[Editor's Note: My friend Kenna Amos has a blog titled "The Straight Face Test," now inactive due to Kenna's work demands. I invited him many months ago to submit columns to me for publication on Observations whenever he had something he wanted to say and the time to say it.
This is Kenna's first opportunity; I hope there will be many more.]
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Theologian-in-chief—maybe even Christian?—Bush’s Not
Few Christians will ever get the chance to witness for Jesus the Christ as Methodist George W. Bush has had and still has.
Unfortunately, he hasn’t capitalized on those opportunities.
I’ve always given the president the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his professed Christianity. In mid-December 1999, during the first presidential campaign, he said, “When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me.”
OK.
That’s what you’d expect a believer in the Christ to profess.
But in that same interview, he named Jesus as his favorite political philosopher. Come again? I’ve heard Jesus called many things, honorific and respectful as well as degrading and insulting, but never that. Perhaps a reading of the Holy Bible, especially the Gospels and New Testament, as political theory might be enlightening?
Regardless, that’s when I first suspected Bush would equivocate later, perhaps significantly, about his faith. And the more I’ve heard him call Islam a “religion of peace,” the more I knew Bush’s big, false declaration about God was coming.
Well, as they’d say in France, “Il est arrivé.”
He did that when he told Al Arabiya in an Oct. 4, 2007, interview at the White House that, essentially, everyone prays to the same god. “I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That's what I believe. I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace,” he declared.
His statement about all of us praying to the same God wasn’t just mistaken, as someone has said—it was flat-out ignorant and wrong for a Christian to say.
How so? Because God’s declared He’s the only one. Him. The I Am That I Am. Yahweh. The Lord Jehovah declares His divine singularity in the Old Testament, for example, in the Book of Isaiah at Chapter 44, verse 6; d Chapter 45, verse 6 and verse 22; and Chapter 46, verse 9. And since the Word of God says He cannot lie, then it’s true, if you’re a Christian.
Sure, Bush can be forgiven. Of course, he’ll need to consider what he did and his motivation for doing it.
But those printed words traveling speedily around the world, especially Islamic countries, will haunt not just America, but Israel and the rest of the non-Islamic—especially, Christian—world for a long time.
Thanks be to God, that’s nothing that He, the Almighty—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—can’t handle. But it could make the sledding a tad rougher for some of us earthly mortals.
As for the president saying once again that Islam is “a religion of peace”? That continues to empower the Islamofascist terrorists.
For him to continue to spout that deceitful theological ignorance and political propaganda, something he’s done since 9/11—especially to an Arab Muslim newspaper—makes the president at least either a dupe or one of the biggest unpaid propaganda mouthpieces the Islamofascists have, or both.
If he were less politician and perhaps a real believer in Christ, he would never have uttered what he did to Al Arabiya, either about God or Islam.
That, too, though, is something the Lord Jehovah can handle. But, again, Bush only makes it tougher, more potentially violent for us mortals when he speaks with spiritual ignorance and deception.
These days, to stand one’s spiritual ground, particularly if you’re a Christian in a post-if-not-anti-Christian America and the anti-Christian world, it takes courage, it takes commitment and it takes clarity—and knowledge.
Sadly, the president seems to have exhibited none of these recently, when he had to opportunity to stand for the one he’s called Savior. Perhaps he hasn’t figured out how to “render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Or that it’s impossible for someone to serve two masters, say politics and God?
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