News Intelligence Analysis
Immorality Wins the White House
Response to Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal
November 4, 2004
By Dennis Crews
George Bush is the first president whose ascendancy into the
White House was fueled by the demise of spirituality in America.
If evangelical churches today retained as their central focus
the gospel of Jesus Christ, Bush would not be president. But
nominal Christians have left the faith of their fathers in droves,
relegating spiritual ministry to an ancillary function and making
the pursuit of political power their central focus. Houses of
God have been turned into centers of partisan political activism.
George Bush has exploited this crumbling of spiritual purpose
and fully embraces the politicization of religion. Conversion
of hearts has been trumped by shock and awe—hardly compatible
with the gospel of Christ, but nowadays the Sermon on the Mount
is for wimps and appeasers. How destructive all this is to America's
soul remains to be seen.
Bush's "culture of life" rhetoric is betrayed by the
tens of thousands of lives unnecessarily lost in Iraq. The study
of war casualties in Iraq, conducted by Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg
School of Public Health and recently reported in The Lancet,
shows the risk of violent death is a stunning 58 times higher
in Iraq since the US invasion, and most of the 100,000 victims
have been women and children. "Violence accounted for most
of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted
for most violent deaths," says Les Roberts, one of the researchers.
This election was won by forcing emotionally divisive distractions
into public consciousness to divert attention from the administration's
profound failures of judment and accountability. And while Americans
continue going about their lives, other people with inherent
human worth equal to ours will continue to suffer unimaginably
because of our choices in this election.
Contrary to Noonan, Bush's victory is not a win for America. It is a net loss for world peace, for the valuation of human life, for moral clarity, for Christianity as defined by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and I believe it will prove an unprecedented net loss for democracy by four years from now. But for that also we will have to wait and see.
Dennis Crews is a Yurica Report Op Ed columnist.
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