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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.