that of millions of others as well. In a country in which Christian authors write diet books (to help you get Slim for Him) and addiction books (Holy Smokes! Inspirational Help for Kicking the Habit), Bush won broad support when he argued—to the dismay of church/state watchdogs—that drug-treatment and prison-fellowship programs that have good track records should not be denied federal funds simply because their methods are faith-based.

Administration critics see a religious agenda that extends beyond compassionate-conservative outreach in the judges Bush has appointed and in his decisions to limit federal funding of stem-cell research, promote abstinence education over condom distribution and deny funds to international family-planning groups. But many of these were disputes that any Republican President could have had with his Democratic opponents. It was only after Sept. 11, when Bush found himself leading a shaken country through a dark valley, that the old left-right debates gave way to something altogether different. Now the debate was less about personal faith changing lives. It was about America's destiny and Bush's view of God's plan for him and for the U.S. a war between good and evil Politicians and voters alike may be guided by faith, but that does not mean they will be led in the same direction. Cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion and school prayer now coexist with an even more pressing and divisive one: a war whose necessity is increasingly disputed and whose context, like it or not, is seen by some as a clash between faiths. However often Bush defends Islam as a religion of peace, his case for war now rests less on high-fiber geo-political arguments than on the suggestion that the 3rd Infantry Division be used as an instrument of God's will to share the gifts of liberty with all people. Kerry, in contrast, has avoided the moral language of people's God-given desire for democracy. "I have always said from Day One that the goal ... here is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy," he said in April in New York City. Even though their strategies are increasingly similar—bring in the U.N., stay the course, press ahead with reconstruction—the rhetoric and rationale behind the strategy sound very different.

Whenever a President has called the country to arms, it has been in the name of a larger good and a higher calling. But the argument is especially freighted when the U.S. is confronting an Arab world that is already deeply suspicious of its intentions. "People don't want a President to think that every important decision has a stamp of God's approval and that God is always on his side," says ethicist Cromartie. "I think people want their Presidents to be pious but not self-righteously so. So there's a paradox, isn't there? A President has to seem to be relying on God's wisdom but not acting like all his decisions are God's decisions." It's the difference between praying that you're right and believing that prayer makes you right. The risk, for anybody, is in conscripting God so that policy becomes inarguable. In his eulogy for his father last week, Ron Reagan Jr. noted that while President Ronald Reagan was a deeply religious man, he was also a humble one. "He never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage," he said. "After he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate."

Over the past nearly three years, Bush has appeared to invoke a divine mandate as he promises to "rid the world of the evildoers." But at the same time, he explicitly rejects the notion that he is waging a holy war. "This is not a clash of religions," he said recently in Colorado. "The faith of Islam teaches moral responsibility that ennobles men and women and forbids the shedding of innocent blood. Instead, this is a clash of political visions." That was not the first time Bush had trod carefully to avoid a tone of Christian triumphalism. He has consistently referred to Islam as a religion of peace "hijacked" by the terrorists, has been host to Ramadan dinners at the White House and has annoyed Evangelicals by declaring that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. The morning Saddam was captured Bush skipped church out of concern that his presence might be seen as gloating. In general, he avoids using words like Lord, preferring Almighty and Providence.

But at some point he risks becoming trapped in contradiction when he tries to separate the jihadists from the God in whose name they fight. Many Americans who support the war on terrorism do so because they view al-Qaeda and its ilk as an implacable enemy anchored in a radical, though by no means typical, Muslim faith, willing to strap on explosives and blow up a nightclub because of a vision of heaven and earth and right and wrong that we may not understand but can't just ignore. It is as though Bush can't allow the possibility that the enemy is motivated by its understanding of God's will lest his critics note that he believes the same of himself. So he portrays the terrorists as heirs of the Nazis and communists: totalitarian in vision, cynical by nature, manipulative in their appeal, certainly not devout. They "couch their language in religious terms. But that doesn't make them religious people," he told a group of religion writers late last month. "I think they conveniently use religion to kill." There are sound, practical reasons for resisting the Holy War framework, but winning a war also depends on knowing your enemy.

A Nation Divinely Divided
There are still five months left until Election Day, but the path is clear. "This is rapidly becoming the most religiously infused political campaign in modern history," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and adds that both parties are responsible. Even the irreverent Howard Dean rushed off to go to church with Jimmy Carter the day before the Iowa caucuses. "Americans want political leaders to have a moral center, but I do not think that Americans expect the President to also be their national pastor," says Lynn.

The truth may be more complicated, particularly about where that moral center derives. In recent years, argues Professor Green, voters have become much more comfortable with the place of religious ideas in the political arena. "We began to see the upsurge of religious rhetoric in the late 1990s," he says. "There was this real sense of moral malaise in the country, among liberals and conservatives alike. They might not be able to agree on the morality, but they all agreed we didn't have enough of it." The Columbine shootings, the impeachment battle, the corporate crookery all piled up and "led many if not most Americans to conclude that the country had lost its moral compass," says Green.

That may explain the response of voters who praise Bush for his strength and leadership, regardless of where he's leading. "I don't agree with him on everything," admits David Cook, 52, a lay leader at the Lawrence Street Primitive Methodist Church in Lowell, Mass., who says Bush's failings matter less than his motives. "He's not the Messiah, but he follows the Messiah." Charly Gullett, who owns a gun shop in Prescott, Ariz., reaches the same conclusion, coming from the opposite direction. "I'm not a believer in God," he says, "but I recognize that faith is a morally guiding force in most people's lives. I believe President Bush has brought honor back to the White House because of his faith. I don't see the religious community being upset with him. I see the nonreligious community being upset with him because they see faith as a threat to liberal thought. There's nothing about Bush's faith that makes me uncomfortable."

Raise the question, and the argument starts. Some see Bush as sincerely guided by principles higher than politics, while others think he's hunting for votes in the pews. Some say they are proud that he is restoring America's moral leadership in the world, while others say they are embarrassed by America's moral arrogance. His talk of love and liberty brings the country together—unless it is pulling it apart. Fully 85% of Bush's supporters say his faith makes him a strong leader, according to Time's poll; 65% of Kerry's say it makes Bush close-minded. "I respect him for having faith," says Tim Baer, a religious-studies major at the University of Oklahoma who wants to go to a seminary and become an Episcopal priest. "I just disagree with how he uses his faith as a President. It's dividing people."

Bush has said as much himself. "My job is to make sure that, as President, people understand that in this country you can worship any way you choose," he told the religion writers. "And I'll take that a step further. You can be a patriot if you don't believe in the Almighty. You can honor your country and be as patriotic as your neighbor." But Bush also sees a change in how people respond to him since he was last on the campaign trail—although that may say more about the times we are living in than anything he has said or done. When he works the rope line, he says, "the thing they say different now than four years ago is, 'Mr. President, we pray for you.' Maybe every other person says it, or at least every third. And it matters a lot. It has made being the President of the United States a heck of a lot easier to be sustained by the prayers of the people and my own personal prayers."

In time, history will weigh the fruits of his labors. Did this President leave the country better off or worse, richer or poorer, kinder or crueler, safer or in greater danger? But that is not Bush's concern. "A President shouldn't worry about how history will judge him," he says. And he gives every indication that it is God's judgment that concerns him. But that comes with a promise of forgiveness that history can easily withhold.

• NANCY GIBBS