President Bush has a deep set of ties to a wide swath of people in the evangelical community. His own personal conversion at the age of 40 came after conversations with the Rev. Billy Graham and as a result of a community Bible study he was a part of in Midland, Texas. A few years later, in 1988, he was in charge of relations with evangelical leaders for his father's presidential campaign, and he established a vast network of relationships with a variety of leaders who have been very influential on him in subsequent years.
The most dramatic manifestations [of President Bush's religious conversion] were in his own personal life. He stopped drinking. He stopped smoking. And by all accounts he became much more serious about his role as a husband and father. It also had some impact on his politics, but it's less clear exactly to what extent ... certainly he's taken a very strong stand on abortion as a pro-life advocate. He's also taken a strong stand as an advocate of the use of the death penalty in the state of Texas, and he directly ties those [stands] to his evangelical faith.
To what extent does his religion make a difference for his politics? If you look at the way he ran the campaign, he reached out to African-American religious leaders, to conservative Catholics, and to a variety of evangelical leaders. The first two strategies didn't pay many dividends. The work he has to do politically at this point is to reach out to a wider section of America's religious establishment than simply the conservative Protestants. And it's not clear how far or how effecitvely he's going to be doing that.
People tend to be very cynical when you display your personal piety for what seems to be political profit in the short run. Americans are turned off by that. In some sense, they are afraid of very particular, specific expressions of religious piety. There's a fine line that all politicians have to tread between the particularity of their faith and how they display it in any kind of public forum. President Bush obviously has a lot of work to do with mainstream Christian Protestant denominations, with liberal Catholics, with Jews, and with members of the world religions that are now growing at fast rates in America. He has a lot of territory to cover to reach out to those groups.
It's difficult to see a direct connection between the teachings of the Methodist church, President Bush's political stance, and his expressions of piety. It seems that the bulk of the influence upon him spiritually has come more from evangelical sources and less from mainstream Protestantism.
There are three parts to the genius of John Wesley's thought and the tradition he established. Methodism is a religion of the heart; there's a serious piety there. But it's also melded with a serious pursuit of the intellect. The mind is also a very strong part of the Wesleyan tradition. The third component is a strong call for social justice and outreach. There was a concern for the poor at the beginning of Wesley's ministry that has run through the history of the United Methodist Church. There is a wonderful opportunity for President Bush to draw upon that. Clearly he uses the language of the heart. That's part of his vocabulary in most every political setting. What remains to be seen is whether he draws upon the actual Social Priniciples that have been written by his church, which talk about how to engage that piety in the political world. He has a reservoir to draw upon there. It's not clear to what extent he will.
