[Mb-civic] Faith-Based Politics - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Faith-Based Politics

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, November 24, 2005; Page A35

President Bush made a quick transition from completing a revealing trip 
across Asia to welcoming the holiday season to the White House this 
week. Both actions help illuminate the enhanced role that religion plays 
in the nation's politics and policy under Bush.

The much-dismissed trip said little about Asia but everything about 
Bush. Religion and democracy were at the top of his agenda there. It was 
the highlight of what has become a relentless attempt to reverse the 
recent secularization of U.S. foreign policy as well as other aspects of 
national life.

The annual Thanksgiving Day proclamation Bush issued also captured the 
paradoxical American commitments to observing religious freedom for all 
while surviving as one nation under God. In his version of the ritual 
document originated by the Founding Fathers, Bush asked God "to watch 
over America."

He seems more comfortable than most of his predecessors in stressing and 
reconciling in public his own commitments to religion and democracy, the 
two grand themes -- and moving forces -- of his presidency. They are the 
irreducible elements of governance for Bush at home and abroad. American 
secularists, and others, may see danger in this juxtaposition, but Bush 
sees it as the solution.

The president did not build his unorthodox visit to China around 
economic cooperation with the world's fastest-rising manufacturing 
power. Nor did he seek to advance a strategic dialogue.

Instead, Bush's centerpiece was religious and political freedom. China's 
communist leaders did not like that approach -- they rounded up 
dissidents in retaliation -- but they had to welcome Bush politely in 
front of their people even as they fumed over his worshipping so 
publicly with Chinese Christians.

For Bush the whole trip, dismissed by policy realists as 
counterproductive, was probably worth those moments and the photographs 
of him among the Chinese faithful in a land that persecuted and expelled 
its once-powerful Catholic community after the 1949 revolution.

Beijing also had to swallow Bush's meeting with the Dalai Lama, the 
exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, on the eve of the president's Asian 
journey, and Bush's endorsement of Taiwan's vibrant democracy, delivered 
from the democratic stronghold of Japan.

The persecution of Catholics in China and Eastern Europe made support 
for Christianity an openly avowed weapon in Western strategy at the 
outset of the Cold War. John F. Kennedy's interest in South Vietnam was 
stirred in part by the flight of Catholics from the north and the needs 
of a besieged government headed by Catholics in the south.

The role of religion in U.S. and European foreign policy faded away with 
the end of the godless Soviet empire and the Cold War -- even as 
religion was rapidly becoming the engine of backlash against 
modernization in the Muslim world and elsewhere.

Bush's priorities are also reflected in his encouragement of and 
development funding for faith-based organizations working in poor 
countries. This sparks growing concern among American nongovernmental 
development organizations and European governments, which are working 
more closely together as a result.

Usually overlooked in analysis of the relative harmony and effectiveness 
that Condoleezza Rice's first 10 months as secretary of state have 
brought to U.S. foreign policymaking is the fact that she and the 
president share a deep evangelical religious bond. She reflects not only 
his politics but also his innermost beliefs. This may give her a major 
advantage over other Bush aides in carrying out policies based on faith.

Let me rephrase that: In contrast to its foreign policy, the Bush agenda 
at home is a collection of smoldering ruins. The administration has 
illogically dismissed deficits and balanced budgets as decisive economic 
factors, alienated Congress on every conceivable issue, left its tax 
cuts vulnerable to reversal, and enveloped Social Security reform in a 
poisonous political atmosphere.

Bush's most durable support comes from a coalition of social 
conservatives who usually define their politics in religious terms -- 
whom Bush has pleased or placated by nominating John Roberts and Sam 
Alito to the Supreme Court -- and the pro-democracy activists of the 
right who agree with him on pushing democracy in Iraq, Ukraine, China 
and elsewhere.

Bush's Asia trip suggests that the president's heart and mind remain 
with that core coalition. Republicans who are urging him to pivot to a 
broader constituency and agenda to rescue a failing presidency are 
swimming against the tide.

China deserved the frank admonitions about religious freedoms that Bush 
delivered in his well-conceived celebration of democracy's reach in 
Asia. Here at home, he needs to establish that he can make religion a 
force for change without making it a tool of governance, or vice versa.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112301660.html
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