The Secrets of the Kingdom: Spiritual Discourse and Material Interests in the Bush Administration

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. [. . .] Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists [. . .] .

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

—George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress
(We Will Prevail, 15, 17)

[T]he politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth and symbol—have become the norm in the modern world.

—Michael Ledeen, D'Annunzio: The First Duce (x)

The presidency of George W. Bush contains, at its very heart, a fundamental paradox and apparent contradiction. On the one hand, this is arguably the most outspokenly religious president in U.S. history, a man who claims not only to have been saved, but called by God to lead our country. Religious conviction informs virtually every aspect of his presidency, from his domestic Faith-based Initiative to his equally faith-based foreign policy announced in a "crusade" against the "Axis of Evil" and a promise to bring freedom as a "gift from the Almighty" to benighted regions of the world like Iraq. Indeed, much of Bush's success in the last two elections has been credited to his image as a man of sincere faith, straightforward honesty and moral conviction.

Yet on the other hand, this is also by many accounts the most secretive administration in U.S. history, displaying an intense preoccupation with information control. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been described by various observers as having an "obsession with secrecy" or a "secrecy fetish"—one that Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, has called "the most secretive of our lifetime" (Elsner) and one that former Nixon legal advisor, John W. Dean, concludes is "worse than Watergate." This preoccupation with secrecy began with Bush's first days in office, as he fought to conceal his own Texas gubernatorial records and the presidential records of Reagan and then-Vice President H.W. Bush; and it continues to pervade virtually every aspect of this administration, from the highly secretive National Energy Development Policy to the bewildering flurry of dissimulation surrounding the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. As Walter Cronkite aptly put it, "This administration—the most secretive since Richard Nixon's—suffers from a deepening credibility problem" and reflects a disturbing "pattern of secrecy and of dishonesty in the service of secrecy." In sum, this administration has gone to great lengths to cover over, mask and obfuscate a number of other interests that are far less spiritual and far more material in nature.

However, the apparent contradiction between Bush's intense display of religiosity and his administration's equally intense concern with secrecy ultimately turns out to be only that—an apparent one. Indeed, religion and secrecy are not only coexistent in this administration; they are intimately intertwined.

A careful analysis of Bush's use of religious discourse shows a complex mingling of at least two major currents in the current presidency: the millenarian rhetoric of the far Christian Right and the imperialist ideology of the neoconservative movement. Bush's powerful and repeated rhetoric of "freedom" as the gift of the Almighty and the "goal of history" reflects not only a kind of messianic faith in God's plan for humankind; it also hints strongly at the aggressive foreign policy of neoconservative theorists such as Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and think-tanks such as the Project for the New American Century. In Bush's discourse, the religious ideal of God's plan for human history is fused with the neoconservatives' more practical and material plan for a "New American Century" or what Irving Kristol calls "an emerging American imperium."

One of the most influential neoconservative theorists is Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the...