Is President Bush’s denomination one that believes the end times are coming soon?
Just curious.
Only since the year 2000.
No cite (it was a print source - an issue of Time magazine IIRC), but I think he’s a Methodist, so no, no apocalyptic delusions.
Actually, I’m ashamed to admit that he’s nominally Episcopalian, or so I heard. Episcopalians as a whole consider the End Times to be nonsense. However, I’m not about to attempt to speak for Mr. Bush.
CJ
Bush has been “outed” several times as being a mock-Christian. E.g., the book by an old friend of his who taped their phone calls. Lot’s of references in it to how Bush was “passing” as a conservative Christian.
He is surrounded by NeoCons, and NeoCons are not big on morals.
My understanding is that in DC, if he attends church at all, it is an Episcopalian church. But I had been under the impression that he considered himself Methodist.
Okay, Bosda’s link seems to confirm my memory. His family was Episcopalian, but he is a member of his wife’s Methodist church. Although (as an Epsicopalian) I would balk at referring to the End Times as “nonsense,” neither denomination is particularly preoccupied with the apocolypse.
I guess it depends on how you define “end times.” If you just mean a general belief that there will be a Second Coming, a day of judgement and basically an “end” to things, you’re right that Episcopalians (like Catholics, Lutherans and Orthodox churches) would not call those things nonsense (although, as you say, they would advise people not to become preoccupied with it). What they do call nonsense is any idea that you can use the Bible as a roadmap to determine exactly what will happen and when. By and large, they don’t believe that the specifics of the End Times can be sussed out from reading revelation, they put little or no stock in populist “Left Behind”/Hal Lindsey scenarios and they (correctly) deny that there is any Biblical basis Rapture beliefs.
Agreed, Diogenes. That’s pretty much what I meant.
He may not walk it, but he talks it, and you can feel free to dismiss it as political pandering. Consider:
But thenhe might be the Antichrist himself:
He probably believes the end times are coming, anyways. His role in this apocalypse is to get all the blame for all of our problems that are going to start here real soon. He knows it, which is why he looks so old and gray. He’s not really looking forward to being hated by everyone around the world more than he already is.
Simple answer? No, he’s not, and the people worrying about this are paranoid loonies.
Of course, I shouldn’t bother trying to reassure them on this point. It was so much fun watching leftists pee in their pants for 8 years, worrying about Reagan dropping the big one! This could be just as much fun to watch.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I think the bigger concern is that the religious fundamentalists who do believe in the End Times and want to bring about WWIII form a sizable part of his base, and they’re eager to cash in their chips. Sorta like how they deraild the Harriet Myers nomination because she wasn’t sufficiently rabid, but on an international scale.
I’ve never seen any evidence that Bush actually believes this stuff, nor that it affects the way he goes about being President. But hearing him avoid saying “no” to that apocalypse question was disquieting all the same. Here’s a transcript of that speech and the Q&A. I guess I should take comfort in the fact that he never gives straight answers, so perhaps that wasn’t unusual.
As Kevin Phillips pointed out, that answer took 5 minutes when a simple “No” should have sufficed, but we should take comfort that W answered* it without referring even obliquely to Bible prophecy at any time.
*Actually he just hijacked the question into an opportunity to get back on message, saying the same things he had just finished saying, but considering the alternatives . . .
There is no way in hell any President is going to directly say “no” and piss off eighty million fundamentalists. Bill Clinton would not have given a straight answer, either. Neither would Bush 1.0 or Reagan, who were two of the least religious Presidents in living memory.
Eighty million!? Really?
I wonder if Jesus would laugh or cry if he saw what had been wrought…
I wonder if Carter would have?
Thanks for the link, Marley23. It appears to me that he answered the question with a fairly clear no immediately, then as BrainGlutton has noted, launched a mini-speech on a general topic that had nothing to do with the question. Which is pretty much what politicians do. Here are the first sentences of his answer, which I consider reasonably direct.
He’s saying he hasn’t thought of it that way, and he hasn’t talked to anyone who thinks of it that way.