Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explains how the Bush White House is the first to use religion in its particular way.

The White House Wasn’t Always God’s House

George Washington was a nominal Anglican who rarely stayed for Communion. John Adams was a Unitarian, which Trinitarians abhorred as heresy. Thomas Jefferson, denounced as an atheist, was actually a deist who detested organized religion and who produced an expurgated version of the New Testament with the miracles eliminated. Jefferson and James Madison, a nominal Episcopalian, were the architects of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. James Monroe was another Virginia Episcopalian. John Quincy Adams was another Massachusetts Unitarian. Andrew Jackson, pressed by clergy members to proclaim a national day of fasting to seek God’s help in combating a cholera epidemic, replied that he could not do as they wished “without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the general government.”

This particular statement should be proclaimed far and wide:

“The most dangerous people in the world today are those who persuade themselves that they are executing the will of the Almighty.”

(Note: I disagree a bit, however, about Reagan and Carter and others never using their faith to get support or votes… I recall Carter’s being a Sunday-school teacher being used in his favor by his campaign, to say ‘here’s an honest God-fearing guy who isn’t going to lie like Nixon’ … but still, when it came to making actual decisions about the nation, none of these others openly proclaimed that they were doing whatever came to them in prayer.)

The editors of the grand old magazine have, for the first time in its history, endorsed a candidate. And they manage to write the best single statement I’ve yet seen explaining why we need a regime change of our own. Check it out at The New Yorker.

Everybody needs to read this.

NYTimes Magazine article on Bush’s fanaticism

”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .

And my favorite line…

Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn’t do much for analytical skills.