Why I believe George Walker Bush is not a Christian

© 2004

by Liam Wescott

George Walker Bush is not a Christian.

This is an extremely bold statement to make, but it is the truth.  George Walker Bush is no more a genuine, Bible-believing, follower of Jesus Christ and His teachings than I am the King of Norway.  Yet millions of George Walker Bush's supporters, many of them genuine Christians themselves, believe he is a Christian.  He's not, and the purpose of this editorial is to explain why I believe he is not a Christian. He professes to be a believer, but his words and actions are not those of a true Christian.  Let us briefly examine his life, record, and words for any evidence of his purported belief in Jesus Christ.  I believe that once you do, you will see that despite his professed belief in Jesus Christ, George Walker Bush does not actually believe in or follow the teaching of Jesus.  Once you come to that viewpoint you will also see why genuine Christians should have nothing whatsover to do with nor support him.  He is a fraud, plain and simple and I believe the evidence shows that. 

My purpose here is not to judge or condemn him.  I am here to present the evidence I believe shows he is not who he claims to be.  I make no special claim to virtue or to godliness.  I try to follow the example set by Jesus Christ as best I can.  I am not perfect; not one of us is, but I believe in Jesus Christ and He is my Lord.  I accept that George W. Bush is also a child of God.  God will judge Bush’s life and my own. Only God can judge him and only he can repent for his misdeeds.  He cannot, however, escape the consequences of the wrongful deeds he has done.

A central theme of those pious people among us who claim to be Christian is that they follow the Ten Commandments.  This is a good thing.  The Commandments basically tell us we should worship God, honor our parents, don’t lie, don’t steal, and don’t covet.  If he really is a Christian, then George Walker Bush would not go breaking the Commandments willy-nilly, right?  Well, he seems to have violated at least five of them in the case of the Iraq war, as just one egregious example of many, many examples.  If you support George Walker Bush, this is who you are supporting:

1) "You shall not bear false witness."  George Walker Bush lied about the this war, why it was so absolutely necessary, and its eventual cost.  Where exactly are these vast piles of WMD's we were assured Saddam had in quantities that would dwarf even Mt. McKinley and could be unleashed upon us at a moment's notice?  Don't tell me we haven't "found them yet" because that excuse is so laughably aburd it might make for material on Saturday Night Live.  There were no WMDs, there are none today, and we will never find any because they NEVER EXISTED (at least not in many, many years).  How do we know this?  Because the Iraqis themselves told us and in addition for 12 years, Iraq was subject to the most invasive, comprehensive, and complete weapons inspection program in United Nations history.  In addition, the United States put Iraq under the most intense scrutiny any nation has ever been placed under, including satellite surveillance, surveillance by airplanes, surprise inspections, etc.  A camel could not have farted in Bagdhad without us knowing.

Yet George Walker Bush assured us that "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" and that we had to attack his country RIGHT NOW.  This is called "lying" and that is a shorter term for "bearing false witness" as listed in the Commandments.  This is one of the gravest sins that can be committed in the eyes of God.

2) "You shall not covet." George Walker Bush is an oil man to the core.  He wanted Iraq's oil for his corporate patrons in the boardrooms of Halliburton, Bechtel, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and all the other places where the cabal of evil men with very small minds and very black hearts who bankrolled him and continue to prop him up even today reside.  These men are evil and he serves them, not God.

3) "You shall not steal."  Attacking, invading, and occupying a sovereign nation, a nation that posed no threat to us, never could pose a threat to us and had been essentially disarmed and hijacking its natural resources from its people (who are, after all, the people entitled to decide what should happen with those resources),  is called "theft" and is proscribed by the Commandments.  This again, is one of the most serious offenses against the laws of God imaginable.  

This is exactly what George Walker Bush did.

4) "You shall honor your mother and father."  It can be argued that 's father was less than eager for his son's military adventure in Iraq and tried to hint to the son not to go about it in the way he did. Probably because George Senior realized back in 1991 that we could not possibly conquer Iraq without extremely dire consequences to ourselves and our world standing.  Yet George Walker Bush chose to carry out this mad folly against his father's wishes.  Therefore he dishonored his father.

5) "You shall not kill." in the process of invading Iraq, over 500 of our soldiers are now dead, thousands of them are now wounded, some permanently, and countless thousands of Iraqi civilians are now either dead or maimed for life.  This did not have to happen.  War should always be the last resort, only undertaken after all other options are exhausted.  Yet George Walker Bush chose to plunge this nation into an endless war whose consequences we are only just now beginning to appreciate.  Please don't tell me those nearly 500 dead American service members died "defending our freedom" because that implies that our freedom was somehow threatened in some way by Saddam Hussein or his nation.  That is false.  John Ashcroft and George Walker Bush pose a greater and much more dire threat to our freedom than Saddam ever could.  Those nearly 500 American soldiers now dead in George Walker Bush's war died for no good reason at all.  The taking of a human life is probably the most serious of all the offenses one can commit in the eyes of God.  Make no mistake, the blood of those dead Americans and Iraqis are on the hands of George Walker Bush and if you support him, you support a murderer, liar, and thief.

The war in Iraq is, as I say, just one example of George Walker Bush's hypocrisy.  There are many, many others:

George Walker Bush claims that he is a “compassionate conservative” without giving much in the way of an explanation of what that means.  Time and time again in the Bible, we see Jesus speaking to and ministering to the poor, the beggars, the dispossesed, the homeless.  Quite clearly Our Lord cared about these people.  He cared about them and ministered to them to set an example to us.  We should care about those less fortunate than us.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus clearly states what fate shall befall those who do not help the poor (Matt. 25: 41-46).

Jesus has little good to say about the rich and the well-off.  He lambastes them for their riches and finery while at the same time there are people in the gutters, dying of starvation and disease.  I think Jesus has little use modern American culture with its emphasis in acquiring material wealth.  Bush’s tax cuts benefit the very rich, yet as a Christian, he is called upon to show compassion to those in our society least able to provide for themselves.  No true Christian would propose or support anything that benefits the rich at the expense of the rest of us.  Yet this is exactly what George Walker Bush is doing.

We are told that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim. 6:10).  I believe that this passage refers not just to money, but to power.  Money is equivalent to power.  Those who have the gold make the rules, as the saying goes.  But power is a dangerous thing, like a drug.  In moderation and used wisely, it can be a force for good.  Power for the sake of power is bad indeed.  Yet this is what George Walker Bush seems to want.  He cares only about attaining power and exhibits dangerously little regard for using that power wisely.  This is not a healthy attitude for a Christian to have.  God wants us to be loving and compassionate and not to be seduced by power, yet this is exactly what seems to have happened to George Walker Bush.

If George Walker Bush is really a Christian, then he should believe in Jesus Christ to the absolute exclusion of all other false gods, prophets, and anything else that would stand between him and the Kingdom of God as revealed by His Son.  The evidence suggests otherwise.  He has a history of substance abuse and his unwillingness to discuss that abuse frankly does not lend confidence that it has ceased.  As Christians, we are told that our bodies are a temple of God and we are not to abuse them (1 Cor. 6:19).  Drug and alcohol abuse is not in keeping with this restriction.

He claims to have sobered up and become responsible when he reached forty in 1986.  However, in 1992 on a videotape made at a boisterous wedding reception, Bush can be seen drinking a dark liquid from a glass.  See the clip for yourself.   In that clip, he ridicules people who don’t drink and his behavior in the videotape suggests intoxication.  Other people have noted that George Walker Bush has all the symptoms of a "dry drunk" and just speaking for myself, I believe that he is still abusing alcohol.

The single greatest virtue (outside of love) that Jesus taught us is that we should be humble in all things and demonstrate humility before God.  Those who do so demonstrate an attitude that is much closer to genuine Christianity than the attitude displayed by many of the professed followers of Christ.  Ever since his assumption of the office, George W. Bush has displayed remarkably little of either humility or humbleness.  He struts around like a swaggering bully, asserting that he has a "mandate" to whatever he wants just because he sits in the White House, the people be damned.  Setting aside for the moment the many questions about his legitimacy, how does this attitude square with that of Christ?  Tell me, would Jesus Christ act this way?

Matt. 7:20 "By their fruits you shall know them" the Scripture tells us.   George Walker Bush has supped from the Trees of Hubris, Arrogance, and Pride, and the fruits of same are this: our once-great nation has now fallen from God's favor; our standing in the world has dropped considerably, and our international stature has suffered as a result; he has destroyed the budget surplus bequethed him by his predecessor; he has ballooned the national deficit in his plan to hand over the US Treasury to his greedy corporate buddies, he has wrecked the economy, gutted environmental and food safety laws, destroyed international treaties as though they were scrap paper, and in short, has done everything he can to wreck this once-great land.

No, George Bush is not a Christian and those of you who are Christian and are supporters of his need to take a good hard look at who you are supporting and why.  He did not win the presidency, he does not deserve to be president, and his life does not reflect the life and teachings of our Lord, Jesus Christ.  He does not deserve our support, only our prayers because, based on the stated rules laid down by God in the Bible, George Walker Bush is going to Hell unless he repents of his misdeeds.  Be not deceived (1 Cor. 6:9), either you can stand with your liar and reap the whirlwind of shame and disgrace he will inevitably bring down upon himself and this nation or you can renounce him and save yourself.

The choice is yours.