George Bush's Armies of Compassion

Born to an Episcopalian father and a Presbyterian mother in 1946, George Walker Bush was baptized as an infant into the Episcopal Church. Thirty-one years later he married a Methodist and, after a long struggle with alcohol, joined a Non-Denominational community Bible study, met Billy Graham, went teetotal, and began to describe himself as “born again”. This personal conversion experience would go on to play a central role in the way he presented himself and his administration, both to the American public and on the international stage. While the jury is still out on the degree to which Bush’s Christian faith was subject to political calculation, it undoubtedly manifested itself in a kind of missional zeal that shaped both his national and foreign policy – a zeal that he made no effort to disguise. Bush’s presidential inaugural address in 2001 pledged America to a particular goal: “when we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.”[1] Bush certainly endeavored to uphold this over the eight years that followed.