Diana Wichtel: Beware statesman invoking God

The alarm bells really started ringing after September 11, when George W began throwing around words like "crusade" and "evil-doers". I liked him better in the old days, when he said things like, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family" and "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully".

Actually, I never liked him.

But such pronouncements, though devoid of discernible meaning, were at least relatively harmless.

Now, emboldened by getting away with sounding increasingly like an Old Testament prophet rather than a 21st century world leader, Bush continues to blur the lines, not just between church and state but between the will of God and the will of George W. Bush.

In journalist Bob Woodward's behind-the-scenes book, Bush at War, we hear this from Bush: "There is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war. There is a value system that cannot be compromised - God-given values. These aren't United States-created values."

He is talking about things like freedom and mother love, apparently. But he's also setting up the outrageous notion that if and when America goes to war it will be about upholding Divine law. Nothing to do with American foreign policy.

They say Bush was quite a drinker before he saw the light. For that matter, Bush says it himself. Then he gave up the booze and became a born again Christian.

This explains a lot. Like many a reformed hellraiser, he seems to think this gives him permission to preach to the rest of us, even though most of us knew way before George W did that excessively abusing oneself with substances was a bad idea.

Bush has certainly retained the manipulative qualities and denial techniques of the hardened boozer. To invoke God in the way he does is to cut the moral ground out from under anyone who disagrees with you. By the time he's finished, to be against America's policies is to be against God. It would be quite clever if it wasn't so scary.

Well, not that clever. Even in Old Testament mode, Bush sometimes reverts to his English-as-a-second-language ways. "We hold dear what our Declaration of Independence says, that all have got uninalienable rights, endowed by a Creator," he told community and religious leaders in Moscow last year.

It was an interesting Freudian slip. That double negative in "uninalienable" means the rights are, in fact, alienable, something a lot of innocent civilians may be about to find out.

But it's getting harder to laugh. Some commentators are seriously worried about what has been referred to as Bush's "Messiah complex". Others think the rhetoric is largely for political purposes.

I hope the latter are right. The alternative is that the most powerful man in the world believes that God's plan includes apocalypse, if not now, then possibly quite soon.

Whatever Bush's temporal or spiritual agenda, he was at it again in his State of the Union speech. "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."

Cue wild applause. Liberty is God's gift to humanity. America sees itself as a free nation, therefore God has favoured America. Iraq, on the other hand, is not free, therefore God doesn't like Iraq and it's okay to bomb it back into the Stone Age. Nice.

This sort of thinking has done some good - there are hilarious parodies of Bush speeches to be found on the net - "Our God also pities the atheists who insist on separation of church and state. Forgive them Father, for they do not know that in Hell, even your teeth burn. (Applause.)"

And, of course he is not the first politician to claim that God is on his side. Nor, sadly, will he be the last. You also have to take into account the general God-bothering tendencies of American public life. American entertainment industry awards ceremonies are full of people, mostly living lives of appalling consumption and hedonism, who seem to believe God is directly responsible for their latest forgettable album or awful sitcom.

But this is different. This is a fundamentalist mindset. And what disturbs me about fundamentalism of any flavour is that it is usually so frighteningly primitive and literal. Writing about Woodward's aforementioned book, a reviewer says, "What are readers to make of the anecdote in which a CIA operative is told to bring Osama bin Laden's head home in a box? Was this for real? Apparently so, since the operative took a cardboard box and dry ice with him."

Yikes. The trouble with bringing God into politics - well, you only need to think of Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Bosnia ... and it's not that big a step from believing you are serving God to believing you are God.

The Nazis saw themselves as super beings with the right to give and take away, to decide who would live and die, who was human and who was not. The horror of what they did stays so fresh not because they behaved like monsters. Live long enough and you see a lot of that. It's because they behaved like gods. And that's something we don't want to see again.