Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bruce Kent

Kent’s line is less a diagnosis of George W. Bush’s personal faith than a warning about what happens when political power borrows the moral certainty of scripture and strips it of humility. The sting is in the phrasing “yes, he’s religious”: a grudging concession that quickly flips into an accusation that this religiosity isn’t private devotion but a governing method. “Fundamentalist sort of way” works as a loaded qualifier, invoking not just belief, but a rigid, literalist posture that treats doubt as disloyalty.

The key move is his framing of the Old Testament as “a charter.” That word drags religion into the realm of legal documents and nation-building: charters authorize actions, grant rights, justify expansion. Kent implies that biblical narrative is being repurposed as political paperwork, a template for exceptionalism. The subtext is pointed: when a leader imagines his nation as “chosen,” policy stops looking like negotiation and starts looking like entitlement. “To do what they like” lands as the blunt, almost weary conclusion - a moral critique of unilateralism, not theology.

Context matters: Kent, a peace activist and prominent anti-war voice, was speaking in an era when Bush-era rhetoric regularly braided faith, patriotism, and mission language, especially around the War on Terror and Iraq. Kent is calling out that fusion as a dangerous permission slip: sacred story converted into strategic doctrine, with consequences measured in lives rather than sermons.