The private faith of a public man

It was the first meeting between President Bush and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

The summit in the imposing Brdo Castle, a 500-year-old sanctuary for kings and nobles in the rumpled hills of Slovenia, carried an agenda of issues both portentous and prickly: antimissile defense, Russian participation in NATO, violence in the Balkans, oil exploration in the Caspian Basin.

When the two heads of state met on that sun-dappled day in June 2001, however, the first topic of discussion wasn't wars in space or fuel underground.

It was about God.

"You know, it's interesting, there is a universal God, in my opinion, and the first conversation I ever had with Vladimir Putin was about God – in Slovenia," Mr. Bush revealed a year later. "It was a way that we – we'd never met each other, and the first discussion we had was about our personal beliefs."

The revelation of this private moment, which clearly moved the president, offers a glimpse of how much faith has become a part of the Bush presidency.

Almost two years into his term, Bush's religious beliefs are emerging as a central influence in his policy and politics – inextricably linked to everything from the war on terrorism to the November elections.

While presidents throughout history have leaned on and invoked God, Bush has been far more public than most with his personal beliefs and values. Some of this clearly reflects the times: Moments of crisis – in this case, a horrific attack and the residue of fear in its aftermath – often bring out overt expressions of faith, as the nation looks to a president for comfort as well as leadership.

But for Bush, who reads his Bible every morning, faith extends beyond the national catharsis of the moment. By his own admission, his religious views shape much of who he is and, by extension, experts say, some of his most important decisionmaking.

"One of the animating principles of this administration is the restoration of the role of faith in the public square," says Marshall Wittman, the former legislative director for the Christian Coalition.

In some ways, Bush's religious fervor echoes that of one of his recent predecessors, Jimmy Carter. The peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., was the first born-again Democrat to be president. Bush is the first among Republicans.

Mr. Carter would sometimes show up unannounced at the First Baptist Church in Washington to teach Sunday school. While Bush hasn't yet taken to teaching tots about Daniel in the lions' den, he may have surpassed Carter in another area: He is "perhaps the first modern president who actually sees policy applications" for his faith, says Mr. Wittman.

Some of this is rooted in the issues surfacing today, such as human cloning, that already reflect a complex intersection of science and religion. In other cases, Bush has pushed a values-based agenda on his own – often with controversial results.

One of the most visible examples of a Bush-led program is the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which seeks to ease the federal restrictions on the role religious groups can play in providing welfare and other services for needy Americans. Encouraging churches to help solve some of the nation's social ills has long been a central tenet of Bush's "compassionate conservative" philosophy.

The initiative, for now, remains bottled up in Congress.

Last summer, when Bush finally announced his position on the morally charged issue of human embryo stem-cell research, it didn't come without extensive consultation with scientists, ethicists – and religious leaders. A strong opponent of abortion, he decided to allow federal funding for research only on existing lines of stem cells.

"I don't think there's any question that his faith was absolutely determinative in his decisionmaking," says Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention. A fellow Texan who has known the president for about 15 years, Mr. Land consulted with the White House at "high levels" on the stem-cell issue.

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