The Guardian 14 September, 2005
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
On God’s team
Have you ever considered how useful it is to a bourgeois politician to be considered "a man of God"? Well, think about it.
Immediately, you are no longer regarded as a lying, self-seeking sleazebag like other politicians, but as someone who is divinely guided, who is above all the skullduggery politicians normally engage in under capitalism.
No wonder so many bourgeois parliamentarians are rushing to embrace the church!
Whether it’s Brendan Nelson or British PM Tony Blair, prominent pollies are pushing their religious credentials — and their religious policies — for all they are worth.
The most outrageously religious is of course George W Bush. Certainly Bush’s religiosity is no purely private matter.
In 2001, Gary Bauer, the President of US Christian right lobby group American Values, told the Washington Post "There is a shared sense among conservative evangelicals that a man of God is in the White House."
Also at the end of 2001, when "televangelist" Pat Robertson resigned as President of the Christian Coalition — probably the main Christian right lobby group — Bauer told the same paper "I think Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled.
"[Bush] is that leader right now."
(Robertson, incidentally, distinguished himself recently by calling on the US government to organise the assassination of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez. "We have the capability, why don’t we just do it?" said this man of God.)
Bush’s staff includes several whose sole job is to liaise with the Christian right. Top man in this group of religious White House aides is Tim Goeglein.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, leaders of the Christian right took the opportunity to get stuck into people who follow Islam. However, when Bush spoke of a "crusade" against Islamic fundamentalists he discovered that only fellow Christian fundamentalists supported him, both in the US and globally.
He had to backpedal very quickly, which of course his speechwriters are adroit enough — and practiced enough — to do readily.
Nevertheless, in the US the leaders of the Christian right began, as Esther Kaplan noted in her 2004 book With God On Their Side (New York, The New Press), "to speak of Bush’s presidency as divinely inspired and his re-election as divinely ordained — a view his staff has avidly cultivated."
One of them — our old friend Tim Goeglein, fact — told a Christian magazine: "I think President Bush is God’s man at this hour."
Notes Kaplan: "This faith in his presidency has shielded Bush from accountability and from doubt.
"Since he believes, like his base, that ‘we are not the author’ of our lives, what does it matter if his claims that tax cuts would provide millions of jobs, that Iraqis would embrace American troops, and that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction have all unraveled?
"Bush and his conservative evangelical base are on the same team — God’s team."
Two weeks ago, I wrote about that nice man Augusto Pinochet, and the support he received in later life from Baroness Thatcher and the Pope. The last-named was of course another member of "God’s team" — although not an evangelical.
However, like his good mate Pinochet, the late Pope was nothing if not anti-communist, and that quality makes him one in a long line of leaders who cloaked their anti-people, anti-human actions in claims that they were saving civilisation from Godless communism.
From Whiteguard leaders Wrangle and Kolchak in the Russian Civil War to Hitler and Franco in the ’30s and ’40s and on to the leaders of France, Britain and the US in the decades following WW2, butchery, torture and extermination have been the routine tools of anti-communism.
Nevertheless, when the Pope died his anti-communism was paraded as his greatest contribution to the modern world!
The ABC’s Hamish Robertson, interviewing that pillar of democratic thinking John Howard, asked the singularly biased question: "Do you think it’s perhaps hard to underestimate the Pope’s contribution to the collapse of communism; after all, he was in the forefront of the fight against communism in his native Poland?"
(And some people still talk about the ABC’s "left-wing bias"!)
With a lead question like that, Howard responded predictably: "I think as time goes by that will loom very large indeed in the writing of the history of his contribution.
"I don’t in any way of course want to diminish his role as the leader of the Catholic Church, and therefore the foremost Christian of the time; I don’t want to do that.
"I think the two things are interwoven because his opposition to Soviet communism was based on his faith and his belief in human freedom and human dignity, so one was a natural extension of the other."
Eyewash! The late Pope was the most reactionary Pontiff since Pius XII.
Opus Dei, the extreme reactionary clerical grouping behind Pope John Paul, and the evangelicals that back George Bush are two sides of the same coin. Neither is at all concerned about "human freedom and human dignity".