The question of Bush's faith

This is a very clear response by Ayelish McGarvey to the Ron Suskind article from this past Sunday's New York Times Sunday Magazine. It pretty much hits my attitude about Bush's faith on the head. In a way, it's odd how much in regards to this administration rests on the question of Bush's faith, since it's almost always what he relies on for policy decisions - either his "gut" or his "faith". (God knows he doesn't rely on the rational testimony of his military or science advisors, unless of course they already agree with his bowels or his interior monologue with God (if this is in fact what it is)...) Journalists in general take Bush's testimonies of faith verbatim and don't question him on it; perhaps because a person's true heart is actually unknowable, questioning a person's word is essentially worthless from a journalistic perspective. But pieces like the Suskind piece, while shocking in themselves, are slightly meaningless to me because I've never really believed that his "faith" was any more than a shill to the social conservative right. No politician on the right is dumb enough to think they're going to get anywhere without reeling in their Evangelical base, and Bush saw what happened to his father with a base that was insufficiently convinced of Bush Sr.'s Christian conviction. So what better than a rebirth of the pagan prodigal son into Christianity through no lesser vehicle than Billy Graham? Certainly on a personal basis, Bush post-rebirth has done some mightily unChristian acts, or at least supported them, and on a political basis of course the mind reels at the moral relativism implicit in just about every aspect of both his campaigning and his policy-making. If what he represents is indeed Christianity, then I have to kind of wonder, what isn't?

In any case, you either have:
a)a man who wraps himself in the cloak of Christianity in order to put a lock on the Christian base of his party, and allows him to do whatever he wants policy-wise, Christian or unChristian as it might be.

or

b)a man who in fact does operate "on faith" with little concern for rational, expert-based discourse. And still engages in policy-making that bares little or no resemblance to any kind of Christianity I can recognize.

Either way. It's frightening.