GOD AND MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

The Supreme Court will soon consider the 1954 addition to the Pledge of Allegiance of two short words: "under God." The Bush administration has sworn to keep them there. What is happening to the wall separating church and state—the key distinction between America and the fundamentalists it is fighting?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I am a strict construclionist and a firm believer in original intent. This is why I believe that the Pledge of Allegiance, in its current phrasing, is two words too long. The superfluous words— "under God"—were inserted during a jittery McCarthy-era moment in 1954, and after President Eisenhower had been unduly impressed by a preacher. The same preacher sermonized that the pledge, in its form as then recited, could be uttered by any schoolchild in Moscow. Quick remedial action was required, and so it was determined that the rhythm and harmony of the pledge, along with its main point, should be ruined by a crude editorial insertion.

Francis Bellamy, the former Baptist minister and Christian socialist who wrote the original pledge, was looking for a form of words that would be genuinely "inclusive." At the time he did this, in 1892, children in the South were still watching Civil War veterans swear allegiance to the Confederate flag, and in the North there was much Protestant bigotry against Catholic immigration. Thus, reasoned Bellamy, it was necessary to have a civic and secular patriotism, based upon the idea of "liberty and justice for all." That simple notion managed to get the country's children through two World Wars before it was trashed. Now the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California has upheld a complaint brought by an atheist parent. So we'll soon see the Supreme Court debating something apparently trivial but actually essential. How stands the "wall of separation" between church and state, in a country locked in furious battle with armed and dangerous theocrats?

Over at the Department of Justice, Attorney General John Ashcroft is in righteous mode and prepared for spiritual warfare. You might think that he would be too busy pursuing the god-inflamed and godintoxicated enemies of the Republic, but he's taking time out to keep the pledge the way it is: a standing insult to secular Americans. After the appellate court voted 2-1 to find the current wording of the pledge unconstitutional, he swore that his department would "spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag." This is the intellectual equivalent of saying that the Constitution upholds the right of all Americans to worship Santa Claus in their own way. But then, Mr. Ashcroft has also made another famous statement, telling his audience that "America has been different. We have no king but Jesus." This proclamation is also two words too long. We have no king at all, and we have no state church, or official religion, and that's that. It's also supposed to be the essential difference between ourselves and the homicidal fundamentalists.

Ashcroft was not attorney general when he made this stupid remark in 1999, while accepting an "honorary degree" from Bob Jones University. (A full degree from that historically racist and sectarian sink of ignorance would hardly count higher.) And George Bush was not president when he was asked to name his favorite political philosopher during a candidates' debate in 1999, and modestly nominated Jesus Christ. As it happens, the two favorite "political philosophers" of the American right are Leo Strauss, an agnostic, and Ayn Rand, a proud and determined atheist. But millions of people at home and abroad have now gotten hold of the idea that we have a fundamentalist and proselytizing administration, led by a born-again believer. How true is this charge?

o begin with the defense rather than the prosecution: Bush has not mentioned the name of Jesus, except when speaking to other Christians, since taking the oath of office. He only makes general invocations of the Almighty these days. It's understood that he privately asks himself, "What would Jesus do?," but there's no particular objection to that, since if he were not a Christian he would be the first president since Abraham Lincoln who did not make this claim. (Also, he clearly doesn't take the advice of his favorite "political philosopher," who generally counseled turning the other cheek.) It's true that the president employed the word "crusade" when speaking of the fight against al-Qaeda, but this word has only lately fallen under a ban of disapproval. Until very recently, every civil-rights activist in America would have described his or her movement as a crusade. Also, Bush only said it twice. And he more than balanced it by making several highly flattering remarks about the Muslim religion, going further in this respect than any of his predecessors and making a claim—that Islam is "a religion of peace"—which asks us to believe quite a lot, and which nobody living in an officially Muslim society could believe for a second.

Descending from the grand to the minuscule, the president has also told us on more than one occasion that he personally has been aided by a higher authority, and that he needed the help as much as he once needed a drink. The old choice— "It's me or Jack Daniel's, you asshole"— has been brusquely offered to many a gross Texan husband by many a pissed-off Texan wife, and there's no good reason to doubt that this story is just another version of the old, old one. Except that in Bush's case it worked. He really did choose Jesus over the amber nectar. (Forcing myself to reflect on this choice has taken me into an area of ethereal responsibility well above my pay grade at this magazine.) Yet, not to be overly sarcastic about it, the decision did involve the future candidate in the first page-by-page, line-byline scrutiny of any book that he had ever undertaken. As a result of a long, hard stint at "Community Bible Study," he is now as abstemious as any Muslim or strict Hindu or 1920s biblical-Protestant prohibitionist.

In a society half crazed by its own addiction to therapy and personal growth, there needn't be any great alarm about that either. Bush's marriage was saved, and his daughters and niece grew up to be barflies or prescription forgers, which shows that we are all at the mercy of heredity as well as of divine judgment. There is no final victory of good over evil. Did someone say evil? Yes, as a matter of fact, Bush did, on several occasions, adding the word "evildoers" to describe the perps themselves. I think that it's culturally shallow for liberals to assume, as they mainly do, that evil is a word only of religious discourse. (Try "malefactor," for example, as a synonym for evildoer.) Hannah Arendt, an imperishable name among secular intellectuals, referred repeatedly in her analyses of genocidal Europe to the "evil-doer" Adolf Eichmann and to "radical evil" and "the banality of evil." This suggests, if we put it only briefly, that we do need a word for it. The president did not refer to an axis of sin, now did he?

Actually, his problem is more one of banality than it is of evil. Like that great Republican Dwight Eisenhower, he seems to believe that any "faith" is better than none. Eisenhower remarked rather gauchely that "our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply-held religious belief—and I don't care what it is." With comparable naivete, President Bush announced that Vladimir Putin was a fellow he could bond with because he carried a crucifix inherited from his mother and was a man of faith who could be looked in the eye, and that Turkey's new Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was also a trusty believer in heaven's providence. Thus a cruel and shifty ex-lieutenant colonel in

Bush has not mentioned the name of Jesus, except when speaking to other Christians, since taking the oath of office. the K.G.B. and a mediocre religious demagogue from Ankara both received a kiss of peace at the White House. (Both went on to watch coldly and to act cynically, after numerous Bush entreaties, as American forces took on Saddam Hussein more or less by themselves.)

The case for the defense now switches I automatically to the case for the prosI ecution. If faith can lead to such godawful pratfalls in foreign policy, what fresh hell might it not wreak on the domestic front? Here we find the president resorting to the softer language, not of faith but of the "faith-based," in order to imply that the federal government can and should take care of the rich, while the churches, mosques, synagogues, and cults can and should take care of the poor. To some extent this was inevitable, because the Clinton welfare policy had already dumped poor children off the rolls. But it was impressive to see how soon a doubt-based policy kicked in. Church-state relations, especially financial ones, are not a oneway street. The state should not, as our Constitution stipulates, have anything to do with favoring religion in general, let alone any religion in particular. But neither should any religion—or all religion, for that matter—be tainted by association with the state. You cannot escape this dilemma by pretending to be neutral or indiscriminate. Do I want my taxpayer dollars to fund, say, a security detail in some housing project that is run by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam local recruits? Emphatically not. But how can Farrakhan himself justify taking money from a regime he regards as polluted and profane? And how can anyone justify the funding of a group such as Farrakhan's, which has, to put it squarely, discriminatory hiring practices? This is an extreme case, which did in fact come up, but it nonetheless illustrates all the other ones. The charitable instinct, or the prompting of compassion, is one thinkable defense of the religious mentality. But this is undermined and corrupted by definition if it solicits money that's already been compulsorily raised by law. There's no way around or through this contradiction, which is why the "faith-based initiative" was so eviscerated by the Senate this spring.

Embarrassed overseas and thwarted at home by his reliance on simplemindedness, Bush has resorted to a tactic of "signaling." In his speeches, and in some of his nominations and appointments, he lets the relevant constituencies know that he is on their side. He has two amazingly smart allies in this process: Michael Gerson, his chief speechwriter, and Karl Rove, his senior adviser. Gerson is loosely describable as a Christian "evangelical," a term of art in the religion business that has no known definition. (Approximately speaking, an "evangelical" Christian is one who really believes this stuff and wants to share the good news.) Neither Gerson nor Rove has anything to do with "end time" or "premillennial" Christianity, and neither believes that an intense military tussle with Satan is soon to take place at Armageddon. This is an often circulated slander against them, and against Bush too. It obscures the picture rather than illuminating it. Bush had an Episcopalian boyhood, attended Presbyterian church when the family moved to Texas, and later joined his wife's United Methodist congregation. His "conversion" moment had nothing to do with any particular branch of Christianity and was complete long before he planned a political career.

But in 1994, as he was thinking about running for governor, he told a reporter from a Houston newspaper that you don't get to heaven if you don't believe in Jesus. The reporter was Jewish, and there was a minor flap. (Some Jews get upset when some Christians say there won't be a Christian-Jewish reunion in paradise. Other Jews, I have noticed, can manage to bear the idea.) Anyway, this crass remark probably helped secure a Bush base among true believers in the more brush-infested parts of Texas. He did much the same thing, running for president in 2000, when he made an emergency pit stop at—yes—Bob Jones University during a tough battle on the southern front with Senator John McCain. Since then, the signaling has become much more sophisticated, not to say refined, not to say more niche-marketed.

In his inaugural speech, written by Michael Gerson, Bush put the following question about America and destiny: "Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?" That arresting image was, I think, first used by the 18th-century English poet and essayist Joseph Addison. But it was actually drawn in this case from a letter written by John Page, during the American Revolution, to the deistical skeptic Thomas Jefferson. The idea was as ecumenical as you could get.

Then, in his most recent State of the Union address, the president announced that there was "power, wonder-working power," in "the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people." The wording was corny enough—all presidents say something like that—but if you were an old-time gospel type you couldn't have failed to "get" the reference to a favorite hymn, "There Is Power in the Blood," which says that there's "power, power, wonder-working power, in the precious blood of the lamb." This same "lamb," as we know, is the human sacrifice represented by Jesus. A similar "message" was sent in the very title of Bush's campaign biography. As you will all at once recall, this was A Charge to Keep—which derives from a famous hymn by Charles Wesley, brother of the founder of Methodism. It speaks of the duty "to serve the present age" and "to do my Master's will." But such hinting and indirection is imposed on the president, who must also try to please Catholic and Jewish and Muslim voters as well as a surprising number of secular ones, and who has—in Karl Rove—a polycentric and polymorphous organizer who got him most of the Muslim vote last time. Bush's appeal to Catholics, by way of statements on cloning, stem-cell research, and partialbirth abortion, completes this holy triangulation. As for the Jewish vote, still muted as a force in G.O.P. circles, that's perhaps why we hear, from time to time, that Ariel Sharon is "a man of peace" as well. (If religion is so goddamned peaceful, then why are we fighting zealots and fundamentalists on so many fronts?)

As a result of "Community Bible Study," Bush is now as abstemious as any Muslim or strict Hindu or 1920s biblical-Protestant prohibitionist.

One provisional conclusion would be that Bush does better when speaking in devotional codes, or in the words of Michael Gerson, than he does when improvising for himself. (The gift of speaking in tongues has emphatically not yet descended upon him when he talks ad lib.) I have spoken to numerous thoughtful people who work or who have worked for Bush, none of whom wanted to be quoted, none of whom go to the same place of worship as he or as one another, and most of whom are more devout than he, who all agreed on one point. The president is neither a religious fanatic nor a man who just uses religious rhetoric as a cynical tactic. He takes his religion as a confirmation, or as a reinforcement. He doesn't think he's a prophet. He prefers to be a fatalist and to say that all is in God's hands. "It relieves him of the things of this world," one of them said. "It means he's less worried." Bush, in other words, could have made a very plausible Muslim, and— why is this more of a stretch?—a fairly good Hasidic Jew.

America is a most religious country and has a most decidedly secular constitution. Only state secularism, after all, can guarantee religious pluralism. This is an easy paradox to grasp. Has Bush grasped it? He has appointed not just John Ashcroft but also Rod Paige. And he has nominated Dr. W. David Hager. Mr. Paige is secretary of education and appears to believe that in a future, ideal America the churches and not the government should be in charge of the instruction of the young. Dr. Hager, who is Bush's idea of an adviser to the F.D.A., is an opponent not just of abortion but also of contraception outside of marriage, and has been quoted as saying that women suffering pre-menstrual syndrome should turn to prayer and Bible reading. (If this man is wedded, I think Congress must subpoena his wife, or—if he should turn out to be from Utah—all his wives.) One of Bush's first presidential acts was to forbid federal funding for any group overseas that even gives advice on abortion. This is, by all reports, just the compassionate treatment that the African AIDS epidemic needs. And the foregoing implicitly raises the very fraught question: If this is Bush's idea of a political nomination, what might his judicial nominations be like? (The current nightmare of the Democrats, and fund-raising tool for advocacy groups, is J. Leon Holmes, proposed for a district-court judgeship in Arkansas in spite of his expressed opinion that rape victims hardly ever get pregnant and thus won't be needing access to abortion.)

The wider picture might clarify a bit if Bush's critics did not also attack him in the name of god. During the prelude to the war against Saddam Hussein, a spokesman for Bush's own United Methodist Church was quoted in a bit of peaceloving propaganda as saying that such a conflict "violates God's law and the teachings of Jesus Christ." How the bishop could know this is quite beyond me. How the Pope presumed to say what Jesus would do is also quite beyond my power of surmise (1 do know that it came as a huge shock to the White House to discover that it was Christianity that was the religion of peace). If religion is to be kept separate from politics, or at the very least separate from government, then everyone, including so-called liberation theologians and candidates running under the assumed title of "Reverend," must learn to contribute their own brick to the wall of separation.