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by Tom Teepen
George W. Bush sought the presidency four years ago promising to be "a uniter, not a divider." He is running for re-election as a divider -- and, dangerously, the division he is working is religious.
Bush has created the most overtly, indeed, aggressively religious presidency of modern times, maybe the most evangelical ever, and while he is careful, when he remembers, to rhetorically honor all faiths, in practice this is specifically a conservative Christian presidency.
And now Bush's re-election campaign is organizing "friendly congregations" to serve as recruiters and advocates for Bush and particularly to marshal voter-registration drives. Some 1,600 pastors have been contacted just in Pennsylvania.
In effect, the president is setting up a church-based political machine.
Both parties have used religious connections before. The Democratic party owes many of its voters and much of its oomph to the black church. The GOP profited for years from the right-wing "voter guides" of the Christian Coalition.
But it remained for Bush to carry the practice to such an extreme that its difference in degree adds up to a difference in kind.
Bush was prayed into office at his inauguration specifically in the name of Jesus and not under the broader mantle of God, as had been customary. And his administration has pursued policies not merely informed by a general background of faith but directed by sectarian specifics.
The administration's severe narrowing of medical stem-cell research, its antagonism to contraception and its opposition to any sex education other than counseling virginity until marriage do not reflect the broad practice and values of most mainstream Christians but rather the dogmas of conservative faiths.
Unable to get his faith-based initiative past the bipartisan skepticism of Congress, the president has used executive orders and bureaucratic dodges to put much of it into play anyway.
Bush postures as a champion of even-handedness, saying he is saving the faith community from anti-religious prejudice, but that's nonsense. The federal government already had an active program of grants to religious groups for social services. Recipients were required only not to discriminate in hiring for non-religious jobs and not to use tax money to proselytize.
It is just those reasonable restraints that the Bush administration has sloughed off in its zeal.
The result is that, by an accounting that just about everyone agrees is incomplete, the administration issued $1.1 billion in grants to religious groups last year, drawing 129 new first-time applicants.
More than a thousand religious leaders, out for more federal money, attended a recent White House conference organized by the White House Office on Faith-Based Initiatives that Bush has created. The president's pep talk was interrupted as much by "Amens!" as by applause. Small wonder. At another meeting with pastors in January, the president touted "the miracle of salvation" as the answer to social problems.
The president is, on the one hand, holding out the promise of billions of tax dollars to eager clerics and congregations and, on the other hand, enlisting them in his re-election campaign. If your are uncharitable, you could see that as a classic shakedown.
Published on Friday, June 11, 2004 by the Daily Camera
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