Bush Blends Patriotism, Religion

In a mountain hamlet, where the T-shirts proclaimed that it was hosting “The nation’s largest small town Independence Day celebration,” President Bush imbued the Fourth of July with the aura of a religious holiday.

To a throng of West Virginians gathered before a county courthouse, the president delivered a message of American unity in the face of attack, vowed the use of massive military might around the world and steeped it all in the cadences of a country preacher.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks offered the president a new context for an old message, well-worked by politicians from town mayors to chief executives on the national holiday.

“In this 226th year of our independence, we have seen that American patriotism is still a living faith. We love our country only more when she’s threatened,” the president said.

Offering a declaration of unity, he said: “When you strike one American, you strike us all....

“History has called America to use our overwhelming power in the defense of freedom. And we’ll do just that.”

The president, who boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in a gray business suit, white shirt and red tie, shed the tie and jacket and appeared here in a white Western-style shirt, quickly rolling up his sleeves even before he began speaking to the sun-draped crowd.

He said that the liberation of Afghanistan from Taliban rule “was the beginning of the long and unrelenting struggle we have entered” and declared: “We will take the battle to the enemy, wherever he hides and wherever he plans and wherever he dwells.”

And throughout were reminders that the Founding Fathers had, even as they established freedom of religion as an underlying principle, declared the nation’s debt to a single deity.

“We’re thankful for our freedom, the freedom declared by our Founding Fathers, defended by many generations and granted to each one of us by Almighty God,” Bush said.

He also used the day to declare that he would speed the process for foreign-born members of the U.S. armed services to apply for citizenship. The White House later said that this could affect as many as 15,000 military personnel.

The president’s helicopter, Marine One, landed Thursday morning in the front yard of Mabel Chapman, 81, who, reporters were told, cut her two-acre lawn herself on a riding mower.

Bush made his remarks in front of the flag-bedecked Jackson County Courthouse, erected in 1916 at the intersection of Main and Court streets. Placed as a camera-friendly backdrop for the president were about two dozen men in military regalia: green uniforms for current members of the Army, the caps of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars for the veterans.

The town, with a population listed at 3,023--well more than appeared to have turned out--is 32 miles from the state capital, Charleston, and about 250 miles west of Washington.

But West Virginia--dubbed both the northernmost Southern state or the southernmost Northern state, depending on perspective--offered Bush more than convenient geography. It is prominent in his political universe.

It was one of a small group of states that by conventional wisdom would support a Democratic presidential candidate--but one in which broad shifts in voting patterns in 2000 put it into Bush’s camp.

Without it, he would have lost the election, and he had been president less than a month when he paid his first visit here in 2001.

And Ripley offered him not just a friendly crowd but also one receptive to a religious message.

The Rev. Jack Miller of the West Ripley Baptist Church declared in his invocation before Bush arrived: “We have ridiculed the absolute truth of [God’s] word in the name of multiculturalism. We have been forced to honor sexual deviance in the name of freedom of expression. We have exploited the system of education in the name of the lottery.... We have killed our unborn children in the name of choice.”

That message decrying multiculturalism seemed to conflict with Bush’s statement later that “every ethnic background is known and respected here in America. Every religious belief is practiced and protected here.” On other occasions Bush has noted that some Americans don’t practice religion. He made no such point Thursday.

Mayor Roy Guthrie--who was sharing a platform with notables from Bush and Gov. Bob Wise and Sen. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, both Democrats, to the Miss Ripley Fourth of July Queen 2002--said, “God gave us the greatest country in the world.”

And when the crowd, with Bush on the stage, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the words “under God” boomed out from hundreds and hundreds of throats, in spontaneous rebuke to the U.S. appellate court ruling last week that those two words make the pledge unconstitutional because it melds the roles of church and state.

Indeed, said Bush, wrapping religion and the flag into a single fabric, “no authority of government can ever prevent an American from pledging allegiance to this one nation under God.”

The president spent barely two hours here, returning to Washington at midday, and he planned to watch the fireworks display Thursday night over the Washington Monument from a White House balcony, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said.