Bush Exploits Religion for Political Goals

President George W. Bush makes a big show about his religion and how his religious beliefs motivate him, even to the point of invading Iraq on orders from God. To what extent, however, are Bush's religious pronouncements really just masks to hide or justify his political agenda?

In the Boston Globe, James Carroll writes:

The Republican attack on Kerry's religion goes hand in glove with George W. Bush's exploitation of religion for narrow political purposes. Bush salts his public statements with religious references as a way of preempting challenge... If Jesus is his political philosopher, or if the heavenly father is his adviser on Iraq, then Bush has to explain neither his despotic politics nor his disastrous Iraq policy.

Bush sponsors "faith based" social projects to disguise his agenda of dismantling structures of government that provide basic human needs. Bush cites religion as a way of justifying a politics of exclusion -- wanting America to be a place that bans gay people, keeps women subservient, suspects religious "outsiders" (whether Muslims or atheists). Such religion is the ground of the "us versus them" spirit that defines Bush's foreign policy.

Bush uses religion to justify his penchant for violence, which is manifest in nothing so much as his glib use of the word "evil." Once an enemy is demonized, transcendent risks can be taken to destroy that enemy. We see this apocalyptic impulse being played out in Iraq today. If in order to obliterate "evil" it proves necessary to obliterate a whole society -- so be it. A divinity seen as willing the savage murder of an only son as a way of defeating evil is a divinity that blesses an America that destroys Iraq to save it.

Carroll describes this as the twisting of religion, but he should know as well as anyone that this is precisely how religion has manifested itself through the millennia — especially Christianity. Perhaps it is a twisting of what he thinks religion should be, and that's fine, but it's quite a bit different from saying that there is some pure "essence" of "real" religion that is being twisted by tactics like the above.

The truth of the matter is that for every good thing about religion, there is something bad as well. Using religion for the sake of violence or hatred is just as much "natural" as is using it for love or generosity. That's how religion always has been and always will be. Denying that it is "real" religion commits the same "sins" that Carroll attributes to Bush: it's a demonization of an "enemy" in order to preempt challenges (to religion itself).

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