FAITH WITHOUT WORKS.

Amy Sullivan questions whether George Bush is really such a Christian after all:

Both supporters and critics of the president point to his stirring religious rhetoric as proof of his faith--whether they believe his religious convictions are reassuring or disturbing. And yet those often eloquent and powerful words come from the pen of his head speechwriter, Wheaton College graduate Mike Gerson, not necessarily from Bush's inner soul.

She puts forth a brief but compelling case that I'm not prepared to pass a judgment on; I will ask a tangential question, though. Can Bush's alcohol-fueled mid-life conversion really be called a "conversion?" This is the man who, in his younger days, famously had an argument with his mother over whether Jews get into Heaven -- he said they didn't. No one disputes the Christian bonafides of Poppy and Barbara, nor that young George was raised as a good, fire-breathing Methodist. So why should we consider what he did later to be a conversion when it appears that what he really did was stop fucking around so much?

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2004:10:20:14:14

1 Comments

mom said:

Even the Methodists don't claim God has called George Bush to the presidency! Check out: http://www.umc.org/interior.asp?ptid=2&mid=5867

Commentary: What’s a Christian to do in the election?

A UMNS Commentary
By Bishop Kenneth Carder

Partisan politics dominate public attention. Much of it is deceiving, acrimonious and downright disgusting. Sin and spin seem to have joined forces in this campaign. What is a Christian to do?

Of course, these are not "born-again" people in the commonly accepted use of the term. They have a "social creed" rather than one that claims all sorts of regligious dogma (http://www.umc.org/interior_print.asp?mid=2338) and are more inclined than most other protestant denominations to accept and embrace differences in worshipers than to highlight sameness.

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