During the 2000 Republican primaries, in the third televised debate, the candidates were asked by a panelist to name the political philosopher who had most influenced them. Most replied in a conventional way, Tocqueville always a safe bet. No one would say Machiavelli, of course. But George W. Bush answered "Jesus Christ."

		Jeffrey Hart is professor of English emeritus at Dartmouth College and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. He is the author of "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education."

Silence. That answer wavered in the air like a knuckle ball, the panelists were afraid to whiff.

Too bad, because Jesus teaches little or nothing about politics. His focus is inward, to the purity of the soul.

No doubt Bush meant that to be a good man is to be a good president. But that would have been a subject for debate. Jimmy Carter was widely thought a good man, as was the first George Bush. Neither ranks high as a president. Franklin Roosevelt was thought deceptive and disingenuous, but was elected four times and usually ranks in the top 10 among presidents.

One thing everyone can agree upon about Bush is that as president he has brought religion into politics in a way unknown to recent memory. And he has owed both of his electoral victories to his Evangelical Christian base. This indispensable base has profoundly affected his policies, foreign and domestic.

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.

To understand what Bush's evangelicalism consists of, a glance at its history in America will be useful.

Evangelicalism has always been based upon a sense of personal sin, which its preachers tend to excite, and recovery through a discovery of Jesus. Paul on the road to Damascus would be an early example of this. George W. Bush appears to have overcome his earlier alcohol problem by experiencing the influence of Jesus in a milder version of Paul's experience.

Historically, American Evangelicalism has had three stages, or Awakenings. This tells us something immediately about Evangelicalism -- that it rises up and then subsides and must be repeatedly revived.

The first great "Awakening" began in the first third of the 18th century, and is associated with John Wesley in the South and Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher, in the North. Both of these men possessed professional theological training, Wesley at Oxford, Edwards at Yale. They were to be the exception on that point. Such American Evangelicalism typically has a homemade quality because of its "faith" in Scripture, a "faith," as it is today, often based on wild misreadings of the text of Scripture itself.

Though Edwards was an educated man, his preaching of sin, damnation and the possibility of salvation through Jesus drew large crowds, often filled with emotion and showing it in sometimes bizarre ways, rolling on the ground, fainting, having spasms. The same with Wesley's immensely popular preaching here and in England. The emotions raised by this first Awakening are held by historians to have energized the beginnings of the American Revolution.

The second Awakening occurred during the period leading up to the Civil War, and energized the Abolitionist movement in New England. From there it spread west along the wagon trails after the war. Its Cromwellian strains can be heard in Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," where the Lord is stamping out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored -- in the South. But Lincoln and Grant were not New England Evangelicals, far from it, and fought to save the Union.

After the Civil War, Evangelicalism rose in the West with the poor farmers and eventuated in William Jennings Bryan and his Cross-of-Gold campaigns for cheap silver. But though the Democrats nominated him for president three times -- 1900, 1904 and 1908 -- Bryan was an ignorant man, considered by Theodore Roosevelt a mere "trombone" orator of no worth at all. He brought the Democratic Party into disrepute and never came close to winning.

The present or Third Awakening of Evangelicalism believes all sorts of bizarre things, such as the imminent end of the world, the second coming of Christ, the sudden elevation of the just to heaven and the final struggle of Good versus Evil in Jerusalem: Armageddon. We thus have the immense popularity of the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

The whole thing is based on two visionary books of the Bible, Thessalonians and Revelations. Cast in poetic imagery, these often are highly allegorical, for example alluding to events of the late Roman Empire, and hardly to be taken literally. The term "Armageddon" does not even refer to Jerusalem, but is an English translation of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew har geddon, "at" or "near Geddo." This was a large town at a considerable distance from Jerusalem. That it was the juncture of two caravan routes where brawls were likely could have led to its metaphorical use as a metaphor for battle.

In any case, Ariel Sharon can rest easy on this point, and you yourself can safely make a date for lunch without fear of being wooshed up to heaven. People have kept a lot of lunch dates since those visionary books were written 20 centuries ago.

The reason that religious populism in the form of Evangelicalism cannot work is that it is very difficult to cross from the world of the five senses, in which we live, to the realm beyond it, if any, with which the higher religions of course are concerned, since they posit a God who was there before the beginning. If we did not believe in the evidence of our senses, we would walk into walls and fall down stairs.

Traditional Christianity sees the Resurrection as linking our familiar world of empirical fact with the realm of the beyond-time: Jesus inhabits both. Therefore Jesus is the crux (not to make a pun) of Christianity. To quote Paul again, "Unless Christ is risen, our preaching is groundless."

On that point, supported by other evidence in the four narratives, the entire structure of Christian theology rests, and its representation of such theology in language, such as the Apostles' Creed, in ritual, in art, in music. The linguistic formulations in the creed took about 1,000 years to reach finished form, but their origins can be traced back to the generation of the apostles themselves. No individual can push ahead alone in such an effort of thought and representation as this exhibits. Populism falls on its face, trusting in emotion. Nor is Scripture enough, unless you know how to read these ancient texts.

Because Evangelicalism is sustained by no structure of ideas, and, beyond that, has no institutional support in a continuing church, it flares up in repeated "Awakenings," and then subsides as the emotion dissipates. Because it is populist and homemade, its assertions tend often to be ridiculous, the easy targets for the latest version of H.L. Mencken.

If we recall Leo Strauss's formulation that "Athens and Jerusalem" -- science and spiritual aspiration -- are the core of Western civilization, American Evangelicalism is a threat to both, through ignorance of both.

Except for that major qualification, Evangelicalism would not matter much if it were a private superstition, a sort of hobby, except that the Evangelicalism of the Bush variety has real and often dangerous effects on the world in which the rest of us, and even they, live.

During the 2004 presidential election perhaps the most scandalous of these arose as an issue in the campaign, stem-cell research. In August 2001, Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for such research involving fertilized cells created after 2001. This severely inhibited research which had indeed proved promising. Bush claimed to have issued his order for "moral reasons," but all the moral reasons seem to support the research.

The fertilized cells in question are left over and frozen in fertility clinics, in fact doubly doomed because frozen and with a finite shelf-life, and also because a fertilized cell will not develop unless implanted in a woman. Instead of wasting them, why not use them to, it seems possible, treat an entire array of dreadful diseases? One opponent of the research put the objection crisply: such cells "must not be destroyed no matter how noble the cause." It seemed clear that Bush's objection to the research was driven by his Evangelical base, indefensible as his position was.

Other Bush-inspired policies with severe implications for public health began to form a list as long as your arm. In fact, despite their potentiality for real harm, they possess a comical sort of zaniness. As reported in The Washington Post, they include:

Information about safe sex was removed from the Centers for Disease Control Web site.

The scandal that the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research prohibited over-the-counter sale of a "morning after" contraceptive as encouraging promiscuity and thus spreading disease -- clearly outside the mandate of the FDA. The New England Journal of Medicine described this as a political decision, which of course it was.

The fact that the Bush administration has devoted millions to faith-based organizations promoting abstinence, but in doing so telling flagrant lies: that condoms fail to prevent HIV 31 percent of the time during heterosexual intercourse (3 percent is accurate); that abortion leads to sterility (elective abortion does not); that touching a person's genitals can cause pregnancy; that HIV can be spread through sweat and tears; that a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person"; and that half of gay teenagers have AIDS. Some grants for faith-based programs stipulate that condoms be discussed only in connection with their failure.

You would think that such Halloween science would be impossible in federally funded programs. Isn't bearing false witness prohibited by the Ten Commandments? But, as we see, Evangelicals make up their own scripture. And this is the Bush administration.

Then there was that book the federal bookstore at the Grand Canyon was obliged to carry, maintaining that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah's Flood. Geology shows that the canyon took millions of years to form by erosion. No problem. Geology is wrong.

The saints, they are marchin' in. H.L. Mencken, where are you when we need you? But some of that represents the comic side of the Bush administration. No one should be laughing about its stem-cell policy. Welcome to Evangelical Land. Today, it's us.