[referred via JesusPolitics]

Bush’s religious backers like Haggard point to the president’s policy agenda as evidence of his spiritual ideals. The Christian spirit of compassionate conservatism, they say, infuses Bush’s commitment to policies like faith-based social services; many believers hold that a poverty of the spirit is at least partly to blame for such social ills as drug abuse and crime. Bush’s stance on abortion and other so-called life issues is also in concordance with the conservative Christian worldview. And the administration’s proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, while theologically dubious, certainly resonates among more traditionalist believers. Even the war in Iraq, on which Bush famously consulted his heavenly (rather than earthly) father, was proffered as an Old Testament-style battle between the forces of good and The Enemy, as such Christians refer to Satan. “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil,” the president declared after September 11.

But the aforementioned issues are Christological softballs, as it were. After all, Bush’s positions on such matters land him safely in Republican territory. Never once has the president crossed party lines to uphold Christian principles such as aiding the poor or caring for the environment, for example. Much more of the president’s record reveals a man with a far deeper commitment to partisanship, or just simply being right -- even at the expense of clear biblical teaching.

-- from As God As His Witness by Ayelish McGarvey