ven in the week before Christmas, a columnist for a secular newspaper thinks twice before writing expressly about Jesus Christ. But then the man whom polls say is a likely next president of the United States speaks feelingly of Jesus in an explicitly political forum, in reply to a question having nothing to do with religion. Asked what ''political philosopher'' he most admires, George W. Bush answered, ''Christ ... When you turn your heart and life over to Christ ... it changes your heart.''
Some wondered whether this was a breach in the wall between church and state or how ''Christ'' would view Bush's positions on questions ranging from the death penalty to the abrogation of the ABM treaty. Such reactions point up the difficulty involved not only in a public use of what devout Christians call the Most Holy Name, but in any discussion of the sacred person whose birth is commemorated this week.
''Which Jesus Christ do you identify with, governor?'' is a question that could properly have been put to Bush. As a self-styled ''compassionate conservative,'' perhaps the governor centers his piety around the Jesus of neighborly love, but as a born-again Christian perhaps he honors Jesus as a personal savior who comes to his followers less through the neighbor than through the individual's own soul. Other Jesuses compete with these: the peasant revolutionary whose rough visage stares out, Che-like, from the posters of Liberation Theology; the Aryan Christ, fair-haired and blue-eyed, who came to repudiate Judaism.
But then there is also Jesus the Jewish Zealot, who set himself against every religious establishment. Jesus is, variously, a pacifist and one who came to unsheathe a sword, a troublemaker and an apostle of meekness, a defender of the poor and a guest of tax collectors, an icon of purity and a friend of prostitutes.
In other words, Jesus Christ, as usually spoken of, is a prism through which the prejudices and politics of his devotees are reflected. One of the most consistently woven threads in the tapestry of history is the way in which the absolute name of Jesus Christ has been invoked, across the liberal-conservative spectrum, to justify the all too contingent passions of human beings. And, in fact, that history suggests that, mainly, those passions have had little or nothing to do with either the message or the person of the Jesus Christ of Scripture.
To take only one example, jumping off from the question put to Bush, consider the story of a genuine ''political philosopher,'' Benedict Spinoza (1632-77). His ''Ethics,'' ''Theologico-Political Treatise,'' and other works helped lay the philosophical groundwork for ideas of democratic pluralism, religious tolerance, and constitutional government. Spinoza influenced not only the likes of John Locke and David Hume, but also those English dissenters we remember as the Pilgrims, the second generation of whom encountered his ideas in Holland on their way to the New World. And where did Spinoza's ideas come from? Spinoza's family were Jewish refugees from Iberia. He was born a Jew in Amsterdam, the son of a man who had witnessed the autos-da-fe of the Inquisition. Spinoza himself was spied upon by Spanish Catholics and banned by Dutch Calvinists.
These experiences of radical intolerance were the incubator of his political philosophy. It is not too much to say that the American idea - universal freedom of conscience protected by government - was born at least partly out of the way the one name of Jesus Christ was used to advance opposite political agendas.
Such history lives in the institutional memory of the United States, which is why even devout citizens of this country have been made uneasy by the political invocation of religion (and why a columnist, writing on a political subject, might think twice before invoking religion himself). Politics by definition is the realm of relative claims and compromise, while religion, for better and for worse, takes the absolute for granted and can regard compromise as moral failure. The determination to observe the distinction between these realms amounts to one of the great breakthroughs not only for a humane politics, but, equally, for religious faith freed from the corruptions of power.
These are some of the questions that bubble below the surface of George W. Bush's statement, and citizens are right to ask them. Alas, it is clear that Bush himself would be the last person to be able to sort through such complexities. His glib use of the name ''Christ'' in the context of ''political philosophy'' is a breathtaking display of ignorance for a man of the American political mainstream.
More disturbing, since it seemed so patently an attempt to deflect a question he was unable to answer - Bush is shrewd enough to know that reporters won't push him on his self-announced piety - his glib invoking of the name of Jesus Christ revealed a cynical readiness to exploit the faith as a hiding place. Which is hardly the way to honor the one whom George W. Bush says changed his heart.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
