The Soap Box

Hurrah, hurrah. President Bush is back.

No, President Bush is not John. But in the wake of the Katrina disaster, he has been attempting to make himself into something of a Lazarus. With his approval ratings in the basement, it’s unanimous that the President’s primary task is to try to rise from the dead. But what no one seems to be noticing is that he’s trying to use God to do it. Though when you think about it, his entire presidency has been about God, hasn’t it?

Compassionate Conservatism, stem cell research, evildoers. Yeah, Compassionate Conservatism. Remember that? The stem cell issue has stayed with us since it became the first big decision of Bush’s presidency, and the evildoers are certainly still with us. But everyone seems to have forgotten what this administration was about before September 11th, when Bush redirected the fury of God which it is America’s birthright to steer toward the evildoers in Al Qaeda - er, Afghanistan - er, Iraq. Yeah, that’s it. Iraq.

For those who can’t recall, President Bush campaigned heavily in 2000 on what he called “Compassionate Conservatism” - that is, you can be a conservative and still care about people (as it turns out, the only people a Compassionate Conservative cares about are the wealthy whose taxes are too high, and those who want their children to learn about God in the classroom). Upon taking office, Bush created a White House agency called the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, with outreach centers in the major executive agencies to coordinate all of their faith-based efforts. The mission of the office is to identify “unnecessary” restrictions on the channeling of federal dollars to religious organizations that perform social services. You know, that pesky “separation of church and state” stuff.

Bush also introduced legislation in Congress to remove many such restrictions. For months and through numerous congressional hearings, Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative languished. Liberals decried the Constitutional violations, as well as the idea of public money funding discrimination by religious organizations against women and gay people. Even in the Republican Party, all but the most religious conservatives were uneasy about signing on since the President was still new to the office and largely unpopular. Finally, after almost certain failure, the President skirted Congress and implemented most of the policies through Executive Order instead. Then September 11th happened, Bush became the embodiment of American vengeance, and everyone forgot about compassion.

August 29, 2005. At least hundreds of Americans are dead; the President’s approval ratings are in the basement, again. This time, there is no one to direct his vengeance towards (besides himself), so the moment calls for . . . what else? Compassion. In his twenty minute primetime address to the Nation from New Orleans two weeks after the tragedy (it apparently took him awhile to remember the term, too), President Bush referred to compassion a total of four times. He referred overtly to God twice (not counting the obligatory closing, “God bless America”), at times sounding more like a preacher than a President. While pundits were focusing on whether the President would take personal responsibility for the government’s failed response to the crisis or not, whether he would be able to convey that same sense of leadership he showed after September 11th or not, they completely missed the signals that President Bush has returned to the domestic agenda that he lost during his first year in office. The unfinished work of the Bush Administration is bringing God back to the country, and as domestic policies regain the limelight, the Compassionate Conservative identity has clearly regained control of the presidential schizophrenia.

So far, we have gotten from the President a vague outline of the government initiatives he thinks are necessary in response to this tragedy: opportunity zones in the gulf region (a twenty-year-old economic stimulus policy consisting mainly of tax breaks which didn’t work then and won’t work now); personal recovery accounts (much like what Bush would have liked to have seen Social Security turn into); and an urban homesteader act which will give federal land to lower-income people willing to construct a home on it. But these are not policies to deal with the immediate concerns facing evacuees, such as food and clothing, those short-term needs which are the only ones the American public has the attention span to care about. As the administration is pressed to respond to these challenges, what’s become clear is how the President is trying to use this tragedy as a springboard to complete the domestic agenda he hopes will be his other, more successful, legacy. It’s all about God from here on out.

The very next day after the President’s televised response to the biggest natural disaster in American history, who was leading the serial “Ask the White House” session on the White House website? Not the Secretary of the Interior, or the Secretary of Homeland Security, or even the First Lady, but the Director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Jim Towey. The entire session was spent discussing the amazing job people of faith have done to provide for the survivors (as though all the non-religious have been sitting on the sidelines, and in stark contrast to the job done by the government). Towey was awed by how the “armies of compassion” were providing food, offering housing, and “most of all, loving those who survived and consoling them.” Towey assured a nervous nation that “President Bush knows that while government can not love,” religious organizations can.

When the erstwhile FEMA Director, Michael Brown, recently expressed his personal opinion on the government’s role in the recovery, he inadvertently revealed how he got the job everyone seems to agree he was not qualified for: It is the responsibility of churches, he said, to take care of the poor and homeless, not the government. The Bush Administration’s principal domestic tenant is that non-governmental organizations (especially “faith institutions”) must be the ones to “administer important programs [otherwise known as social welfare programs] with love and tenderness,” to use Towey’s words. And for the federal government to pay for it, as Bush has been trying to do for years; FEMA recently announced it would reimburse religious institutions for their Katrina disaster relief efforts.

That last item was the only thing in this entire two-week chain of events that woke the press up a bit to Bush’s impending religious domestic agenda, and the White House took a lot of heat for it. Expect more in the near future. Without the albatros of reelection hanging around the President’s neck, he is likely to be even more brazen in his holy quest to shepherd America back to Jesus, and to get into more trouble as a result. The formerly secular dismantling of New Deal and Great Society government programs begun by Ronald Reagan in the eighties will continue so that, in place of the concrete social and economic support system the disadvantaged have been entitled to for seventy years, the Bush Administration will offer them houses of worship where they can go to receive their fair share of love.

Ultimately, the reinvigorated Faith-Based Initiative will be as spectacular a failure as it was in 2001 less because of the American people’s fidelity to the separation of church and state, but more becase of our infidelity. Despite the fact that nearly forty percent of Americans regularly attend church, and the new-old Republican strategy of sweeping into office on the wings of a Bible, for most religion is merely another source of instant gratification in our informercial capitalist culture: Be wicked all week with sex, chocolate, alcohol, and avarice, and quickly restore your place in heaven in only a few short hours Sunday morning. Americans take offense at little else more than being told how to be moral, particularly by their President. Really, the framers of the Constitution included that separation-of-church-and-state provision mainly as a back-up plan. We probably won’t even need to use it.