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CHAPTER 1

Religion, politics, and the Bush administration

President George W. Bush delivered the 2003 State of the Union address before Congress and an estimated U.S. television audience of 62 million, emphasizing goals and accomplishments of his administration as well as challenges posed by terrorism and other perceived threats. In particular, Bush devoted just over half of the address to the administration's "war on terrorism" and the need to confront Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Near the end, the president turned to discussion of the national character of the United States and its purpose in the world, declaring that "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." He then added, "We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history. May He guide us now" (Bush, 2003a).

Four days later on the morning of February 1, the space shuttle Columbia exploded, killing all seven crewmembers. The president spoke to the nation from the White House that afternoon. Included in his comments were these words:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing." The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home. (Bush, 2003f)

The explicitly religious language in these two addresses, in combination with the administration's push for war in the Holy Land-rich Middle East, prompted a spate of popular analyses of Bush's religious faith. Newsweek magazine devoted its March 10 cover to "Bush and God," the Washington Post took up the topic with stories and columns, and New York Times columnists and guest writers weighed in. In August, Vanity Fair contributed "God and man in the White House," and in September Gentlemen's Quarterly offered "George W.'s personal Jesus". These writers and publications were of mixed mind regarding how much Bush's religious faith infused his politics and how it accorded with previous presidencies. It was clear, though, that this president's faith, and the implications of that faith for administration policy and global relations, had become a matter of considerable public interest. Bush's religious outlook was no longer merely a personal or even political matter; it had now been absorbed into the discourse of popular culture.

The argument here is that Bush's overtly religious language, what religion scholar Martin E. Marty termed "God talk" in one of the Newsweek articles, was only part of the story. The much more important and far less obvious matter was that the administration had converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political language to create a political fundamentalism that offered familiarity, comfort, and a palatable moral vision to the U.S. public in the aftermath of September 11. This book offers a definition of political fundamentalism and then examines its application by the Bush administration and the response of mainstream U.S. news media, focusing on the period between the 2001 terrorist attacks and major combat in the Iraq war in spring 2003.

One indication of the remarkable success of the Bush administration in this endeavor was the presidential images that served to bookend the 20 months analyzed here. On the evening of September 11, 2001, Bush was relatively unpopular for a first-year president, faced a skeptical, anxious, and confused public, and delivered a somber address from the Oval Office. On May 1, 2003, the president was riding high in public approval, had headed the nation through two military campaigns, and delivered a "Mission Accomplished" address with pomp and full regalia from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Indeed, in April 2003 a full 80 percent of the U.S. public said that the president "is a strong and decisive leader" (Gallup, 2003) — an all-time high in the polling organization's measure of this trait.

The leadership of Bush and the administration came with a significant price, however. Absent during the months from September 11 to the Iraq war in 2003 was a robust public discussion about the meaning of the terrorist attacks and the direction of the nation in its aftermath. The administration's political fundamentalism did much more than offer familiarity, comfort, and a moral stance; it also closed off a substantive societal — and international — conversation through a set of politically calculated, religiously grounded communication strategies. Instead of opening up the discourse and allowing a democratic dialogue to take place, Bush's rhetoric hijacked the discussion about the significance and implications of September 11, thereby denying to U.S. citizens important opportunities for national self-examination and a wide public hearing of diverse viewpoints — and also shutting out the world, much of which was extending unprecedented sympathy for U.S. citizens and the nation. Democracy was disregarded as the administration emphasized language and policies that limited potential avenues of political and social action, pushed incessantly for immediate adoption of administration policies by consistently raising the specter of another September 11, declared that U.S.-defined freedom and liberty were unchallengeable God-decreed norms for all peoples, and consistently silenced dissent by proclaiming it to be un-American and dangerous.

These administration communication approaches, in the midst and then aftermath of the September 11 crisis and substantially amplified by mainstream news media, effectively controlled public discourse and engendered a climate of nationalism in which the public treated presidential support as a patriotic duty and Congress felt compelled to adopt far-reaching domestic and foreign policies. Policies enacted between September 11 and spring 2003 included the U.S.A. Patriot Act, several economic recourses to a widely felt recession, the new Cabinet post of the Department of Homeland Security, a preemptive foreign policy doctrine, and the decision to apply this doctrine against Iraq — all of which occurred with far less public debate among political leaders, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, than the nation deserved. The administration had created a national mood of spiritual superiority under the guise of a just sovereignty. It was a moral stance underpinned by threat, fear, and paranoia, and carried the connotations of the apocalypse; that is, of course, if Bush's prescriptions for deliverance were not followed. The ultimate irony is that in combating the Islamic extremists responsible for September 11, the administration adopted, pursued, and engendered its own brand of political fundamentalism — one that, while clearly tailored to a modern democracy, nonetheless functioned ideologically in a manner similar to the version offered by the terrorists.

This book examines several domains of the U.S. political and news environments closely to understand these developments. The public's surge of support following the September 11 attacks, what political scientists have termed "rally round the flag" behavior, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to explain the president and administration's remarkable political successes in late 2001, throughout 2002, and early 2003. The president was given the opportunity to lead by the public and Congress, clearly; but he need look no further than his father's experiences in the early 1990s to know that his public standing would ultimately depend upon his ability to offer a resonant agenda in a convincing manner. For Bush the son to be successful, he would have to transform into a rhetorically compelling leader and he would need a nationalistic news media to widely amplify his message to the U.S. public. To be specific, the administration had to fashion and then set into motion what political scientist W. Lance Bennett has described as "propaganda, American style" (1988, p. 176), wherein the public is fed simple, stereotypical ideas from politicians via uncritical television and newspaper media — with the result that the public becomes either passive to or accepting of the message. The historical record suggests that Bush delivered and the mainstream press obliged.

This book focuses on how this occurred and what it means for the United States generally, and the U.S. political system in particular. The central argument is that the Bush administration offered a message ideally suited and strategically crafted for the times, one that leading news outlets consistently conveyed to a mass audience. Capitalizing upon the post-September 11 anomic state felt by many U.S. residents, the president and his administration brought a conservative religious worldview into the mainstream of U.S. politics. Religious worldviews, Rottenberg (2000) has argued, offer a "comprehensive faith-inspired vision about the nature of things and the meaning of history" (p. 403) that guides the establishment of norms, decision-making and behavior. The Bush administration's worldview is one grounded in religious fundamentalism — that is, it emphasizes absolutes, authority and tradition, and a divine hand in history and upon the United States. Such a worldview is disastrous for a democratic political system, for it mandates an ideological shift away from open discussion, publicly responsive leadership, and humility, toward authoritarianism, publicly unmindful leadership, and arrogance. All of these were present in the Bush administration after September 11.

It is necessary to acknowledge, though, that worldviews are not easily identified. They are often unconscious in nature and articulated by people in language that rarely sheds clear light on one's foundational values and assumptions about reality. Lakoff (1996) has argued:

[M]any people believe that they are consciously aware of their own worldviews and that all one has to do to find out about people's views of the world is to ask them. Perhaps the most fundamental result of cognitive science is that this is not true. What people will tell you about their worldview does not necessarily accurately reflect how they reason, how they categorize, how they speak, and how they act. (Lakoff, 1996, p. 36)

For this reason, research on political worldviews must establish clear criteria about what counts as evidence; Lakoff suggested analyses should be able to offer a unifying explanation for why and how individuals focus on certain topics and use certain words and phrases in arguing about these topics, and then should test this explanation by analyzing these individuals' communications because every "speech or book or article is a challenge to any would-be description" of a worldview (p. 30). This is the approach adopted here. The arguments offered about the administration's political fundamentalism are examined through systematic analysis of the public communications of the president and top administration officials (speeches, press conferences, congressional testimony, and so on) regarding several policies and goals between September 11, 2001, and the president's calling of an end to major U.S. combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003. In turn, to gain insight into how these communications disseminated and whether they ultimately were influential, news and editorial discourse of leading news organizations and public opinion polls are examined at several points during the same 20-month window.

MODERN POLITICAL FUNDAMENTALISM: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Political fundamentalism is offered and defined here as an intertwining of conservative religious faith, politics, and strategic communication. It is conceptualized as consistent with, yet substantially distinct in societal implication from, civil religion — what Bellah (1974) defined as "a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things" that "while not antithetical to, and indeed sharing much in common with, Christianity, was neither sectarian or in any specific sense Christian" (p. 29).

A common example of civil religion discourse in U.S. politics is the "God bless America" phrase that presidents have used to conclude national public addresses. Such language is present in the Bush administration, but so are several additional discourses that are far less common among U.S. political leaders and are suggestive of the central role that religion — conservative religious faith, to be exact — has served in this administration. Political fundamentalism also is of much greater strategic import than a basic presence of religious fundamentalism in U.S. politics, which, in the form of the "Christian Right" over recent decades, has drawn considerable national attention and strongly infused the Republican Party with a socially conservative agenda. This movement has labored, however, to successfully broaden its message into a political fundamentalism — that is, to convert a self-proclaimed Christian rectitude, via strategic language choices and communication approaches, into righteous political beliefs.

The Bush administration achieved such an adaptation following September 11, transforming a religious paradigm into a political one by choosing language and communication approaches that were structurally grounded in a conservative religious outlook but were political in content and application. Insight into this process can be gained by drawing upon the concept of "structures of feeling," offered by cultural theorist Raymond Williams as a way to understand how meanings and values become embedded in social, political, economic, and cultural environs over time. Williams emphasized that social and political leaders' abilities to shape the "specific feelings, specific rhythms" experienced on a daily basis by individuals is crucial to the process by which certain ideologies become "formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations" (1977, p. 132). The result of the Bush administration's policy and communication processes after September 11 was the formation of a worldview emanating from the White House that had deep and conservative religious roots yet felt political — and thus became more likely to be received favorably in the press and by the U.S. public. This is what is meant here by political fundamentalism.

It would be a mistake to think about political fundamentalism only in regard to the Bush administration, however. Political fundamentalism in a modern form has both a recent, albeit nascent, past and a likely future in the United States. The dramatic social changes and turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s prompted a number of U.S. residents to turn to the stability offered by fundamentalist churches and doctrines, bringing conservative Christianity into the "cultural mainstream" by the mid-1970s. At the same time, religious conservatives began to engage in substantive political action to address perceived declines in traditional morality and the nation's potential abdication of its role, in fundamentalists' view, as "the 'city on a hill' ordained by God as the light to the nations" (Ammerman, 1991, p. 40). Indeed, since it was founded, a conception of the United States as a "chosen nation" has been present among many Protestants. In 1976, however, religious conservatives gained a new sense of political efficacy when devout Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter was elected to the White House. Concerted political organizing followed, and by the early 1980s the new Christian Right, as the movement became known, had created "a sophisticated political operation that was far more extensive and effective than any of its predecessors" (Lienesch, 1993, p. 7).

At the center of this movement was the Moral Majority, an organization developed by three conservative political organizers and headed by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell. The Moral Majority's agenda focused on family-related issues, particularly abortion, prayer in schools, and matters of sexuality and gender roles, including staunch opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment for women. In time, fundamentalists began to develop a network of pastors, churches, television programs, newsletters, and seminars that generated considerable revenue, while also spreading and reinforcing a renewed engagement by Christian conservatives in politics. The Christian Right eventually opposed Carter over a number of matters, particularly his foreign policies. Falwell argued, for example, that the dissemination of Christianity to other peoples could not be carried out if other nations were communist — a perspective which provided a good reason to support a strong U.S. military and conservative foreign policy. In this context, Ronald Reagan emerged as the favorite son of religious conservatives. Reagan offered the mix of conservative social and foreign policies desired by fundamentalist leaders — in particular, opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and a conception of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" — and he exhibited open enthusiasm for Christian conservatives, to whom he said in 1980, "I endorse you" (quoted in Sawyer, 1984). Indeed, Reagan gave federal appointments to several leaders of the religious right.

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Excerpted from "God Willing?"
by .
Copyright © 2004 David Domke.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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