Bush Tells Group He Sees a ‘Third Awakening’
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”
I don’t begrudge Our Glorious Leader his faith; this is, after all still (nominally) a free country. What does flip my switch is that he somehow seems to have forgotten that he is the President of ALL AMERICANS…and not all of us are Evangelical Christians. In fact, damn few of us are. There are few things that upset me more than listening to Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader use his bully pulpit to shill for his brand of born-again, Evangelical, Apocalyptic End-times Christianity. What makes it even worse is when he assumes that the carefully-screened people he meets are somehow representative of the nation as a whole.
Unless I feel asleep during my American Government classes in junior high, and I don’t think I did, and if memory serves, this nation is still governed by a SECULAR government. Our legal and political system is a SECULAR system. So why, then, does Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader see it as his role to be the Evangelizer-in-Chief? Why does he think that pushing his brand of narrow, fear-based Christianity is an appropriate thing for the most powerful man in the world to be doing? Did he not get the memo about the separation of Church and State?
Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people “who saw life in terms of good and evil” and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.
Hmm…might his impressions have anything to do with the reality that the guests at his highly-choreographed public photo ops and propaganda sessions are thoroughly screened and vetted for ideological realiability? When never is heard a discouraging word, of course the skies are not cloudy all day. You’ll likely not hear a dissenting opinion, either.
Jeebus, he really IS that stupid, isn’t he??
“A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me,” Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. “There was a stark change between the culture of the ’50s and the ’60s — boom — and I think there’s change happening here,” he added. “It seems to me that there’s a Third Awakening.”
The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830.
And Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader is proud to be the next David Koresh leader of the new American Christian Revoloution. Unbelievers need not apply for full membership in this brave new AmeriKKKa….
Some scholars and writers have debated for years whether a Third Awakening has been taking place, although some identify other awakenings in U.S. history. Bush aides, including Karl Rove, have read Robert William Fogel’s “The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism.”
Bush has been careful discussing the battle with terrorists in religious terms since he had to apologize for using the word “crusade” in 2001. He often stresses that the war is not against Islam but against those who corrupt it. In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war.
Yeah, and we all know what a riotous success the Crusades were, eh? Sure, thousands died, but they WERE infidels, after all.
Whether or not Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader is correct about this being a “Third Awakening” or not, there’s a very important point that he’s missing. He is the President of ALL Americans, not just White Christian Evangelical zealots. We Americans may be a spiritual lot, but the power structure is overwhelmingly Christian, and the current strain of in-vogue Christianity doesn’t cotton to infidels and unbelievers…and woe betide those who try to buck the trend.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
