There’s a lengthy article in this weekend’s Financial Times about George W. Bush and religion. The whole thing is worth a look, but a couple of sentences really caught my attention:

“Bush’s moral clarity unnerves people in Europe, an essentially post-religious continent that views as suspect or distasteful people who treat the political podium as a pulpit.”

Hmmm, yes and no. Britain’s liberal intelligentsia is currently trembling with excitement over Rowan Williams, the clownish Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams, a moral cretin and intellectual lightweight, is currently using his pulpit as, well, a political podium to bien pensant cheers. In addition, there are, of course, a good number of European-based Islamic clerics who use their position to push a political agenda. The response from those supposedly secular Continentals? Silence.

If I believed in reincarnation, I’d be calling now for the return of Voltaire. Is it too late to clone him?

Another sentence from the same piece:

“To the increasingly secular societies of Europe, Bush’s firm belief in Christ unsettles humanist non-believers who suspect that unparalleled military might and a born-again Christian moral conviction make for a gung-ho superpower, over-confident both in the justice of its course [sic] and the promise of a righteous victory.”

What nonsense. Alleged skepticism over Bush’s “firm belief in Christ” is just an excuse to enable Europeans to continue their endless moral equivocation. To take one counter-example, Winston Churchill was able to know a “righteous” cause when he saw it, and he had, I suspect, not a scrap of religious conviction. He’d be disgusted by the Continent’s current stance.

And rightly so.