/CONT/   #

BUSH AS A CHRISTIAN: HIS MIDLAND DAYS

False Christs! False prophets! And false Christians! - is this 
what Bush is? - a false Christian? It certainly seems so. Gail 
Sheehy also has a lot of questions concerning the veracity of 
Bush's Christianity - and her conclusions only reinforce what 
we have already said.  

In her incisive article on George Bush that appeared in Vanity Fair 
in October, 2000, she traces Bush's so-called "conversion" back to 
the mid-1980s when Bush finally gave up the bottle and his general 
all-around carousing. But Sheehy reports that Robert McCleskey 
says that when Bush abandoned the bottle, it had more to do with 
an ultimatum his wife, Laura, gave him than it had to do with any 
personal experience with Christ.  

McCleskey, a friend of Laura's since childhood, says, "Laura 
explained it to him in a way he would understand it, and he quit 
drinking." Did that mean his wife threatened to leave him if he 
didn't stop drinking? he was asked. "That's right." In other words, 
he would lose his wife and his twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, 
born in November 1981 - the only structure he had, reports 
McCleskey. He continues solemnly, "I mean that Laura and those 
two little girls had changed his life."  

McCleskey isn't the only one that claims that it was Laura that 
made Bush give up the bottle. It was widely reported in the press 
throughout Texas at the time that Laura had told her husband, 
"It's me or the bottle," or "It's me or Jack Daniels."  

However. Don Evans, perhaps Bush's closest friend and now the 
Secretary of Commerce, indignantly rejects all this. And why is 
that? - because, if this is true, it does little to establish 
Bush's bona fides as a Christian - AND THAT IS, AFTER ALL, 
WHAT IS IMPORTANT HERE - I.E., ESTABLISHING BUSH'S LEGITIMACY 
AS A CHRISTIAN. One needs to remind himself of what's happening 
here: If the elites are going to be successful in building a 
Christian "mass movement" to counter the Left's efforts to 
sidetrack globalization, the man they "choose" to lead this 
movement must, of course, be a Christian, or he must, at least, 
be perceived to be a Christian.  

The truth is, nonetheless, that there are many men and women - not 
all of them Christians - who have given up the bottle in order to 
maintain a marriage. This, of course, doesn't take away from what 
Bush did - it is an admirable thing when anyone gives up a 
destructive habit like that. But it doesn't mean that one has 
to accept Christianity to do so. Nonetheless, Don Evans is 
insistent that Bush quit the bottle because he embraced Christianity.  

DON EVANS & DON JONES

He claims Bush became a Christian when he and a few friends 
invited Bush to attend some evangelical Christian meetings 
(meetings that were arranged around a course of study by James 
Dobson) while Bush was still drilling "dry holes" with Arbusto 
Oil back in Midland, Texas. Don Jones, another close friend 
from Midland days, corroborates Don Evans' story - at least 
up to a point. Jones says that Bush did indeed accompany him 
and a number of other friends in Midland (including Evans) to 
a series of Christian meetings in the mid-1980s - but Jones 
says that Bush never really took the matter seriously.  

The truth is, according to a rather sheepish Jones, Bush never 
"behaved himself." He claims that George would be constantly 
cracking jokes like, "What kind of pants did the Levites wear?" 
When the pastor asked, "What is a prophet?" Bush sang out in 
front of forty other couples, "That's when revenues exceed 
expenditures. No one's seen that out here in years." Another time 
the pastor asked the question, "What happened to the Jew on his 
way to Jericho?" and Bush quipped, "He got his butt whipped." And 
when his attention span was exceeded, he would set his watch to 
go off in the middle of the pastor's lesson. The other men would 
guffaw, and the following week they would all set their watches to 
go off at the same time in the middle of the lesson and the class 
would turn into a cacophony of alarm bells.  

There are a number of other things that seemed to trouble Jones 
insofar as Bush's claim to be a Christian was concerned. Jones, 
who can point to the exact date when he became a born-again 
Christian, never heard Bush describe an actual "conversion 
experience." Jones says that "He (i.e., Bush) never said he 
was spiritually empty" (i.e., that he "needed" Christ) - something 
that mystified Jones, and troubled him deeply. Mike Conaway, a 
six-foot- three former football player who was another one of 
Bush's close friends back in Midland when Bush is supposed to 
have become a Christian says, "I didn't see any change in his 
behavior. I thought that's what is supposed to happen when 
a person becomes a Christian. But I didn't see that in Bush."  

CHAPTER VII

BUSH AND THE PROMISE KEEPERS: RELIGIOUS RHETORIC  

TURNED INTO POLITICAL RHETORIC
BUSH IS TRANSFORMED BY THE PROMISE KEEPERS

The fact is, no matter how one cuts it, Bush's experience with 
Christianity during the mid to late-1980s was at best a shallow 
and superficial one - not the kind of experience that would go 
very far in establishing himself as someone who took his Christianity 
very seriously. But all that changed when he came in contact with 
Dr. Tony Evans (not to be confused with Don Evans), the black pastor 
of one of Dallas's largest mega-churches, the crystal-chandeliered 
Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, and the Christian organization Evans 
helped to found, the PROMISE KEEPERS.  

Sheehy says that Tony Evans was one of the early "movers and 
shakers" in the PROMISE KEEPERS phenomenon that seemed to 
appear out of nowhere in the early to mid-1990s. What seemed 
to attract Bush to the PROMISE KEEPERS was its implicit political 
message, a message that he came increasingly to believe that - 
had his father embraced it - he would not have lost the White 
House to Bill Clinton.  

The loss by "Bush the Elder" to the Clintons in the 1992 
presidential election had infuriated "Bush the Younger," and 
it had ignited in him a new, burning interest in politics. 
All of this coincided nicely with Bush's new friendship with 
Tony Evans. Essentially, what Bush learned from Tony Evans was 
a completely new approach to politics - a RELIGIOUS approach 
rather than an economic one, an approach that Bush thought 
could trump the economic message that Clinton had used to 
defeat his father with. Indeed, Dr. Martin Hawkins, Tony Evans's 
assistant pastor, says that what Bush did was to imbibe a "WHOLE 
NEW PHILOSOPHY" about "how the world should be seen from a divine 
viewpoint" - a view that Sheehy alleges was essentially LIFTED 
STRAIGHT OUT OF THE PAGES OF ONE OF TONY EVANS' PROMISE KEEPERS 
HANDBOOKS.  

While the PROMISE KEEPERS themselves embrace no political doctrine 
as such, Bush and many of his cohorts came to believe that they 
did embrace a religious rhetoric that - if properly stroked 
and rearranged - could be transformed into a powerful political 
message that would resonate forcefully with a people who were 
growing weary with what many considered to be the "out-or-control" 
liberalism of the last few decades.  

THE ESCHATOLOGY OF THE PROMISE KEEPERS

Most of the leaders of the PROMISE KEEPERS movement embrace a doctrine 
of "end times" (eschatology), known as "dominionism."
DOMINIONISM 
PICTURES THE SEIZURE OF EARTHLY (TEMPORAL) POWER BY THE "PEOPLE OF GOD" 
AS THE ONLY MEANS THROUGH WHICH THE WORLD CAN BE RESCUED; ONLY AFTER 
THE WORLD HAS BEEN THUS "RESCUED" CAN CHRIST RETURN TO "RULE
AND REIGN."
Some dominionists see the seizure of the earth as the result of 
"signs, wonders, and miracles;" others picture it as the result of 
military and political conquest; most see it as a combination of 
both. It is this eschatology that Bush has imbibed; an eschatology 
through which he has gradually (and easily) come to see himself 
as an agent of God who has been called by Him to "restore the 
earth to God's control" - a "chosen vessel," so to speak, to bring 
in the "Restoration Of All Things." AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT 
IT - IT IS EXACTLY THIS ESCHATOLOGY THAT MOTIVATES 
BUSH TODAY. People are making a big mistake in 
underestimating this fact. [More about this later.]  

Al Dager, a recognized expert on the dominionist mindset, writes,

"Some two decades before Pentecostalism found its way into the 
(mainstream) denominations (i.e., the Episcopalians, the Catholic 
Church, etc.) as the 'Charismatic Renewal', it experienced a new 
surge of experience- oriented theology within its own ranks. It was 
from this neo-Pentecostal experience - what came to be called the 
'Latter Rain Movement' - that Charismatic Dominionism sprang. The 
more prominent leaders of that movement blended Pentecostal 
fervor with teachings that the church was on the brink of a 
worldwide revival. That revival would result in a victorious 
church without spot or wrinkle ... (which) would inherit the 
earth and rule over the nations with a rod of iron."  

Dominionism can run the gamut from the harsh, rather mean-spirited 
and very militant kind propagated by a R.J. Rushdoony or a Gary North, 
to the much more mild and palatable kind that dominionist aficionados 
and votaries like C. Peter Wagner, the late John Wimber, John White, 
Dr. Bill Hamon, Harold Caballeros, Sue Curran, Rick Joyner, John Paul 
Jackson, Barbara Wentroble, Chuck Pierce, etc. posit. It is this 
much more mild, "feel-good" form of dominionism that the PROMISE 
KEEPERS embrace and promote.  

Barbara Wentroble, in her book People of Destiny, explains the 
new cuddly and friendly form of dominionism that Bush ran into 
with the PROMISE KEEPERS. Essentially, what these "new 
dominionists" believe is that the human race was created to be 
God's "representative in the earth." They were to guard and care 
for all of God's creation under His direction - and although many 
generations have failed in this responsibility, God has never 
changed His mind. That's what the church is all about. The church 
is the means through which God is going to re-establish His 
authority on the earth. God put His power and Spirit into the 
church to change the world and bring it back under authority. 
[Wentroble is somewhat of an anomaly; like Sue Curran, Wentroble 
is one of the most popular "new dominionist" speakers in a very 
male-dominated world. She is considered to be an "apostle-prophet" 
by many. Her "sphere of operation" is bringing churches (i.e., 
"Latter Rain," "new dominionist-type" churches) to
small communities 
throughout the country.]   

/CONT/

---