The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents by David L. Holmes

Author:David L. Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3963-4
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

George Herbert Walker Bush

1924 – PRESIDENT FROM 1989 TO 1993

The old house in Beijing that served as a makeshift church was unremarkable, ill-kept, and for the American envoy and his wife, a far cry from the traditional Episcopal sanctuaries of home. The services were in Chinese. The ministers were Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian. The Sunday congregation—about a dozen in all, typical for this house-church—included a mix of African, European, and Asian Protestants whose native tongues made an enthusiastic cacophony of familiar hymns.

But for the American envoy (or unofficial ambassador) to China, George Herbert Walker Bush, the odd setting became a treasured church home, offering “unbelievable” and “most moving” services that (as he wrote in his diary) “we wouldn’t miss.”1 On a typical Sunday, Bush wrote: “Sunday, our little church service. Head count—two African ladies, one African man, three Canadians, two Bushes, four Chinese in the audience, and one preacher. They sing the most wonderful hymns. ‘Nearer My God to Thee,’ ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ All the old favorites. It is a nice touch.”2

No service in that unlikely sanctuary may have been more important to the future president and his wife, Barbara, than the one that took place on June 29, 1975, at the Chongwenmen Church. Bush was serving as U.S. envoy to China during a time when that country’s Communist government severely restricted the practice of Christianity. Yet he had managed not only to convince the Chinese to permit the baptism of his youngest child on that day; he had also managed to gather three of her four far-flung brothers (including the eldest, George W.) for the event. It was, as Bush wrote, “A very special day, an occasion.”

Dorothy, or “Doro” as she was called, was fifteen years old, the youngest of five children, and the only daughter. She was the girl Bush had prayed for after the loss of the couple’s second child, Robin, who died of leukemia in 1959, just weeks before her fourth birthday.

Doro’s baptism had been deferred several times because of what Barbara Bush described as “deaths, politics, long distances, and floods.”3 But now, in the unlikely location of post–Cultural Revolutionary China, that day had finally come. George Bush’s diary entry for June 29 reads: “The big thing that day—Doro was baptized at our little Chinese church. The ministers were extremely happy and smiling—pleasant, wonderful.”4

While the ecumenical Chinese ministers presided at the baptism, suspicious government representatives photographed and tape-recorded the strange ceremony. As far as the Bushes knew, Doro was the first American citizen publicly baptized in China since the Communists assumed power in 1949.5

“Arranging for a baptism in a communist country is no small feat,” Doro later wrote. Able at fifteen to pick her own godfather, she sent a telegram to “one of Dad’s funniest and most handsome friends” in Maine, inviting him to come immediately to China for the service. The telegram arrived in Chinese.6

It was a memorable event in a lifetime of religious practice that holds little mystery. George Herbert Walker Bush was an

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