nondenominational Dwight Hall Chapel. When I was young my parents took me to First Presbyterian in Midland, St. Martin’s Episcopal in Houston, and St. Ann’s Episcopal in Kennebunkport.
I went to church at Andover because it was mandatory. I never went at Yale. I did go when I visited my parents, but my primary mission was to avoid irritating Mother. Laura and I were married at First United Methodist in Midland. We started going regularly after the girls were born, because we felt a responsibility to expose them to faith. I liked spending time with friends in the congregation. I enjoyed the opportunity for reflection. Once in a while, I heard a sermon that inspired me. I read the Bible occasionally and saw it as a kind of self-improvement course. I knew I could use some self-improvement. But for the most part, religion was more of a tradition than a spiritual experience. I was listening but not hearing.
In the summer of 1985, we took our annual trip to Maine. Mother and Dad had invited the great evangelical preacher Billy Graham. Dad had asked him to answer some questions from the family after dinner. That was typical of Dad, always willing to share. It would have sent a signal of importance to have had Billy to himself, but that is not George H.W. Bush. He is a generous man, devoid of a big ego. So there we sat, about thirty of us—Laura, my grandmother, brothers and sister, first and second cousins—in the large room at the end of the house on Walker’s Point.
The first question was from Dad. He said, “Billy, some people say you have to have a born-again experience to go to heaven. Mother [my grandmother] here is the most religious, kind person I know, yet she has had no born-again experience. Will she go to heaven?” Wow, pretty profound question from the old man. We all looked at Billy. In his quiet, strong voice, he replied, “George, some of us require a born-again experience to understand God, and some of us are born Christians. It sounds as if your mom was just born a Christian.”
I was captivated by Billy. He had a powerful presence, full of kindness and grace, and a keen mind. The next day, he asked me to go for a walk around the property. He asked about my life in Texas. I talked to him about the girls and shared my thought that reading the Bible could make me a better person. In his gentle, loving way, Billy began to deepen my shallow understanding of faith. There’s nothing wrong with using the Bible as a guide to self- improvement, he said. Jesus’ life provides a powerful example for our own. But self-improvement is not really the point of the Bible. The center of Christianity is not the self. It is Christ.
Talking with the Reverend Billy Graham, three decades after he deepened my understanding of faith.
Billy explained that we are all sinners, and that we cannot earn God’s love through good deeds. He made clear that the path to salvation is through the grace of God. And the way to find that grace is to embrace Christ as the risen Lord—the son of a God so powerful and loving that He gave His only son to conquer death and defeat sin.
These were profound concepts, and I did not fully grasp them that day. But Billy had planted a seed. His thoughtful explanation had made the soil less firm and the brambles less thick.
Shortly after we got back to Texas, a package from Billy arrived. It was a copy of
In the early fall, I mentioned my conversation with Billy to Don Evans. He told me he and another Midland friend, Don Jones, had been attending a community Bible study. It met Wednesday nights at First Presbyterian Church. I decided to give it a shot.
Each week, we studied a chapter from the New Testament. At first I was a little skeptical. I had a hard time resisting the temptation to wisecrack. One night the group leader asked, “What is a prophet?” I answered, “That’s when revenue exceeds expenses. No one has seen one around here since Elijah.”
Soon I started to take the sessions more seriously. As I read the Bible, I was moved by the stories of Jesus’ kindness to suffering strangers, His healing of the blind and crippled, and His ultimate act of sacrificial love when He was nailed to the cross. For Christmas that year, Don Evans gave me a Daily Bible, a version split into 365 individual readings. I read it every morning and prayed to understand it more clearly. In time, my faith began to grow.
At first I was troubled by my doubts. The notion of a living God was a big leap, especially for someone with a logical mind like mine. Surrendering yourself to an Almighty is a challenge to the ego. But I came to realize that struggles and doubts are natural parts of faith. If you haven’t doubted, you probably haven’t thought very hard about what you believe.
Ultimately, faith is a walk—a journey toward greater understanding. It is not possible to prove God’s existence, but that cannot be the standard for belief. After all, it is equally impossible to prove He doesn’t exist. In the end, whether you believe or don’t believe, your position is based on faith.
That realization freed me to recognize signs of God’s presence. I saw the beauty of nature, the wonder of my little girls, the abiding love of Laura and my parents, and the freedom that comes with forgiveness—all what the preacher Timothy Keller calls “clues of God.” I moved ahead more confidently on my walk. Prayer was the nourishment that sustained me. As I deepened my understanding of Christ, I came closer to my original goal of being a better person—not because I was racking up points on the positive side of the heavenly ledger, but because I was moved by God’s love.
I realized something else. When Billy started answering questions that night in Maine, I was on my third glass of wine, after a couple of beers before dinner. Billy’s message had overpowered the booze. But that was not always the case. I had long been a social drinker. I liked to drink with friends, with meals, at sporting events, and at parties. By my mid-thirties, I was drinking routinely, with an occasional bender thrown in.
We had a saying in West Texas: “Last night he thought he was a ten, when in fact he was an ass.” That applied to me more than once. I like to joke around, but alcohol has a way of turning a quip or tease into a slash or insult. What seems funny with booze can sound so stupid later. One summer night we were having dinner in Maine after a great day of fishing and golf. I had worked up a thirst, which I quenched with multiple bourbon and Sevens. As we were eating, I turned to a beautiful friend of Mother and Dad’s and asked a boozy question: “So, what is sex like after fifty?”
Everyone at the table looked silently at their food—except for my parents and Laura, who glared at me with disbelief. The lovely woman let out a nervous laugh, and the conversation moved on. When I woke up the next day, I was reminded of what I had said. I instantly felt that morning-after remorse. After I called the woman to apologize, I started asking myself if this was really the way I wanted to lead my life. Years later, when I turned fifty, the good-natured woman sent a note to the Texas Governor’s Mansion: “Well, George, how is it?”
Laura saw a pattern developing, too. What seemed hilarious or clever to my friends and me was repetitive and childish to her. She wasn’t afraid to tell me what she thought, but she couldn’t quit for me. I had to do that on my own. At age forty, I finally found the strength to do it—a strength that came from love I had felt from my earliest days, and from faith that I didn’t fully discover for many years.
I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since that night at The Broadmoor in 1986. There’s no way to know where my life would have headed if I hadn’t made the decision to quit drinking. But I am certain that I would not be recording these thoughts as a former governor of Texas and president of the United States.
I’ve been asked if I consider myself an alcoholic. I can’t say for sure. I do know that I have a habitual personality. I was drinking too much, and it was starting to create problems. My ability to quit cold leads me to believe that I didn’t have a chemical addiction. Some drinkers are not as fortunate as I was. I admire those who use other methods to quit, such as the twelve-step process of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I could not have quit drinking without faith. I also don’t think my faith would be as strong if I hadn’t quit drinking. I believe God helped open my eyes, which were closing because of booze. For that reason, I’ve always felt a special connection to the words of “Amazing Grace,” my favorite hymn: “I once was lost, but now am found / was blind, but now I see.”
he morning of June 12, 1999, was beautiful in Texas. The Rangers were in first place in the American League West. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 10,490. Dad had just celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by parachuting out of an airplane—successfully. And I was about to make a leap of my
