Faith-Based Warrior
Bush believes the war on terrorism has a spiritual dimension.

January 30, 2002 1:15 p.m.

eorge Bush took a lot of criticism when in a Republican primary debate in Iowa — two years and ages ago — he said that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ.

Liberals jumped on him for a supposedly nascent violation of the separation of church and state. Even some conservatives knocked him for such an unreflective answer and one that had nothing to do with public life.

I thought the critics were over-wrought, but shared some of the worries about Bush personalizing everything. Only now do I realize how profound and important that answer was.

Bush is not just on a mission these days, as so many observers say, he is convicted, convinced deep in his heart that God put him in the White House for this moment and that God will bless our cause.

When he says, as he did last night, that "even in tragedy, especially in tragedy, God is near," it's not just nice rhetoric, but a truth he lives — and leads — by.

This is what the gleam in Bush's eye is all about: it's not just determination, not just anger, not just sincerity, but all of those things tempered and elevated by faith.

Bush, I suspect, sees himself as a spiritual warrior. At a town-hall meeting in California a few weeks ago, Bush was asked what people could pray about, both for him and for the country.

Bush said they should pray "that there's a shield of protection, so that if the evil ones try to hit us again, that we've done everything we can, physically, and that there is a spiritual shield that protects the country."

A few months ago that statement would have elicited guffaws from the press corps. This time it went basically unnoticed.

Bush's answer showed that he believes the war on terrorism doesn't just have military, diplomatic, and financial dimensions, but also a spiritual dimension. The war, then, is his most important faith-based initiative.

Bush says over and over that the war on terrorism is a fight between good and evil. He means it, not just in the sense that it is a battle between things we like and things we don't, but in an even deeper Tolkienesque sense. For Bush, this is a battle between light and darkness that we almost don't have a public vocabulary for anymore.

Although Bush is trying to revive a part of it. As John J. Miller points out, Bush used the word "evil" last night five times. If I were to pull out one phrase that was the moral and intellectual heart of the speech it would be "evil is real."

What a strange thing for a president to say in a forum usually devoted to long lists of popular programs. But it was somehow comforting to hear him say it.

Why? Because it is true.

Can you imagine Bill Clinton making evil the centerpiece of a State of the Union? I doubt it, especially since he had to devote so much of his presidency to a kind of post-modernist relativism in which nothing is ever quite what it seems (not words, not sex, not promises).

In this, Bill Clinton captured something important in the culture. Absolute judgment of the sort that is inherent in the word "evil" was out of style, so the word had fallen into desuetude or lived on only as a campy word of mockery or fun (e.g. "Dr. Evil" in the Austin Powers's movies).

But Bush seems instinctively to understand evil. I imagine this is not because — say, like Winston Churchill — he is widely read or has a wide experience with the world. It can only be because of his faith.

In that sense, we should all be grateful that Christ is his favorite political philosopher. If God has a plan for Bush, so far it appears to be a pretty good one.