Maybe not.
Now a case from Christianity. Many evangelicals stress an apocalyptic verse in the second epistle of Peter which ends: \ufffdthe Earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.\ufffd If it's all going to be consumed by fire, some evangelicals say, then why worry about pollution or climate change? But the oldest existing version of the New Testament, long preserved at St Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai and now (most of it) in the British Library, has a different Greek verb for the Earth's fate: evretesetai, not katakaesetai. Instead of being burned up, the Earth will be uncovered, its true nature exposed. That, too, is a difference worth studying, for both believers and everyone else.
Emphasis added.
I doubt that you can point to anyone in particular in the Bush administration that advocates destroying the Earth to hasten the apocalypse. Care to try to surprise me?
From what I've read of the Frontline transcripts, and your comments here, you seem to have accepted some caricature of Bush's faith as reality. [link|http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/interviews/green.html|E.g.]:
[John Green:] [...]
So President Bush, in some sense, stands astride the major Protestant traditions in the United States. [But] \ufffdbecause President Bush has such strong religious beliefs and talks about his faith so explicitly, many people want to categorize him. They want to figure out what religious community or religious tradition he belongs to.
It's a difficult thing to do, because President Bush, in many respects, partakes of a number of different religious traditions. He's a member of the United Methodist Church. He's very closely connected to the Wesleyan tradition, and that leads him to lean a little bit towards mainline Protestantism. On the other hand, he's had a personally transforming experience.
\t
He talks about how his faith changed his life and how he'd like faith to change other people's lives, and that puts him a little bit more in the evangelical camp. President Bush hasn't actually told us where he stands -- perhaps because he isn't entirely sure himself, because he draws from a variety of different perspectives, but also because it may not be the best thing to do politically to identify with one or another religious tradition when, in fact, he can identify with several. In his political activity, he often strides across different religious boundaries and can, therefore, appeal to people from different religious backgrounds.
[Frontline:]Evangelicals claim him as one of their own. They feel they have an ally in the White House.
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.
[Frontline:]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."
On a number of other issues, even on abortion, President Bush is unwilling to commit himself to, say, a constitutional amendment to abolish abortions, which evangelicals would really like to see. He has a much more moderate position on abortion. So on a variety of issues, he contradicts both the mainline Protestant position and the evangelical Protestant position.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
