What do you pray for? World peace? That your sports team wins the game? Maybe you’re a Macalester student, so you plead for a return to trade bilateralism and progressive state politics. Or maybe you’re someone much different, and you implore God to empower you in your quest for religious cleansing.

How do you pray? Do you kneel beside your bed with your eyes shut and hands clasped? Is it in a huddle in the locker room with your teammates, or alone backstage with your guitar? Or do you gather intelligence, then hurl bombs and barbed condemnations?

Living nineteen-odd years in very secular places, I never learned how to pray, but if I did it would probably only be for the biggest things, like ending world hunger or getting into a prestigious grad school. Being the prayer virgin that I am, I’m naturally curious about what goes on behind closed eyelids and under down-turned heads.

My spiritual voyeurism has been obliged these past few weeks by a gossiping media regarding one Lieutenant General William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of intelligence for the Department of Defense. I was most fascinated by the media’s apparent astonishment with Boykin’s beliefs; obviously, some people do not have as much experience as I do with peering into the metaphysical lives of strangers.

At first glance, Boykin’s philosophy (and moreover, verbalization of that policy) seems to personify the exact opposite PR approach that the White House wishes to disseminate. It’s almost as if his words were lifted directly off of a war protester’s satirical sign. This is most pointed when, referring explicitly to Osman Atto’s worship of Allah, a uniformed Boykin tells a church audience, “Well, you know what I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” Yes, this is an outraged leftist’s wet dream.

But is this outlook really so shocking? When Boykin stated that God put President Bush into office to prosecute this particular spiritual war, he wasn’t kidding. President Bush has made it clear from the beginning that the war on terror was a war of good against evil, a war of freedom-loving people against terror-loving people, a war of black against white. Besides his early slip of using the word “crusade” to describe the fight in the Middle East, Bush has avoided outwardly theological language in describing the War on Terror. But the overtones of a polarized Biblical struggle pervade everything he says about it.

Interestingly enough, President Bush has had no problem using explicitly religious language to justify policy views in other instances. Bush has noted that “we’re all sinners” when speaking of his belief that civil unions should not be legally recognized, in no uncertain terms implying his conviction that homosexuality is sinful. If his personal conception of sin is a factor in his policy decisions on human rights issues, why should we be convinced of his professed lack of bias against Islam, given the discriminatory policies and actions of the past two years?

The administration’s attitude towards Boykin so far only seems to confirm this suspicion. Predictably, it disavows any prior knowledge of Boykin’s “extremist” views. But it also knew enough about Boykin to give him great authority in the paramount cause of Bush’s presidency, the War on Terror. This discrepancy suggests either extreme incompetence on the part of the administration (even Wal-Mart has been getting more scrupulous surveillance than that), or clear dishonesty.

I do not believe, however, that the administration is incompetent; it is composed of politically calculating individuals, many of whom are probably kicking themselves for not telling Boykin to ixnay on the undamentalismfay. I simply don’t believe that, behind closed doors, the administration sincerely sees Boykin as that extreme. Rather, he is the component of their foreign policy campaign that doesn’t speak in euphemisms and didn’t expect to make the news.

Of course, Boykin’s religious doctrine is not indicative of Christianity as a whole. Just like Islam, Christianity contains a diverse and vast amount of doctrines, with people who worship in many different ways. From my outsider’s viewpoint, religions like Christianity can do at least two great things: first, they help people cope with fear and pain, enduring loss of a loved one, disease and so on. Second, they bring people together, encouraging work towards a common good. Unfortunately, these huge positives can become detrimental in the hands of the wrong people, using those religious communities and the fear inspired by things like terrorism to polarize people. To use the insincere language of Donald Rumsfeld regarding Islam, people like Boykin are not the religion that they preach, they are simply hijackers of it. Remember that there are many different types of hijackers of several different religions; some of them live far away, but some of them frequent the Oval Office.