At one point, we see Bush criticizing the way the government has traditionally made religious organizations that take federal money change their board of directors to resemble a broader range of the populace. What's absolutely chilling about this moment is that Bush is saying this to an all-black audience. Essentially he's getting them to applaud the same mentality that kept blacks and women and Jews off boards of directors for years. (And we also find out that of the millions handed out to religious groups from the faith-based initiative in the Department of Health and Human Services, none has gone to any Jewish, Muslim or non-Christian group.)

"The Jesus Factor" suggests that "Frontline's" dull, reasoned approach has its virtues. This is one of the few documentaries I've seen that didn't present conservative evangelicals as yahoos and rubes. You can find some or even all of what they have to say appalling, and yet Aronson does them the simple decency of allowing them to present themselves, and the audience the essential courtesy of allowing us to make up our own minds about them. And though I despise George Bush as much as I have despised any White House occupant since Nixon, sometimes his critics make dumb mistakes. Jim Wallis of the liberal evangelical magazine Sojourners is understandably bothered by Bush's "righteous empire" rhetoric. He may be right, as well, that it is theologically unsound for Bush to talk of ridding the world of evil (he quotes the scripture about noticing the sty in your neighbor's eye and not the log in your own). But if Wallis cannot see evil in the planned murder of 3,000 of his fellow citizens, I'm glad Bush can.

But the irony of "The Jesus Factor" is that the man it calls the most openly religious president in recent memory comes across as a man who embodies the separation of church and state for the simple reason that, in him, both institutions cancel each other out. The strongest impression of George W. Bush in "The Jesus Factor" is of a man trying to serve two masters simultaneously and failing to serve either. As someone points out here, you cannot take a pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and then make a statement that our rights are derived from God. You cannot, as Wallis notes, misquote lines from the Gospel of John, as Bush did, to make the light of Christ into the light of America. (If John Lennon took guff for saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, shouldn't Bush take his lumps for saying America was bigger than Jesus?) But, conversely, you cannot claim to be a Christian and hear, as Bush apparently does, the Gospel's instruction to "succor the poor" as "sucker the poor." You cannot claim to be a Christian and strip away environmental protection from the land that, surely any Christian believes, is God's handiwork.

What's so horrendous about George W. Bush isn't that, despite his assurances to the contrary, his religion informs his policy decisions. It's that Bush embodies the politicians that the political scientist Stephen L. Newman describes in the current issue of Dissent, those who do not understand that it's vital "that the ends of policy be truly public." Newman is arguing against the position taken by the late philosopher John Rawls -- and many liberals -- that the reasons for state action must never invoke religious language. There is nothing wrong, Newman argues, when religious reasons are used to serve a legitimate civil interest. (The civil rights movement is the greatest example; a more unlikely one, the conservative Christian governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, attempting to change the state tax code so that the rich and corporations paid more than the poor because, as Riley said, the other way round was un-Christian.)

But when Bush sponsors a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, when he opposes stem-cell research (which, as even Nancy Reagan has pointed out, could very well have benefited her husband, a hero to conservative Christians), when in the face of AIDS in Africa or teen pregnancy in America, he ties sex education funding to abstinence programs, he is using private reasoning for ends that may please a portion of the community but do not serve a majority.

At one point in "The Jesus Factor," Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, who has covered Bush for years, points out that the term "compassionate conservative" really means nothing, designed as it is to mean all things to all people, allowing people to hear what they want -- compassion or conservatism. It's a phrase where meaning cancels itself out. The radical notion beneath the measured, reasonable tones of "The Jesus Factor" is that Bush's politics and religion do the same -- they add up to zilch. The horror of that notion is that that emptiness doesn't diminish Bush's ability to spend the next four years throwing the lions to the Christians.

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