The Faith Factor

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Administration critics see a religious agenda that extends beyond compassionate-conservative outreach in the judges Bush has appointed and in his decisions to limit federal funding of stem-cell research, promote abstinence education over condom distribution and deny funds to international family-planning groups. But many of these were disputes that any Republican President could have had with his Democratic opponents. It was only after Sept. 11, when Bush found himself leading a shaken country through a dark valley, that the old left-right debates gave way to something altogether different. Now the debate was less about personal faith changing lives. It was about America's destiny and Bush's view of God's plan for him and for the U.S.

A WAR BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

Politicians and voters alike may be guided by faith, but that does not mean they will be led in the same direction. Cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion and school prayer now coexist with an even more pressing and divisive one: a war whose necessity is increasingly disputed and whose context, like it or not, is seen by some as a clash between faiths. However often Bush defends Islam as a religion of peace, his case for war now rests less on high-fiber geo-political arguments than on the suggestion that the 3rd Infantry Division be used as an instrument of God's will to share the gifts of liberty with all people. Kerry, in contrast, has avoided the moral language of people's God-given desire for democracy. "I have always said from Day One that the goal ... here is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that's a full democracy," he said in April in New York City. Even though their strategies are increasingly similar--bring in the U.N., stay the course, press ahead with reconstruction--the rhetoric and rationale behind the strategy sound very different.

Whenever a President has called the country to arms, it has been in the name of a larger good and a higher calling. But the argument is especially freighted when the U.S. is confronting an Arab world that is already deeply suspicious of its intentions. "People don't want a President to think that every important decision has a stamp of God's approval and that God is always on his side," says ethicist Cromartie. "I think people want their Presidents to be pious but not self-righteously so. So there's a paradox, isn't there? A President has to seem to be relying on God's wisdom but not acting like all his decisions are God's decisions." It's the difference between praying that you're right and believing that prayer makes you right. The risk, for anybody, is in conscripting God so that policy becomes inarguable. In his eulogy for his father last week, Ron Reagan Jr. noted that while President Ronald Reagan was a deeply religious man, he was also a humble one. "He never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians, wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage," he said. "After he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate."