Hypocrisy in High Places

I've been reading Thomas Watson's "The Doctrine of Repentance" off and on for a while now. As with many Puritan writings, each chapter is broken up into smaller sections, many of which are complete thoughts so one can read the book almost like a devotional, a little along each day. That also makes the book easy to go back to after several days of not having read. This was the case recently as I picked up the book again in the middle of chapter 6 which is called "A Serious Exhortation to Repentance."

This chapter talks about those for whom repentance is necessary (which of course is everyone but Watson takes several different types of people and discusses repentance with regard to their specific situations). The section I read last night discussed the necessity of repentance for hypocrites.

Watson says:

The hypocrite or stage-player has gone a step beyond the moralist and dressed himself in the garb of religion...the hypocrite is like a house with a beautiful facade but every room within is dark. He is a rotten post fairly guilded...He can be as his company is and act both the dove and the vulture...He is a pretender to faith, but he makes use of it rather for a cloak than a shield. He carries a Bible under his arm, but not in his heart. His whole religion is a demure lie.

As providence would have it, just before returning to this book and reading the section containing the above quotes, I had read an article on Slate magazine's site which contained an excerpt from a new book by Jacob Weisberg called The Bush Tragedy. This particular excerpt dealt with what Weisberg calls Bush's evangelical politics.

Speaking of Bush Sr. he says:

Wead recommended that the vice president read the first chapter of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, a book that had become a popular evangelical device for winning converts. "Evangelicals believe that this book is so effective that they will automatically assume that if the Vice President has read it, he will agree with it," Wead wrote. Vice President Bush made sure that religious figures saw a well-worn copy on top of a stack of books in his office when they visited the White House and cited Lewis' condemnation of the sin of pride as one of the reasons "we haven't been inclined to go around proclaiming that we are Christians."

Wead is Doug Wead an evangelical whose job it was to help Bush Sr. win over the evangelical community.

Wead eventually transferred from helping Bush, Sr. with the evangelical vote to helping the current president Bush, becoming somewhat disillusioned in the process:

What Rove would do in helping Bush launch his political career in Texas, and Cheney in helping him define his presidency, Wead did in Bush helping him assert and establish his independent identity as a person of faith. But the experience left Wead troubled about the sincerity of Bush's beliefs. "I'm almost certain that a lot of it was calculated," he says. "If you really believed that there's some accountability to life, wouldn't you have Billy Graham come down and have a magic moment with your daughters? Are you just going to let them go to hell? You have all these religious leaders coming through. If it changed your life, wouldn't you invite them to sit down in the living room and have a talk with your daughters? Or is it all political?"

Wead's disillusionment led him to record some of his conversations with Bush. Weisberg says of these tapes:

The tapes reveal how calculated George W. Bush's projection of faith is. Wead said that during the countless hours the two spent talking about religion over a dozen years, they discussed endlessly the implications of attending services at different congregations, how Bush could position himself in relation to various tricky questions, and how he should handle various ministers and evangelical leaders. But the substance of Bush's own faith never came up. Wead told me he now struggles with the question of how sincere Bush's expressions of devotion ever were. He often goes over their conversations from 1987 and 1988 in his mind, having grown more skeptical about what Bush was doing. "As these memos started flowing to him, he started feeding back to me what his faith was," Wead said. "Now what is interesting for me, and I'm trying to understand, is, was I giving him his story?"

I couldn't help but be struck by the similarities between Watson's description of the religious hypocrite and Wead/Weisberg's description of the religion of George W. Bush (and his father). Its become clear to me over the last couple of years that the Republican Party in general and George W. Bush in particular have seen the Christian community as nothing more than a source of votes. They have cozied up to undiscerning high profile evangelicals who then became their shills in the Christian community; all the while treating these same evangelicals with disdain behind their backs and having no intention of genuinely addressing the concerns of Christians once elected.

For 2008 the cycle is repeating itself with these same evangelicals (with a few exceptions) assuring us that we should 'vote Republican' because the election of a Democrat would mean the end of our country as we know it. I'm certainly not a fan of the Democratic Party but I think the Republicans are destroying our country at just as fast a pace and personally I'm tired of being used by them to do it.