Army, Flag and Cross

My piece "Army, Flag and Cross" was just published by the web edition of Free Inquiry.

"When Fascism arrives it will be wrapped in a Flag and carrying a Bible."

Sinclair Lewis

Brilliant.

It was the first word that came to mind when I saw the bumper sticker. We Americans are a nation of bumper-sticker junkies: they tell you everything you need to know about us, from where we take our vacations, to our politics, to what brand of beer we drink. This particular bumper sticker was on a seemingly ordinary vehicle that was several feet in front of me, grinding along slowly in rush-hour traffic. I had plenty of time to study the content of the thing, and to think about what the thing meant.

It was a ribbon, yet another variant on the ubiquitous American “yellow ribbon.” Across the front, on a field of yellow, were the words “Support Our Troops.” The ribbon looped back and showed a field of white stars on a blue background, evoking the American flag. The cleverest part of the ribbon was the last section, hanging below the “Support Our Troops” slogan. It was red and white, with a stripe, intended to carry forward the American flag theme. But there was a subtle touch on this section of the ribbon, a suggestion of a white sunburst that joined with the vertical white stripe and overlaid it with a horizontal white stripe. It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to realize this was intended to be a subtle evocation of the Christian Cross.

There it was, encapsulated, complete, uncut, pure: the symbolic essence of an America that has drifted far from civilization, an American that has grown very, very strange.

In looking at the toxic convergence of Army, Flag and Cross in America, I want to parse the words on that deeply evocative bumper sticker – SUPPORT OUR TROOPS – and confront the question: what does it mean to “support our troops”? And have we reached a point where the idea itself should finally be called into question?

The America symbolized by that bumper sticker is an America that has left behind the world inhabited by rational nation-states and slipped off into a world of sentimental Romanticism. Let me take a moment to explain what I mean by “Romanticism” in this context, because it is critical to an understanding of what has happened to America.

Romanticism can be understood as a worldview that privileges strong emotion, emotions such as pride, horror and awe. When one hears the ominous, drum-beating music that opens every American news broadcast today, it is easy to see that the purpose is to scream “War! Terror! Fear! Pride! Revenge!” over and over and over again. The purpose of all this is to derange the viewer’s senses and to conflate these primitive emotions with a feeling of patriotism. Additionally, Romanticism privileges the individual imagination as the single, unshakeable source of Truth, an aspect that plays right into the American insistence on a “personal relationship with God” rather than traditional hierarchical religious practices. As Baudelaire pointed out when speaking of Romanticism, it is not the truth of the thing in question that is important, but rather the overwhelming and exciting personal emotions that the thing inspires. Such is very much the case with America’s fetishistic Romanticism. Expanding the concept to the political level, America’s Romantic nationalism takes as its starting point the “white man’s burden” and American’s unique world-historical mission to “bring” or “give” democracy to the benighted lesser peoples of the world.

We need to look closely at that ribbon I saw on the back of that car, we need to understand the symbolism of it, and above all, we need to understand how the Romantic sentimentalism evoked by that very dangerous ribbon plays out in the real world.

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America is a country besotted with religion. It always has been, and many days I fear that it always will be. We must never forget that America’s Puritan ancestors were driven from the countries of Europe because they were religious lunatics whose extremism made them beyond the pale of acceptable European behavior. Considering that this was an era when Europe was knee-deep in blood from its many religious wars, and witches were being routinely hanged and burned for consorting with the Devil, the idea that a group could be “too extreme” was speaks volumes. In America, the Devil has always been real. He has horns and a pitchfork, and he walks up and down the broad back of the American heartland and crouches at moonlit crossroads, tempting the unwary to bet their souls on a roll of the dice. America has a long history of Romantic religious enthusiasms, revivals and fundamentalist upsurges. The forward march of civilization has done nothing to dampen this, and America in the 21^st century stands proudly in opposition to the increasing secularism of the civilized world.

One is often left speechless when one reads the public pronouncements of high-ranking military personnel, pronouncements more suitable to Europe at the time of the Crusades than to a developed country in the opening years of the new millennium. For example, we have the infamous “Christian Soldier,” General William G. Boykin, strutting and thumping his chest as he gives speeches (in full dress uniform, it should be noted) to gatherings of hard-right religious groups, loudly proclaiming, “We, in the Army of God, in the Kingdom of God, have been raised for such a time as this!” General Peter Pace, a seemingly sensible and levelheaded Marine who rose to become head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, once defended the leadership of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, stating, “He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country.” This increasingly brazen need on the part of our top military leaders to publicly “witness for faith” is alarming, to say the least. I would not be at all surprised if the day comes when we get to witness, live on TV, a battlefield general suddenly spouting fluent Babylonian and falling into a shuddering heap on the ground before rising, transfigured, and leading his troops into holy battle against the infidels.

Is this alarming? Indeed it is, but not nearly as alarming as the well-organized and brilliantly executed strategy of breeding up the next generation of religious-lunatic military personnel starting right down in the pre-teen years. America is experiencing an explosion of organizations that bear a disturbing resemblance to the sort of “youth on the march” organizations that one saw so often in the last century. We have organizations such as the Battle Cry Christian youth movement, a movement – in the very real sense of that word – totally committed to the feverish glorification of military virtues and the manly pursuit of holy war.

Battle Cry holds massive gatherings in stadiums and other large-scale venues all over America. The rallies are high-energy, high-concept, and high-tech, with the frenetic musical beat of a shoot-em-up video game and live “action figures” of Navy SEALs and other military paragons charging on stage, screaming to the crowd that they are proud “Christian warriors,” and acting out real-life scenes from “the war against Islamic Fascism” as they brief the stadium full of kids on their heroic future as part of the “battle plan for Jesus.” These disturbing antics are followed by the reading of an endorsement of Battle Cry by George W. Bush, a moment that sends the thousands of overwrought young people into paroxysms of testifying, swooning, weeping and general adolescent hysteria. This combination of testosterone-laden posturing and the pairing of military and Christian symbolism is a brilliant recruiting tool for the apocalyptic “long war” that so many on the Religious Right crave. One hopes that those kids wake up the next day feeling the way many kids feel the day after a night of binge-drinking and slam-dancing: beat-up, sheepish, and resolved never to engage in that particular form of idiocy again. One suspects not; most of these kids have never felt such overwhelming emotional and physical excitement in their entire lives – and they are going to want more.

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Coupled with the resurgence of a broad-shouldered, muscular Christianity is a fetishistic new obsession with the Stars and Stripes as a quasi-religious object. There has always been a certain sentimental attachment to the flag as such in American culture (phrases like “Old Glory” and songs like “She’s a Grand Old Flag” are not recent inventions), but since 9/11 the defense of the flag as a physical object has become increasingly strident and irrational. Everywhere one turns in America, the iconography of The Flag is thrust into one’s face in a way that I have never before seen in my lifetime. The most disturbing aspect of this revitalized Flag-worship is the premise that the flag itself may not be burned or otherwise “desecrated.” Perhaps alone among the nations of the world, America has decided that the actual, physical flag – rather than the ideas it represents – must be protected from the ravages of the unworthy and kept physically pure.

Orrin Hatch, on the floor of the US Senate, made the statement that passing an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting flag burning was “the most important thing the Senate could be doing.” He made this outlandish claim at a time when the wheels were starting to fall off the war in Iraq, the resurgent Taliban were beginning to give the lie to the illusion of “victory” in Afghanistan, gas prices were soaring, and forty-five million American citizens were without any health insurance. The fact that no one laughed aloud at the idea that preventing the flag from being burned was the Senate’s most important order of business is alarming. Around the same time, President Bush proclaimed, “at this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag and our freedom in the first war of this century." Again, we have this ominous conflation of the flag with the concept of freedom, and one seems to be witnessing the sort of fetishistic relationship more suitable for Napoleon reviewing the colors of the Grande Armée than an American President offering his rationale for the continuing “war on terror.”

Flag-worship in America has revealed a deep well of Romantic, magical thinking, imbuing an object in the physical world with some sort of ineffable magical gris-gris. I will state it plainly: this fetishistic behavior is a form of emotional voodoo. Flags are not worshipped in a free, democratic state.

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Free democracies also do not worship their armies. They think of their national armies as necessary evils, when they think about them at all. For over two hundred years, America kept faith with George Washington’s caution that "overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty." Even at the height of the Cold War, the military was never glamorized the way it is now. It is impossible to find anything like the current Army-worship anywhere in American history; indeed, to find an equivalent in the 20^th century, one is forced to turn to totalitarian societies (Germany, the USSR, North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq). The title of a new “ultimate fighting” television program that premiered in 2007 summed up the new order of things: “Warrior Nation.” This is how modern America sees itself: as the new Sparta. And in the new Sparta, refusal to unconditionally worship the warrior class is one of the few taboos that must never be violated.

Unlike the countries of the Western world, whose citizens have come (through centuries of bleeding) to view war as a horrible aberration and a failure of rational solidarity, America embraces the prospect of spending years, decades, centuries in the righteous work of fighting the long war to “rid the world of evil”. The “warrior” is fetishized and lifted up to a place beyond any possibility of criticism by the “or else!” implicit in the mantra, “Support the Troops.” One imagines grainy newsreel footage of Hitler “blessing the colors”; the mind conjures up old television footage of the massive militarized May Day love fests in Red Square; and we hear the echoes of the manic triumphalism of the military parades put on by every tin pot dictator in the Third World. One is brought up short by the realization: now it is America’s turn.

As a country, America has begun to worship the professional military class, and more ominously, American has begun to glorify military ideals: testosterone-rich, sentimental, unambiguous, lacking in any sense of nuance, utterly committed to “the mission,” the unending project to “civilize” the world. The unspoken demand is that the civilian population must now embrace these same values, and glorify these same things. One sees a way of thinking in which military priorities as such become the top priorities of the nation as a whole, and woe betide anyone who is foolish enough to challenge the foundations of this new national religion.

One important facet of this Army-worship reveals it for the sentimental and Romantic thing that it is: Americans love their military but they overwhelming refuse to serve in it, and they overwhelmingly refuse to let their kids get lured into serving in it. Yet these “latté liberal” suburban parents who work so hard to make sure little Melissa and Cody don’t get any crazy ideas about “joining up” are the first to chant the tribal mantra: "Condemn the war but not the warrior." How very problematic this new mantra is, once one examines it, as if one could actually decouple the policy from those who voluntarily implement the policy. The two are coupled, pathologically coupled, and will always be so.

The question that almost no one in America seems willing to ask is: at what point in our history did blind obedience to bad orders become a heroic virtue? Does it really make sense to lionize people for doing something that our rational minds tell us is an extremely bad idea? If one opposes the war, how can one support the troops and still claim to be thinking rationally? The belief that one can do so has the stench of bad faith. The fact of the matter is that the people at the top giving the orders are complicit, but the people who are actually pulling the triggers share in that complicity. No one is innocent, everyone owns their own decisions.

The mental gymnastics that Americans go through in order to give “the warriors” an easy out for their actions tend to fall into two categories: “blame the decision-makers, not the warriors,” and “they only enlisted for economic reasons.” These rationales are alibis, and not particularly good alibis at that.

The first alibi is easily disposed of. Principle I of the Nuremberg Tribunal (of which the United States is a signatory) makes it clear that “any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.” And lest anyone complain that this is too vague, Principle IV gives us all the clarification we need: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." And let us be clear: one always has to make clear moral choices. It’s not very pretty, and no one likes to talk about it, but there it is. There are moments, as Camus reminds us, “when everything becomes clear, when every action constitutes a commitment, when every choice has a price.” This is one of those moments, and to pretend that the people pulling the trigger are not, in a very real sense, “decision-makers,” is both naïve and absurd. Army Lieutenant Ehrin Watada in the US and the refuseniks in Israel understand that, even at the lowest rungs in the chain of command, refusal to say “no” is tantamount to complicity.

The second alibi is one that is popular among many Americans, including many Americans who self-identify as “leftists.” In November 2006, the New York Times analyzed the demographic patterns of military recruits and discovered that, in fact, they are slightly better off in terms of education, neighborhood, family income and job prospects than the surrounding population as a whole. Are some of the American soldiers in Iraq there for economic reasons? Sure, but not very many. Did some of them sign up for the chance to go over and blow away some “rag-heads”? Of course; armies throughout history have always attracted their share of sociopaths. But after removing these two small groups from the list, we are left with the vast majority who went, voluntarily and for their own reasons. They made a moral decision. They made a choice. Having made their free choice, are they somehow magically immune from all blame?

They are immune because they are granted immunity from blame by the sentiment of the American people. They are given the alibi of the “pure warrior” because the donning of the uniform has become equivalent to the donning of priestly vestments in an earlier age. The “warrior” is immediately sanctified, justified, raised up beyond all criticism from us lesser mortals who lack the moral fiber to wear the vestments. The American people, living in the midst of this enormous superstructure of myth and alibi, are incapable of understanding that they have armored themselves against evil by manufacturing not the new Sparta, but rather a dystopian, sentimental dreamland.

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In America, it appears that the more pathological the coupling between Army, Flag and Cross, the greater need there is to honor “the warrior.” We should be clear on the fact that this is not necessarily something new. This way of thinking was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

As these words were being written, American soldiers in the Philippines were in the early stages of a near-genocidal rampage that would kill more than 600,000 Filipinos. Not new, this warrior-love, but rampant now, and metastasizing.

The American mythos today is saturated with the Holy Trinity of God, the flag and the armed forces. All are glorified and sanctified in a manner that is overtly sentimental, Romantic and irrational. These three pillars of American society support an invigorated sense of Manifest Destiny, a wonderful feeling of exceptional purpose that was lost after the collapse of Soviet communism. Americans are excited again: standing tall, feeling the pride, and above all, “on the march.” This toxic mix of Army-worship, Flag-worship and God-worship has erupted in a nation where every hope and fear can be rendered down to a slogan on one of the many variations on the yellow ribbon. The irony of it all is that the yellow ribbon was originally a symbol of the grinding, endless sense of victimhood that Americans felt during the Iran hostage crisis. Americans everywhere showed the yellow ribbon because there was quite literally nothing else they could do about the situation except sit there and take it. For those of us who live in America – and for the rest of the world as well – an understanding of this dangerous liaison between rampant militarism and the sanctified yellow fetish of the angry victim is critically important. This yellow shroud – and make no mistake, it is a shroud and possibly even a death shroud – is a voodoo fetish designed to buck up the courage of a people who have, in a few short years, devolved into a nation of frantic, ribbon-worshipping victims.

"Prince of War" - a review

Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire, by Cecil Bothwell, Asheville: Brave Ulysses Books, 2007

“Billy Graham represents a basic kind of patriotism in this country – an unquestioning, obeying patriotism, a loyalty to the authority of the President. Billy was always uncritical, unchallenging, unquestioning.” --- Bill Moyers

“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B and C. Just who do they think they are? --- Barry Goldwater

A power-hungry moral coward. A vicious racist and Jew-baiter. A man with an almost uncanny ability to always be on the wrong side of history. A craven climber and groveller at the feet of power. An “unabashed nationalist and advocate for American empire.” If Cecil Bothwell is right – and he marshals a lot of evidence in support of his thesis – then “America’s most beloved pastor” is all these things, and more. Bothwell gives us the opportunity to see the other side of Billy Graham, the man who was seventh on a recent Gallup poll’s list of the most admired people of the 20^th century. Graham is a man with a history, a man who must be called to account. Bothwell lays out his bill of particulars with subtlety and skill.

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The first leitmotif in Graham’s life story is his obsessive scrounging after power. From the very beginning, he has sought access to the corridors of power with an almost touching desperation. Graham was the first evangelist to conduct a religious service on the steps of the Capitol building, and the first to conduct a full-blown crusade inside the walls of the Pentagon. But Graham has always known that the real center of power in America was the White House, and has proven to be a “constant suppliant seeking presidential attention.” The more intelligent and responsible presidents (Truman, Kennedy, Carter) kept Graham at arm’s length, while other, lesser men utilized Graham for whatever they could gain from the association.

Truman apparently despised Graham from the get-go, describing him to a close friend as “one of those counterfeits I was telling you about,” the sort of man who is only interested in “getting his name in the paper.” But in a bit of pure luck, Graham suddenly found himself being groomed as the darling of the Hearst media empire, which built up the persona of the “simple preacher” and turned him loose to rage against godless Communism to crowds of up to 350,000 rapt believers. Graham was becoming an influential player in the toxic politics of 1950s America – and he was learning to love it.

Graham’s increasingly high profile brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, eventually “becoming one of his most loyal and enduring allies.” Documents reveal that Graham was eager to out-do McCarthy in his rabid commitment to exposing “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge between the wings of the American eagle.” As McCarthy ratcheted up the rhetoric with his demand that suspected Communists be stripped of their Fifth Amendment protections, Graham was right there with him, proclaiming, “Let’s do it!” Never one to hitch his wagon to a single star, Graham was simultaneously voicing his strident support for “the red-scare tactics of Senator Lyndon Johnson and a young congressman named Richard Milhouse Nixon.” Give the man credit: he had a knack for spotting talent early on and currying favor with the people who would run the country for the rest of the century, and beyond.

While Graham’s most infamous association was of course with Nixon, he nevertheless racked up a pretty good track record with subsequent tenants at the White House. It is a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s canny instincts that he wanted nothing to do with the man and kept him out of the White House during his term, but most of Carter’s successors warmly embraced Graham and his values. He wooed Reagan and George H.W. Bush with great success. He had somewhat less success with Bill Clinton, but he was there to give solace to Hillary Clinton (whose religious associations in Washington were uniformly “conservative and fundamentalist”) during the Lewinsky scandal.

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I was continually amazed at Graham’s ability to insinuate himself into the centers of power, given some of his more unsavory views. For if Bothwell is to be believed, Graham is a life-long racist and the worst sort of bigot. It is tempting to fall back on the old, old alibi and say that Graham was a “product of his environment.” As a very young many, Graham fell under the influence of “holy roller Mordecai Ham,” a man notorious as “one of his era’s most gaudy and livid anti-Semites,” a man who fulminated against “apostate Jewry and the wicked Jews who killed Jesus.” While it was not unusual for a youngster coming of age in the Jim Crow south to be bombarded with this sort of vicious rhetoric, it is notable that Graham never shook off these baleful influences. We would hear echoes of Mordecai Ham’s rants in Graham’s infamous “off the record” conversation in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon.

This conversation, which was captured on one of the legendary White House tapes, was not the momentary lapse or attempt to curry favor, as the Graham apologists attempted to claim. On the contrary, the conversation lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from the denunciation of the Jews, and had sometimes been led by Graham. “The Bible says there are Satanic Jews, and that’s where our problem arises,” Graham pontificates at one point, to mumbled agreement by Nixon. Amazingly, twenty additional minutes of this conversation had been redacted before being released to the Watergate committee. What could possibly have been in those redacted twenty minutes that was worse than what wound up being released? Many years later, when the tape was released to public shock and dismay, Graham would do what he has always done when confronted with evidence of his own failings: he would claim that his clear, unambiguous words simply did not reflect his actual views. Inevitably, whenever Graham used this alibi, the big implication remained discreetly unspoken: Graham was either a liar or a moral coward.

Another aspect of Graham’s history is his unequivocal record of racism. Like many from the South (and not a few from the North), Graham inherited a significant bigotry against African-Americans. When a friend suggested to the young Graham that they stop off and get a haircut at a “colored barbershop” where a haircut could be gotten cheap, Graham declared, “Long as there’s a white barbershop in Charlotte, I’ll never have my hair cut at a nigger barbershop! Never!” Many people inherit this sort of vicious thinking, and many people eventually grow up to shed such primitive, mean-spirited attitudes. I kept looking for some point in Graham’s history where he had grown beyond this sort of thinking, but I kept coming up empty handed. The public record demonstrates that Graham was always on the wrong side on the racial issue. Always.

Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to portray Graham as being on the “progressive” side of the civil rights struggle that began in earnest in the 1950s. In fact, as Bothwell documents at length, this “progressive” history has been manufactured out of whole cloth. This is a man who, as late as the 1960s, was holding “separate but equal” crusades for black audiences. Graham would claim, “It wasn’t his decision but that of the organization.” And whenever segregationists would slam him for showing even an inkling of a progressive idea, he would immediately backpedal, claiming he was only there to preach the Bible, not to “enter into any local issues.” While the whole world was watching the battle for human rights in Selma, Graham was vacationing on the beach in Hawaii. Indeed, Graham was notable by his absence from every decisive moment in the civil rights struggle. When M.L. King was gunned down, Graham pointedly failed to attend the funeral, an event attended by over 200,000 people. On those rare occasions when Graham would even acknowledge that something called “the civil rights struggle” was taking place, he would limit his pronouncements to cautioning others to “put on the brakes a bit,” opining that “only when Christ comes again will all the little white children of Abraham walk hand in hand with little black children.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by the unwillingness of black Americans to wait for the Second Coming to claim their rights as human beings.

One might suggest, in Graham’s defense, “that was then, this is now.” Sadly, he does not appear to have grown over the years. As late as 1991, Graham was a member of the whites-only Biltmore Country Club. When called on this by local activists, Graham’s spokesman trotted out the old standby: Graham “didn’t have time to involve himself in local issues.” And in 1993, Graham publicly asked the rhetorical question, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” His answer: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.” Needless to say, Graham’s remarks brought down a torrent of outrage, in the face of which Graham promptly did what he always did: “I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement.” He “almost” went back and clarified the statement. Almost. Graham’s entire life, it would seem, is one long chain of moments of truth in which he “almost” did the right thing.

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As an "elder statesman" whose mental and rhetorical powers are rapidly fading, Graham did not play his usual role as panderer to the powerful in the George W. Bush administration. While one should be grateful for this small mercy, Graham’s son Franklin delivered the inaugural sermon at Bush’s 2000 inauguration, and went on to become a close Bush confidant. And so the torch was passed, and so the disease was propagated. Billy Graham’s uniquely intolerant form of fundamentalist rhetoric, centered on the twin messages of fear and hate, continue to worm their way deep into the fabric of American discourse. It is to Bothwell’s enormous credit that he forces the reader to confront Billy Graham raw, unfiltered, as he really is. To the droves of Graham apologists and “clarifiers,” Bothwell offers a simple challenge: “Perhaps we should pay heed to what Graham has actually said.”

Mister Bush's Sermon

1. Clermont on the Potomac

On November 27, 1095, at a religious council held in Clermont, Pope Urban II delivered
what is perhaps the most famous sermon ever composed. He informed the assembled
faithful that he had “come into these parts with a divine admonition for you”. Urban’s
listeners, who probably expected a mundane, workaday bit of preaching, instead found
their faces burning with holy shame as their Pope cried out, “O what a disgrace if such a
despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the
faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious in the name of Christ!” Urban was calling
Christendom to strike out at the “despised and base race” known as the Muslims, and
strike them down in the name of a vengeful and broad-shouldered God. Europe thrilled to
Urban’s depiction of it as the very sword-arm of Christ, and it promptly marched off en
masse to commence the long-lived folly we now call “The Crusades”.

This sort of militant Christian religiosity is viewed nowadays by most developed Western
nations as a quaint though bloody aspect of a long-ago period of de facto religious
insanity in Europe and the Middle East. I say “most” because there is one glaring
exception: the United States, where precisely this sort of militant Christian religiosity is
resurgent, rampant, and (as the American President assures us) “on the march”. The American “War President” is totally engaged as a constant, zealous cheerleader for this sense of a unique Christian mission. Mister Bush’s “war on terror” has been and will continue to be a war by a militantly Christian country against a predominantly Muslim part of the world, led by a President who genuinely believes he was called by God to this one great task.

Bush’s militant Christian zeal, and his deployment of the discourse of a distinctly American sermonizing in the service of war, simply confirms the worst suspicions of the rest of the world that America is indeed fighting a “Crusade” against Islam. Any European leader who spoke to his people in the language used by Bush would be sent packing to the sound of gales of laughter, but Europe adopts a condescending attitude towards Bush’s new Crusade at its peril. Bush’s followers may sound like classic religious loonies – indeed, as we shall see, many of them are – but they are also (for the moment) at the steering wheel of the world’s last remaining superpower. As such, they are very dangerous indeed, and it is worth the time to try to decipher the strangely hypnotic cadences that Bush uses to lift up his faithful to fight the great Crusade.

We need to understand that George W. Bush is not a President. He is a preacher. He is only at home when he is delivering a sermon. Outside the familiar ground of the fundamentalist tent, Bush is testy, impatient, insecure, uncomfortable inside his own skin. But when he has worked himself up to the sort of pure, testifying eloquence thatevokes a form of religious mania created and purified on dusty American back roadsby sun-maddened itinerant preachers, the naked outpouring of devotion and affirmation from his congregation is a darkly terrifying thing to see. Bush the preacher knows something that his audience also knows, something that America
alone in the world knows: Evil is real. The End Times are coming. The Devil is real, and
waits for the unwary at every moonlit country crossroads. And America, alone among all the nations of the Earth, is called by God to accomplish the thing that has never been accomplished in the whole long, sad history of religion: “to rid the world of evil."

We need to explore the history, the structure, and the passion of Mister Bush’s long and continuing sermon, if for no other reason than to conjure ways to blunt its dangerous
influence in the world.

2. “God Speaks Through Me”

One can savor the irony of the famously messianic chest-thumping of the atheist President Lincoln and of the vicious white supremacist President Wilson, but we must understand that there has always been a strain of what I have chosen to call “sermonic discourse” in the war rhetoric of AmericanPresidents.

For instance, in his address to the American Congress at the beginning of 1942, Franklin
Roosevelt stated unequivocally that “victory for us means victory for religion. And they
[the enemy] could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate living
room for both Hitler and God.” Roosevelt ends this amazing and little-known sermon using words that sound all too familiar today: “We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills.”

One can easily trot out example after example of this sort of sermonic discourse in the history of the United States. It is really not surprising, given that those settlers who first “tamed” the “New World” consisted of small sects (today we would call them “cults”) composed of people whose religious peculiarities were considered too radical and dangerous to be allowed to remain in Europe (no small feat, given the general religious madness infesting Europe at the time). But -- and this cannot be emphasized too strongly -- all of these sermonizing Presidents (with the possible exception of Wilson) understood that their rhetoric was rhetoric, which gave them the saving grace of a sense of proportion and distance. George W. Bush is another species of President. When Bush preaches, he is completely sincere. This is a man who delights in telling people that, were it not for the saving power of Christ, he would be sitting at a bar somewhere in Texas instead of running the world.As head of the most overtly Fundamentalist administration in memory, Bush is utterly convinced that “God speaks through me.”

George Bush’s single rhetorical gift consists in conveying this sincerity to large numbers of Americans. He does this, not through a single “call-to-arms” sermon, as Urban did at
Clermont, but rather by refining and amplifying the uniquely American sermonic
discourse, by using the cadences and imagery of the Baptist pulpit so that his every
speech becomes yet another passage in one long sermon, a sermon with the power to
hypnotize.

3. “Let he who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

One must be wary of conflating sincerity with transparency when unpacking the content
of the Bush sermon. Bush is utterly sincere and utterly obscure in his meaning – unless
you are one of the faithful. It is impossible to ever take a single word of the Bush sermon
at face value. All of Bush’s speeches are sermons, and all of his sermons are parables. One can never understand Bush’s power over the faithful unless one learns the “code” he uses to give a wink and a nod to his fellow believers.

All due credit for crafting the ongoing discourse of the Bush sermon must be given to
Michael Gerson, Bush’s one-time chief speechwriter. Gerson, the man who gave us
the unforgettable phrase “Axis of Evil”, is a typical product of the American Midwest. He
is also a theology graduate, and as such is capable of manufacturing
the perfect Christian allusion to complement Bush’s often inarticulate passion. But
we must never mistake the servant for the master. Bush dictates the content, Bush dictates
the underlying message, and Bush is the master of the code. Let us take a look at a few
examples of how the code is deployed.

In one of his annual “State of the Union” messages, Bush spoke of the “wonder-working
powers” of the “goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”. For a non-
American (or even a non-religious American, of which there are still a few), this
would seem like an odd, “quaint” sort of phrase for America’s highest elected
official to use. But a member of the Fundamentalist faithful would immediately recognize
the phrase as coming from the gruesomely-named hymn, “There is Power In The Blood”.
In the next “State of the Union” speech, Bush deployed vivid imagery that
contained words and echoes guaranteed to resonate with Fundamentalists. When
he spoke of his belief that “History has called America and our allies to action”, he knew
that his followers, hearing the potent word “call”, would immediately make the necessary
substitution in their minds and hear “God” instead of “History”. He sent the same
message in a speech to the Association of Religious Broadcasters when he stated that “we
must also remember our calling as a blessed nation to make the world better … and
confound the designs of evil men.” Continuing, Bush claimed that “Freedom is not
America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to humanity. Therefore, the nation which
embodies freedom should bear this gift to every human being in the whole world.”

We need to step back and take a long look at this problematic word, “freedom”. Note
how often Bush uses the word “freedom” in his sermon, and how often it seems to stand
out as so “odd,” both in the context in which he uses it and against the realities of the Bush
project. I have come to the conclusion that, when speaking of “freedom”, Bush is
employing the time-honored preacher’s tool known as the parable. When you hear a Bush
sermon, do a little thought experiment: every time he says “freedom”, mentally substitute
the word “Christianity.” I have been going back over many of the components of
Bush’s long sermon, and the substitution works so precisely that I am forced to
conclude that this is no accident, that he is sending a nudge-nudge wink-wink to the
faithful. Let us try substituting the word “Christian” in place of “free” and “freedom” and
see what happens.

"Christianity is not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to humanity.”

“I believe that God wants everybody to be Christian.”

Here is a longer example. Note that even in this extended passage, the substitution maps

perfectly.

"Christianity is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here
on Earth. The progress of Christianity is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that
Christianity, if not defended, can be lost. The success of Christianity is not determined by
some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of Christianity rests upon the choices
and the courage of Christian peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice.”

See, one can treat this as an entertaining intellectual parlor game – but a game with dark, sad consequences.

For those who naively believed that Bush was not sincere, and that he would drop the sermonic discourse in his second term, his 2004 inaugural address must have been a chilling wakeup call. If you have never read a transcript of this address, I invite you to do so. In this short address, he used the code word “freedom” 27 times (and the word “free” an additional 8 times). Many who lacked the ears to hear the parable embedded in this sermon puzzled over this constant drumbeat of the word “freedom”.

Once one understands what the word “freedom” actually means to Bush and his
followers, the speech is terrifying. Italy’s newspaper La Republica summed it up by
saying, “there is a sense of a man who considers the whole world as his own parish.” I
personally felt a cold chill when Bush proclaimed to American that “we have a calling from beyond the stars to spread freedom across the world.” In trying to shake
this disturbing invocation from my mind, I joked “well this proves it -- he’s getting his
marching orders from alien space invaders from beyond the stars!” None of my friends
laughed. Come to think of it, neither did I.

4. “Like Joan of Arc, You Must Be Brave”

If my suspicion is true, and Bush is sending “coded sermons” to American
Christian Fundamentalists, one would assume that every major denomination would be delighted to discover that one of their own holds the highest post in the land. In fact, Bush’s relationship with the major denominations is problematic at best. When I watch how Bush conducts himself in regard to the American religious establishment, I am reminded of the great lyrics by Lene Lovich: “Like Joan of Arc, you must be brave, and listen to your heart.” Like Joan, Bush is constantly being picked up and carried forward by voices in his head – voices that he believes come from God Himself. There is no trace of irony or symbolism in his manner when Bush tells another head of state, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” Imagine then the impact that this hardwired direct connection to The Almighty has on those religionists who naively believe that Bush is “one of them”.

Amazingly, given his billing as “America’s most religious President”, Bush is the first
president not to have met with the leadership of any of the mainstream religious
organizations. The Rev. Fritz Ritsch, writing in the Washington Post,
complained, "The president apparently believes that he can talk about theology from the
bully pulpit without talking to theologians.” The sense of anger and spite at having been
cut out of their traditional (and very lucrative) role as intermediary between the
Sovereign and his God is palpable among American religious leaders. This was felt
most keenly during the mad charge towards war in Iraq. In the weeks before the war
began, a ranking member of the Council of Methodist Bishops sulked publicly over the
fact that his organization had spent several months in a fruitless attempt to obtain an
interview with Bush, himself a Methodist (at least, on paper). "The President has not
been willing to hear the voice of his own church." That lovely old Biblical phrase, “stiff-
necked”, seems appropriate here. Bush, quite simply, does not need the religious hierarchy to fulfill his mission. He has his God. And he has his People.

5. Alibi

If George Bush’s sermon did not resonate with a significant portion of the American
people, his high-bandwidth line to The Lord and his apocalyptic discourse
would be of no more interest to us than the rants of some lunatic wandering the streets of
any major city in the world, proclaiming the reality of Evil and the imminent end of this
tired and dissolute old world. Unfortunately, the Bush sermon does resonate across large
stretches of America, and one is forced to confront the question: why?

First, though by no means most importantly, Bush is just like them. He’s a redeemed
sinner, he has seen the light, he has felt his heart moved and changed by a personal
encounter with Jesus Christ. Like so many Americans, he is convinced that he would
have nothing and would be nothing without his unshakeable faith in The Lord.

This view of the world echoes powerfully in the anachronistic backwater of George
Bush’s America. In contrast to the developed Western world, where religion is
withering away due to lack of interest, more than 90 percent of the American people
believe in a real, personal God. Eighty percent of Americans believe in miracles, with 40
percent of them stating that they had personally experienced or witnessed a miracle. Half
the population of America attends church on a weekly basis, and 53 percent say religion
is a “very important” part of their lives. Amazingly, 43 percent of the American people
believe in the Devil, with horns and a tail. With Bush in the White House, the
nation’s capitol is now the heart of this Christian darkness. A few months ago, I was driving up the highway to give a presentation at a philosophical conference in Washington, DC. As I got closer and closer to Washington, tuning in to a series of fundamentalist rants that showed up and then faded away on my radio dial, I had the eerie sensation – for just a moment -- that I was Marlow, coming up the Congo River to the place where Kurtz squatted, waiting.

Bush sermonizes with a finely crafted combination of soothing and inspiring praise
alternating with deep and unequivocal condemnation. America good. Evildoers bad
America battles Pure Evil, so any action America takes in that holy crusade is by
definition Good. Bush hypnotically repeats the same phrases and cadences of love of
Country and love of God like the invocation of a powerful spell:

"We are the most peaceful country on earth.”

"Americans are a resolute people, who have risen to every test of our time. America is a
strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without
conquest, and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers."

"This nation fights reluctantly....We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes
peace must be defended. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the
world, and to ourselves."

These elements of the Bush sermon are delivered with the utter conviction of passages
from Scripture. They are never questioned because they are beyond
question. The sermon tells the American people every sweet-sounding thing they want to
believe about themselves – and they love him for it. His most fervent supporters
often sound like disciples rather than supporters. At any of his rallies (stage-
managed to the nth degree and always packed with an audience of loyalists), one gets the
real sense that these Americans believe they are in the presence of their savior (or
Savior). Bush has been told by God to lead this Crusade to rid the entire world of Evil.

He takes this charge from The Lord very seriously. The American people embrace his
certitude and, infused with their own equal measure of certitude, they line up to march off
behind him. Bush tells them that “this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a
while”, and that’s just fine with his followers. They’ve never felt so alive, so vital, so sure
of America’s place in the world, and of their own place in America. The American
people understand that, in the words that Urban used at Clermont, “there remains still an
important work for you to do”. Bush’s sermonic discourse, which resonates on such a deep level with the American people, echoes Urban’s call so many centuries ago: “Now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago.”