THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GEORGE W. BUSH

“Faith changes lives,” Bush said. “I know, because it has changed mine. I grew up in the church, but I didn’t always walk the walk. There came a point when I felt something was missing.” Through conversations with Billy Graham and Graham’s inspiring example, Bush continued, he was prompted “to search my heart and recommit my life to Jesus Christ. The Lord has made a big difference in my personal life, and in my public life as well.”

Scores of reporters and TV crews covered the announcement of the exploratory committee, a major step toward a full-blown Bush campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Though the event was choreographed and predictable, Bush having revealed a few days earlier what he’d be announcing, that kept no one away. In fact, a picture of the 10 members of the Bush committee appeared the next day on the front page of the New York Times (above the fold and in color). Meanwhile, the church appearances attracted little media attention, except a short film clip on This Week on ABC and a few stories in the Texas press. National political reporters didn’t bother with the seemingly non-political sermons, even by the GOP presidential front-runner. They should have paid more attention.

Religion is far more important to Bush than is widely recognized. Around the age of 40, he had a midlife crisis that led him to reinvigorated faith. In private, he talks now about his “personal relationship with Christ.” He gave up drinking and began reading the Bible daily. He joined a Christian men’s group. His life became more disciplined, his business and then his political career more focused. In the 1990s, he has fostered friendships with Christian pastors, including TV evangelist James Robison of Ft. Worth and Tony Evans of Dallas, a black preacher renowned for his stirring talk at the Promise Keepers rally in Washington in 1997. Bush has become a strong believer in prayer. When Democratic governor Ann Richards conceded defeat in 1994, Bush gathered a dozen friends in a circle in a hotel room, clasped hands, and prayed. Then he went before his supporters and gave a victory speech.

Religion is also an important political tool for Bush. His evangelical Christianity gives him a solid credential as a social conservative. For someone known to the evangelical community as a social conservative — Gary Bauer, for instance — talking about personal faith is superfluous, and Bauer rarely dwells on the subject. But for Bush, Ivy League-educated and suspected of moderate tendencies, emphasizing his faith is helpful, and Bush does exactly that. Fervently expressed, his faith serves as a proxy for other social-conservative positions. It may spare him the need to endorse all of them specifically, including opposition to homosexual rights. And his brand of Christianity differentiates him from his father, former president George Bush, an Episcopalian. Governor Bush attends a Methodist church.

Because Bush’s faith appears to be genuine, it defuses questions about his character. Reporters are obsessed with uncovering embarrassing (or worse) incidents from Bush’s pre-Christian life, but he is probably inoculated with Christians and perhaps with everyone else. As long as the conduct isn’t shocking, all he’ll have to say is that his life has changed dramatically since then. He’s a new person, and the earlier, irresponsible conduct is irrelevant to the pattern of his life as a Christian now. And his words are likely to be truthful.

That won’t satisfy the press, just as his current description of his wilder days (“When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible”) hasn’t. Bush told me that judging his prior lifestyle on a playboy scale of 10, “reality’s about a 3 or 4.” In public statements, Bush has declared his unblemished faithfulness to his wife, Laura. “I’ve been a loyal husband, a dedicated dad, and when I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the dignity and integrity of the office of governor, I have done so,” he said. But he’s declined to answer questions about whether he ever took drugs or smoked marijuana. “I’m not going to itemize my mistakes.”

Last summer, Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News found a Texas Air National Guard document from Bush’s file — he was a fighter pilot in the late ’60s — with the “arrest record” section whited out. Rumors about a drug arrest spread. As it turned out, Bush had been arrested while a student at Yale. He and members of his fraternity had drunkenly “liberated” a Christmas wreath from a hotel to decorate the frat house. His press secretary, Karen Hughes, refers to it as “the infamous Christmas wreath caper.”

Bush talks comfortably about his midlife crisis and spiritual awakening. A mutual friend had told him I was interested in the subject, and he began filling me in on the role of Christ in his life even before I could ask a question. His story is not quite as vivid as that of some born-again Christians, who tell of their prior, sinful life in rich detail. Bush merely says his life lacked meaning, there was “something missing inside my soul,” and he drank too much. “I was not an alcoholic,” he insists. At the time, he was in the oil business in Midland, Texas, and not doing very well. Bush’s favorite hymn, by the way, is “Amazing Grace,” which tells of a “wretch” who is saved.

In the summer of 1985, he and his family visited Kennebunkport while Billy Graham was a guest at the Bush home. Bush and Graham had long talks. Graham asked if Bush was right with God, and Bush said he didn’t think so. “I asked him a lot of questions about God and Jesus Christ — the skeptic’s questions,” Bush says. “Billy Graham’s presence is such that he can melt a skeptic.” But Bush didn’t immediately declare himself born-again. “When you are dealing with a skeptic, it takes a while for the message to sink in.”

The next phase of his makeover came when he and several friends in Midland turned 40 in 1986. They decided to go with their wives to the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs to celebrate. The morning after, Bush woke up with a hangover. “It wasn’t that bad,” he says. “I got up and ran.” But it was bad enough for him to declare that he would stop drinking. His decision was not entirely spontaneous. His wife had been urging him to quit. “I’ve never had a drink since then,” he says. Bush has a reminder of the danger of excessive drinking in his office: a large picture of Sam Houston wearing a toga. Houston had gotten drunk, posed for the portrait, and, in Bush’s view, made a “total fool” of himself.

How did all this change Bush’s life? Bush isn’t sure his friends noticed how much he’d changed. “I didn’t sample opinion,” he says. “I think people probably took notice. Who knows? We’re all sinners.” Over time, people noticed. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist, has known Bush since 1973. By the early 1990s, “you could see this man was a changed person,” Rove says. “That’s not to say the fun was drained out of him.” Al Hubbard, an Indiana businessman who was a pal of Bush at Harvard Business School and now is helping him set up a presidential campaign, says he saw a new Bush in a televised campaign debate with Ann Richards in 1994. “The George Bush I used to know let it all hang out and always told you exactly what he thought.” He wasn’t a conscientious student either. The Bush in the debate was “cool and calm and collected and stayed focused on point,” Hubbard says. Don Sipple, Bush’s media consultant in 1994, says he’s never worked for a more self-controlled candidate.

Bush says the inner changes are more important than the outward ones. Becoming a serious Christian “gave me a different perspective on what matters,” he says. “I don’t fear failure, nor do I fear success. If things don’t work out, they just don’t work out. My religion provides a sense of security. I’m secure in the knowledge my family will love me either way.” He also believes God has “a game plan” for his life. “I don’t know what the end is. I’m not the designer of the plan.” Absent his faith, Bush says he probably wouldn’t be governor. “I really don’t know what I’d be doing.”

But God didn’t “call” him to the governorship, Bush says. “It was more earthly than that.” He ran in 1994 on four issues: schools, juvenile crime, welfare, tort reform. But he was different from almost every Republican candidate in the country, including his brother Jeb, running for governor in Florida. He didn’t attack Richards in negative TV ads. He wanted to run a positive campaign, and there was also a political reason for going easy on Richards, who was quite popular. Bush feared she’d campaign as an aggrieved victim of his attacks, and win. Instead, while Jeb lost, Bush pulled off the most significant single GOP upset of 1994.

Religion has played a less muted role in his administration. Last year, James Robison asked Bush if he’d meet with a few dozen evangelical and Pentecostal preachers. Bush readily agreed. The group was interracial and non-political. “Bush was brought to tears,” Robison says, “as they expressed concern for him and his family.” At the close, one preacher asked, “Would you care if I laid my hand on you shoulder” and prayed for you? “I’d be glad,” Bush said. An aide who accompanied Bush said it was the most electrifying prayer he’d ever heard.

The sermons in Houston on March 6 and 7 were only the latest of a half-dozen addresses he’s given to church groups on the subject of politics and religion. They’ve all been on the same themes, a kind of gospel according to Bush. He exhorts religious people to be involved in politics, insists “faith-based” groups like Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship can solve social problems that government can’t, and argues that only a revival of faith will heal the country’s ruined culture.

“We should welcome the presence of people of faith in politics,” he told the Baptists in Houston. “Just as faith helps determine how you live your life, your involvement in politics helps determine how well our democracy functions.” This, of course, is a signal to the Christian Right that Bush is sympathetic. Addressing a Presbyterian congregation in Austin in 1996, he said “the cynicism of the ’90s” shouldn’t steer Christians away from political participation. “I can understand why ads and double-talk and polls and political blowhards ad nauseam can be discouraging,” he said. Still, religious people should “be engaged.” In this speech, he described the Bible as “a pretty good political handbook” and said he prays regularly and often. “I tell you this not so much for your benefit, but for mine. I accepted this invitation as much to be able to say out loud, in an appropriate setting, that God is real and God lives.”

Since 1995, Bush has championed religious groups as instruments of social policy. “We have learned that government programs cannot solve all the problems in our society,” he said in Houston. “One of my missions as governor has been to unleash the compassion of Texas with laws and policies that say to churches and synagogues and people of all faiths . . . we want you to be involved. Faith is a powerful tool for change.” Through an executive order and legislation passed in 1997, Bush has made it easier for state agencies to work with faith-based organizations. And he extols what he calls “little armies of compassion” in speeches and press releases.

The Bush gospel lays enormous blame on the ’60s. “The culture of my generation, our generation, has clearly said, ‘If it feels good, do it, and be sure to blame somebody else if you have a problem,'” Bush said. Now, the “failed culture” is “the number one problem facing America,” and the “warning signs are everywhere.” Bush often cites a story by Tony Evans, the black preacher, about a man who hires a painter to plaster and paint a crack in the wall. The crack soon returns because the problem is a shifting foundation. “We’ve got serious cracks in our society, and we need to fix the foundation,” Bush said. “To truly change the culture, we must have a spiritual renewal in the United States.”

State senator David Sibley of Waco, a Bush ally, says the governor “speaks unabashedly of his religious convictions to the point it almost gets him in trouble.” In fact, it has. Questioned in 1994 by a reporter, Bush said the New Testament teaches that only those who accept Jesus Christ will go to heaven. When he discussed this with his mother, Bush added, she called Billy Graham, who said one should “never play God” and try to decide who does or doesn’t go to heaven. But Bush’s original comment led to a newspaper story suggesting Bush believes Jews won’t go to heaven. The Richards campaign put an ad in a Texas Jewish publication underscoring that point.

Bush is still eager to erase what he calls a false impression. But he only made matters worse by joking with the same reporter before his trip to Israel in November that he planned to tell Israelis they’re “going to hell.” So upon return, Bush was asked again whether heaven is open only to Christians. “No, I don’t believe that,” he said. “I believe God decides who goes to heaven, not George W. Bush.”

In his Houston sermons last week, Bush returned to this subject. While he was in Israel, he said, a Christian friend told him of joining hands with a Jew at the Sea of Galilee and praying together. Later, the friend recalled for Bush a hymn that says, “Jew and Gentile meeting / from many a distant shore / around an altar kneeling / one common Lord adore.”

Several days after his inauguration to a second term in January, Bush attended a private prayer service conducted by Rev. Mark Craig, pastor of the Methodist church he used to attend in Dallas. Craig talked about the reluctance of Moses to respond to God’s call to lead his people. Not now, Moses said. But people were “starved for leadership” then as now. They want moral and ethical leaders who will “do the right thing for the right reason.” Leaders like this, willing to sacrifice their time and energy, are “exactly what we need,” Craig said. By “we,” he meant the country, not just Texas. As the preacher spoke, tears welled in Laura Bush’s eyes. Barbara Bush leaned over to her son and said, “He’s talking to you.” Bush said later it was the best sermon he’d ever heard.

CORRECTION-DATE: April 5, 1999 / April 12, 1999

CORRECTION:

George W. Bush’s March 6 address was delivered at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, not the First Baptist Church (“The Gospel According to George W. Bush,” March 22).

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.