The Irresistible Potion; Blinded by Bush's "Godly" Mandate

By Laura Spero

"Hello? God? Are you there?...Yes, it's Mr. Bush speaking. Please pick up. Everyone thinks I've got a direct line."

"Mr. Bush?"

"Yes! God?"

"No Sir. It's Karl."
Sigh. "Karl, where is God?"

"In America , Sir. God is in America ."

"That's right! No wonder the line is busy. Onward, then--Freedom is on the march!"


As the presidential race heads into its final sprint, there’s a lot of talk about religion. This is not surprising, since George W. Bush is considered to be a religious idealist, pandering to the Christian right and consulting regularly with the Almighty. And the fifty percent of the country that abhors him simply cannot understand how the other fifty percent could be so easily blinded by Bush's Godly mandate. Sure, there's always going to be that conservative core that never budges, but half the country? Haven't they noticed that the world is falling apart?

What is it about George W. Bush that so persistently appeals to so many people, even non-conservatives, after all the failures of his administration?

I have a theory. This is, at heart, a spiritual election. Not that this alone accounts for Bush’s indestructible popularity, but frankly it helps a lot: in a land where the American Dream has collided with the separation of church and state to produce an utterly secular nation, George W. Bush has given us a kind of spirituality that is too good to be true. And--surprise!--it is not Christianity.

American culture, being exceptionally diverse and ultra-capitalist, provides a very distinctive cradle for any kind of religion. This cradle begins with the First Amendment, which says that the legislature should “make no law regarding an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” What strikes me when I read these lines is that the separation of church and state was directly linked to the right to free speech: the idea was not to mute religious practice but to foster it by making America a place where no single religious ideology could be forced upon anyone.

But if you look around at America today, you do not see a nation that has nourished spiritual practice. This is a land of literal thinkers, scientists, and free market competitors bustling about in the great American Dream—which is, itself, simply the methodology of competing in a merit-based system, where the best man has no limits placed upon his potential achievement.

Capitalism is not especially unique, but Americans embody a uniquely secular version of it. We are die-hard realists. We rigorous, we are exact, we are tough, and we have mastered the art of competing for success through honest work. We pride ourselves on believing only things that can be proven, and we look down upon any sissies who stray from the emotionless resolve that makes good competitors.

And the First Amendment, instead of fostering spiritual and religious freedom, has become a directive to keep our spirituality neatly packaged and out of sight. To say publicly that one is inspired by God is to “shove religion down other people’s throats.” We have learned to confine spiritual practice to sanctioned places and times, where it is less insulting—as much to our collective sense of reason as to our diversity of religious beliefs.

Now don’t get me wrong—our secular values are not inherently bad, and our realism has served its purpose well. Americans epitomize the best in capitalism and we have pushed untold frontiers in scientific research. And, thanks to the first amendment, a great diversity of religions thrive unmolested by the U.S. government.

But the fact that Americans are religious does not make them spiritual. Religion itself is merely an avenue to something transcendent: a sense that individual lives fit into something more important, and therein have purpose. Religion is practice; spirituality is a mindset. And in this country, the by-product of our realist sensibility is that spirituality has become inherently offensive. We take great pains to ensure that it does not mingle with and contaminate the methodology that we implement to find fulfillment in the here and now.

Now I realize this sounds a little Marxist, but hear me out. Marx worried about a disconnect between the worker and his product; he drew a distinction between the farmer who sees crops grow and the factory worker who just sees parts all day but never puts a car together. I'm drawing a distinction between the farmer who senses himself as connected to nature and the planets and the cycles of time, and who consults astrological charts for the most minute decisions, and the businessman who senses himself as connected to economic forces, and consults the stock market. Both have a sense of why they labor and how to measure the product they produce. But the first guy has a spiritual product, and the second guy doesn't.

Or, to put it in Bush-terminology, the first guy acts through a source of absolute "Good" (a technical term meaning “Not Evil"), and his actions, in their service to this source, give him surety that his life has meaning. The second guy is successful, but he doesn’t have any guarantee that his success “matters.”

I’m not saying we should all be tree-hugging vegans. We need the stock market. But it’s worth noticing that we do not, broadly speaking, look to spirituality to succeed in U.S. culture. What if businessmen consulted astrologers in order to make investment decisions? There’s no point in saying they should, but there is value in noticing that they don’t.

There’s even more value in noticing that they can’t. We must wonder how and when businessmen—or any of us, for that matter—do connect to something more transcendent then the stock market, and what gives transcendent value to daily life and work in the mean time.

And how thirsty our nation might be for that value. How vulnerable.

George W. Bush has offered us something irresistible: a transcendent purpose that doesn’t offend our values as a secular nation. A Christian conservative? Yes, but the religion he has actually sold to us is entirely profane. "Freedom is on the march!" Bush tells us. Freedom as defined by what? By us.

Bush has told us that by being Americans, we are connected to that elusive transcendent purpose—that America is itself Good, and that Good—who knew?—is American. Our secularism, our American Way, has itself become God’s work, has taken on transcendent value. And in a culture wearied by double-blind studies, stifled by a purposeful and explicit void in place of any connection to the transcendent, WE LOVE IT.

So it isn’t that surprising that fifty percent of us are still intoxicated by George W. Bush, even after some disconcerting specifics, because his mandate is, itself, the American Dream, and that is irresistible. It’s no surprise, either, that as the presidential race comes to the homestretch, religion has become a central point of discourse. Because, ultimately, this has been a religious experience all along, and fifty percent of America is still drinking with ferocious thirst at a wine they cannot resist. What is left but for the opposition to call Bush’s bluff, a well disguised poison, and beg a parched America to cork the bottle?

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