for someone so beloved, there's really not much to say, huh?
There is a book written on the topic, called "The faith of George W Bush". I think Christians in general can identify with him as someone who is not ashamed to admit that God changed his life, and that his religion plays an important role in his life today.
Here is an excerpt from a Dallas Morning News article (Various journo's who interviewed the president on his faith):
"Bush believes very much in the core ideas of Christianity -- the belief that you must believe in Jesus in order to go to heaven, that there is no other way to salvation. … That's a fundamental Christian belief, and he embraces it. He believes in the absolute nature of God. Fundamentally, he believes in the existence of evil, not as an abstract idea, a philosophy, but as something that's real and tangible. It's something we've seen really most recently when he talks about the terrorists. He talks of them openly about the existence of evil on Earth. That's something that means something to him. That's a designed comment. That's something that comes out of his heart, because he absolutely believes it.
When he was governor, he would read the Bible every morning. It was something that he had begun doing years earlier in Midland, Texas. It was part of a program, and it was part of something that helped settle him. I know we talked a number of occasions about how he felt in the morning when he'd wake up in Austin, Texas, at the governor's mansion. First thing he'd do was make coffee for his wife and feed the animals, a growing group of cats and dogs, and then he would read the Bible. He didn't want to talk about that publicly early on. But it was very much core part of who he was.
When George Bush was in college, he was a political conservative. He had come out of a tradition wherein the family had gone to the Episcopalian Church. It was natural that he would be offended by, and talked a lot about being offended by the "If it feels good, do it" generation. Those weren't his guys. He was a frat rat, a frat boy in college.
But he was also someone that liked the fundamental ideas of religion, even though at that time he had not been born again and he was not really following a rigorous church attendance. But when he was in college, he was offended, I think, by the kind of general tolerance, the political tolerance that reflected itself in the 1960s.
So it became only natural, I think later, that when he ultimately embraced religion in a new way, in a fundamental way in his heart, in the very aspect of who he was, that it would seem very consistent with a conservative political philosophy which believed in hard work, good things for business and an absolute right and wrong in everything. So I think his religion, which he really embraced at the middle of his life, was something that was very consistent with the politics that he embraced all the way through it.
There's no question that the evangelical community has an ally in President Bush on a number of different issues, and in terms of basic values. There is a great deal of commonality between President Bush and evangelicals. Technically speaking, though, President Bush is a mainline Protestant, from the more conservative or traditional, or, if you will, evangelical wing of mainline Protestantism, but not really part of the core of the evangelical community, as scholars tend to understand it.
So there is a sense in which evangelicals are claiming somebody who really isn't part of their religious community, but someone who shares many of their values, who certainly understands them well, and shares a number of their religious beliefs.
And while he walks in both worlds, he also differs from both.
Certainly, President Bush differs from his own denomination, from the United Methodist Church, in that he doesn't adopt a lot of its official positions. For instance, he is pro-life on abortion, whereas United Methodists tend to be pro-choice. He disagrees with many Methodists on social welfare issues, and Methodists have a long tradition of supporting the welfare state. President Bush [is] very critical of the welfare state. On foreign policy, President Bush has a somewhat more aggressive foreign policy than many Methodists would agree with.
But if you compare him to the evangelical community, he doesn't completely agree with them, either. For instance, when it comes to issues like how the government should relate to the gay population, President Bush is much more tolerant, unwilling to stigmatize people. When asked about the gay community, for instance, President Bush will often say, "Well, we have to recognize that we're all sinners and we shouldn't be critical of one another, and we need to be tolerant of each other."