Great article by Howard Fineman in Newsweek which goes over how George Bush’s faith and world view intertwined, informed his presidency, staffed his administration, and ultimately drove many of his signature foreign policy moves.

There it is, encapsulated in prime time: the Bush campaign, presidency and world view. This is a president who often would rather preach than answer questions–or ask them. He leads and runs unapologetically on faith, dividing the world and the presidential campaign into two discrete spheres: one for patriots who believe in his policies and vision, and one for everyone else. Whether he can win re-election that way is unclear. The race is a tossup; the press conference didn’t appreciably move the polling needle. But if Karl Rove is the guru, the strategy is pure Martin Luther. “Here I stand,” Bush seems to declare. “I can do no other.”

http://www.newsweek.com/gospel-according-george-125363

Manicheanism refers to an extant religion that ultimately viewed existence as a cosmic struggle between good and evil, between the spiritual and material. Today, its used to describe people who hold the view that actions are clearly either morally good or bad.

Winston Churchill constantly fell back to this vision, stemming from a Christian worldview that saw it necessary to defend Christian civilization from existential threats, specifically the Axis in World War II and the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War.

At the close of his 1940 “Their Finest Hour” speech, Winston insists

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

The entirety of his 1946 “Iron Curtain” also insisted that there was a cosmic struggle between good and evil afoot. In it, he prevailed upon the audience to understand that “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” and that this iron curtain would set the stage for another struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.