Why Bush's win had its genesis in Christian thought
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
7 Nov 2004
George W. Bush has been re-elected President of the United States of America, after a bitter and divisive election.
I thought he would win, because the polls showed him neck and neck with Kerry or slightly ahead. Wherever the polls have a conservative leader, who has provoked strong opposition, you can normally add a couple of percentage points to his total.
More people will vote for a strong leader in a secret ballot than are prepared to confess publicly to doing so! A friend of mine was in a French village years ago when there was a referendum on De Gaulle’s policies. No one had a good word for the General, but the voting figures showed that nearly everyone in the village voted for him! It is usually more reliable in a close election to look at the odds the bookmakers are offering on who will win.
I was in the U.S.A. a couple of weeks ago and the divisions there were as deep and bitter as they were here in 1975 after the Governor General dismissed Prime Minister Whitlam. It was not pleasant, and I am not sure that it is healthy, even when a country is at war.
The failure to capture Bin Laden and the problems in Iraq are major causes of division, but not the only ones. The electoral system in the U.S.A. pushes the parties apart, whereas our system pushes them towards the middle.
Voting there is not compulsory, and there is no preferential voting. Therefore huge efforts are made by the parties to get their followers to vote for victory by whichever candidate is first past the post. The more deeply people feel, the more likely they are to vote! So the rhetoric is high and often extreme and the public rallies are often huge. The expense is enormous, but big numbers participate.
The political divisions almost exactly parallel the divisions between the great cities and the countryside and also follow religious lines. Both candidates were churchgoing Christians, Kerry a Catholic and Bush a Protestant, but churchgoing Christians are overwhelmingly pro-Bush. This is politically important, because the Protestant Churches especially in the Southern States are enormous and politically involved. This is quite different from Australia, where the Family First party only polled 2% nationally. In the U.S.A. “the Moral Majority” of conservative Protestants and Catholic allies might be 40,000,000 people.
There the pro-life struggle is more advanced than in Australia, but the Democratic leadership has turned its back on those who support life. Kerry was pro-abortion, even voting for late-term abortions. He had explicitly excluded ever appointing a pro-life judge.
Many, indeed most serious U.S.A. Christians, even when they were concerned about the war in Iraq, or the economy, or health care or the poor, would not vote for Kerry because of his anti-life rhetoric and votes.
This is a deep wound to the traditional Democratic Party constituency.
