A Country Ruled by Faith

Historian Garry Wills has a long article online at The New York Review of Books describing the incursion religion — in the form of GWB’s evangelical Christianity — has made into our government, from justice and social services to science and war. All of this is stuff that we know about but seeing it all laid out, the history of the last six years is pretty scarey stuff.

The article begins like this:

The head of the White House Office of Personnel was Kay Coles James, a former dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and a former vice-president of Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council,[2] the conservative Christian lobbying group that had been set up as the Washington branch of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. She knew whom to put where, or knew the religious right people who knew. An evangelical was in charge of placing evangelicals throughout the bureaucracy. The head lobbyist for the Family Research Council boasted that “a lot of FRC people are in place” in the administration.[3] The evangelicals knew which positions could affect their agenda, whom to replace, and whom they wanted appointed. This was true for the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and Health and Human Services�agencies that would rule on or administer matters dear to the evangelical causes.[4]

The White House was alive with piety. Evangelical leaders were in and out on a regular basis. There were Bible study groups in the White House, as in John Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Over half of the White House staff attended the meetings. One of the first things David Frum heard when he went to work there as a speech writer was: “Missed you at the Bible study.”[5]

One of the most frightening aspects of this administration has been its attack on women’s rights, most obviously in the form of reproductive choice.

• At Justice: do you remember how John Ashcroft drug his feet about investigating the incidents of white powder being sent to abortion clinics during the anthrax scare soon after the 9/11 attacks?
• Do you remember how he subpoenaed women’s hospital records in an attempt to enforce the ban on late term abortions?
• Do you remember how the FDA was pressured out of approving the morning after pill.
• Of course you remember how information about condoms disappeared from the CDC and abstinence programs became the only way to prevent venereal disease.
• The National Cancer Institute was not allowed to expose the false claim linking abortion to breast cancer.

The most shameful thing this administration did along these lines was to put an abortion gag order on foreign aid and to withdraw funding completely from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on the grounds that the money went to fund abortions.

But it’s not just in reproductive rights that this government has thrown its religious weight around. I recommend that you read the whole article.

A member of my family once said that she did not doubt George W. Bush’s conversion. He is a sincere Christian, she observed, but he is a Christian who has not grown in his faith. He is like a child.

Spoiled children are bullies.