A Nation Bound by Faith.(religion in United States)

With her nation at the brink of war, Anne Summers is searching for answers. The 35-year-old software engineer follows the debate over Iraq. But like a lot of Americans, she also does something else. She prays. So it was, on a frigid Wednesday night, that she trudged out to a prayer service at Willow Creek Community Church in the affluent Chicago suburb of South Barrington. One of the nondenominational "megachurches" that have proliferated in American suburbs in recent years, Willow Creek looks like a corporate conference center. No crosses, no stained-glass windows, no pews. Willow Creek holds its services in a 4,500-seat, theater-style auditorium. There is even a video cafe, where congregants sip coffee and watch services on closed- circuit television.

This day 3,000 people turn out, most of them white, well-educated and suburban. A giant video screen displays the words our father. Summers had prayed it wouldn't come to this, but she supports the war even so. "Bush and Powell and all those guys are Christian," she says. "I do believe that God has blessed this country."

When it comes to matters of might and right, Americans look to the heavens in a way that bewilders much of the rest of the world-- especially Europe. A majority of Americans say religion shapes their lives, and it clearly shapes politics. Regular churchgoers are far more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, according to polls, and it's well known that the religious right is the Bush administration's political base. The president himself sometimes sounds like the nation's commander in the pulpit. His State of the Union address last month repeatedly invoked divine power, declaring confidence in "the loving God behind all of life and all of history." "May He guide us now," George W. Bush beseeched.

The president has never shied from talking about his own embrace of born-again Christianity, at 39, a transformation that he says helped him kick a drinking problem. Bush attends regular Bible-study sessions in the White House. Others around him do the same; Attorney General John Ashcroft begins every business day with a prayer meeting. After a California court ruled the Pledge of Allegiance violated the constitutional separation of church and state for declaring "one nation under God," indignant politicians filed out of the Capitol and loudly recited the pledge.

Invoking the Almighty is common among American politicians, who know well that voters in the United States prefer leaders who side with the angels. But with Bush, religious conservatives can for the first time fully claim one of their own in the White House. What detractors--at home as well as abroad--find most alarming is the president's tendency to blur the lines between personal faith and policy. In fact, the White House often deliberately infuses its message with Biblical overtones. Bush's famous denunciation of the Axis of Evil--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--was originally penned as the "Axis of Hatred." The change came about, according to former speechwriter David Frum, when senior White House staff opted for a more "theological" formulation. "If people want to know me," Bush said during his campaign for president, "they've got to know that's an integral part of my life--my acceptance of Christ."

Faith increasingly seems to affect the administration's decisions. Just last week the president named a doctrinaire Christian, Dr. W. David Hager, as head of an advisory committee on reproductive-health issues for the Food and Drug Administration. Hager, who describes himself as pro-life, refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women and has written that women should treat premenstrual syndrome by reading the Bible and praying. In the Congress, the House Republican whip, Tom DeLay, refers to disputed Middle East territories as Judea and Samaria, as they were known in the Bible. Last year House Majority ...