Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, July 10, 2004
 | Straight Dope on Bush
As I have reflected on the president that disappeared during 9/11, the vice president who remains in the shadows and has fingers in some deep and oil-soaked pies, and the current fiasco in Iraq, where troops are now surrounded by hostile indigents and nobody has a coherent plan on how to maintain safety and order, I have wondered if any Christians have yet come to their senses about trusting conservative politics to be our deliverance. |
I don't hate George W. Bush, but I do have trouble with despising him. I have to remind myself that this man is not a kingpin of villainy. I'm not sure what he is, but as our consitutional rights are ever more threatened by anti-terrorist legislation, and as stem cell research is continuing with only a few restrictions in place (placed there by Bush as lip-service to the conservative Right), I have to recgonize that George W. Bush is what many conservative Christians want in a politician. They want the right words to be said. They want the invocations of God to be made. They want prayer services in the Cathedral in Washington.
But they also want to be comfortable in their homes. They want to remain middle class respectable. They want safety in American skies, even if that means bombing the livelihoods of Iraqi people to flinders as an example to the Middle East, when their only crime was being born in Iraq. They want low gas prices, even if that means a regime of tyrannical despots remain in power in Saudi Arabia. They want to see the age of "Israel restored" ushered in, even if we have to usher it in by displacing and robbing innocent Palestinians of their homes and lands and livelihoods. They want the Moslem world punished for 9/11, even though a handful of extremists were the ones responsible (and those extremists were financed by our "friends" the Saudis). They want to say we have freedom of religion but they want Moslems to leave the USA or be frightened into second class citizen status.
So really, George W. Bush is just riding a wave of what the conservative Christian right expects. If he is full of contradictions, it is because we are full of contradictions.
For a thorough analysis of the contradictions of George W. Bush, check this link.
For the real truth on where the deliverance of the Christian lies, you'll have to go to a larger work, the Bible. Christ is our life; the kingdom of heaven is our kingdom. We are put on this earth to bring in His kingdom, and that requires giving (and living) the good news of salvation to mankind: the gays, the communists, the feminists, the pro-abortionists, the Moslems, the atheists, the drug dealers, etc. We cannot convert the world by trying to make it behave. We convert the world by taking up the cross of Christ, following Him, and living with our expectations placed in Him.
