"J.F.K. had to fight the anti-papist expectation that his Oval Office would take orders from heaven. For W., it's a selling point. Some right-wing Catholics want John Kerry excommunicated, while evangelicals call the president a messenger of God. 'God's blessing is on him,' the TV evangelist Pat Robertson says, adding, 'It's the blessing of heaven on the emperor.'"
"Mr. Bush has shown all the evangelical voters who didn't like his daddy that he gets, as Mr. Robertson puts it, 'his direction from the Lord.'"
"The president has this strange notion that his belief in God means detailed and perfect knowledge of everything that God wants. He may wish to keep his head stuck in the Iraqi sand, but he may discover that the Almighty has His own purposes."
I liked the last quote because I think that a lot of Christians, not just Bush, give the impression that we have the absolute truth, we've got it figured out. A professor I had last year, Jerry Root, made sure we knew the difference between believing that an absolute truth exists and claiming that we know everything about this absolute truth. Perhaps the evangelical belief that we have a direct line to an all-knowing God needs to be tempered with the reminder that we don't know it all! I wish my fellow Christians would quit playing the God card, especially for political purposes. The girls I went to Cleveland with this past weekend and I decided that we didn't want to identify with the name "evangelical" anymore, precisely because of the influences of the above-mentioned fundies.
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