I have heard Al Franken talk about this (in his audio version of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”). I may just have to get the paperback book so I can use the references he uses, for which he provides all the bibliographic info, even in the audio version. What impresses me so much about Franken is his research. I knew he was a pretty intelligent guy, but he has written the absolute best book I’ve come across yet on the two-faced nature of contemporary Republican politics (as represented by what SEEMS to be just about everybody, but I’m sure there are exceptions…..namely, probably most of the people who buy the lies, hook line and sinker, because they want so desperately to be right— after all, many of them say that Bush is “God’s man”, and so that seems like a rather lofty responsibility. I would not want to be responsible for handing over authority to someone who disgusises himself as an “angel of light”, and ends up deceiving thousands. Especially since a poular notion among the Religious Right is the end-times scenarios, which include the rise of the Anti-Christ.)
Anyway, Franken points out how neither Donald Evans nor Bush seem to be really ready to “talk Bible” when they have questions put to them. This interview describes that encounter, and also how Bush became a little miffed when a reporter asked him what Bible passage he’d read that day, and didn’t answer the question.
So I’m sort of fascinated by the extent to which he really is born again, and how much a part of his life this really is. It’s possible he thinks it is.
With the religous right’s almost pathological emphasis on personal piety (pathological, becuase it is almost always to an almost complete exclusion of any sense of social and political responsibility), it is not at all out of character to “narrow” their “born again status” down to some almost secretive “personal relationship” which can seem almost divorced from their actual social, op=political, and work lives. Their rise in the past 20 or so years in the Republican party as a serious “base” to be reckoned with has come about with the same sort of “lack of social conscience” toward almost all issues OTHER than abortion, school prayer, and homeosexuality. They call themseleves “ProLife”, and yet vehemently oppose GunControl, and are disturbingly pro-war, pro-death penalty, and pro-Get Rid of Welfare (which usuaally extends to just about every social program that is in place to try to aid people in dire need).
So it is an accomodation of “bits and pieces” of the gospel, which more often than not, ends up severely bastardizing the meaning of the terms spiritual, salvation, belief, and also piety. It’s almost “Gnostic” (an early first century spirtual sect that denied that God has anything to do with this “fallen world”, and that God deals only “with our spirits”, and so we can carryout an entire spirtual journey basically while leading a totally divorced-from-the-world “spiritual life”. It’s really mysterious how they miss the rather clear messages like “If you do it not unto the least of these, you did it not unto me” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” and even “love your enemies”. I sort of have a suspicion that it has to do with really BELIEVING in a particular lifestyle and set of “assumed rules” for maintaining that life, and then seeking to reconcile and reinterpret the Bible as a reinforcement of that lifestyle, making us conveniently, a part of “God’s chosen”.
The Republican machine has tapped into this process and craftfully forged what I would consider to be a pretty big hatchet job on the “relevance” of Christianity to life in the United States, except as a support for the platform of the Republican party. So much so, that Democratic party voters are marginalized in the Christian world, at least in the media.