Once again, the religious rhetoric of President Bush is causing a stir. Fair enough. Mr. Bush
does not disguise that his evangelical Christian convictions are an essential part of how he
makes decisions, and he has not hesitated to link them with the war on Iraq.

Most of the attention given the president's religiosity these days is not coming from his
supporters, who seem quietly satisfied. The concerns are coming from his critics, especially
from opponents of the war.

They worry that he divides the world too easily into good and evil. They resent that for many in
the United States, the president's faith seems to allow him to refrain from addressing stubborn
facts and complicated arguments, as though it were enough to reason, "These are the president's
policies; the president is a devout and moral Christian; therefore, these are devout and moral
Christian policies."

Strangely absent is any similar attention to the views of others in the administration, especially
the recognized architects of the Iraq war like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul D. Wolfowitz, as well as other top officials like
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

Are their worldviews at all formed, as the president's is, by religious convictions and reflexes?
Or are they shaped almost entirely by secular notions of geopolitics and national interest?

These questions seem all the more pertinent in view of the president's managerial style,
seemingly less dependent upon policies of his own than on choosing from alternatives presented
to him by the top administration officials. 

Secretary Powell has identified himself as an Episcopalian with a love for the church's traditional
ritual. On at least one occasion, he has linked his faith with the decision to halt the attacks on
retreating Iraqi Republican Guard units in the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf. 

Ms. Rice, an observant Presbyterian and the daughter and granddaughter of Presbyterian
ministers, has spoken publicly of her faith but not, it seems, of its implications for war and
peace. Mr. Cheney, like the president a Methodist, has said even less. Likewise for Secretary
Rumsfeld. Articles on Mr. Wolfowitz have mentioned only that he is Jewish. 

One paradoxical possibility is that while United States foreign policy is expressed in terms of the
president's evangelical faith, it is being forged on what the author Robert D. Kaplan calls a
pagan ethos.

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly with years of reporting experience from
some of the world's most violent war zones, made the case for conducting United States foreign
policy according to such an ethos in his book "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a
Pagan Ethos" (Random House, 2002). 

Mr. Kaplan was not invoking the pantheistic spiritualities espoused by Wiccans and other
contemporary adherents of nature religions. Rather, he was writing of the lessons to be drawn
from the harsh world of the Peloponnesian Wars between Sparta and Athens as recounted by
Thucydides, the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage as recounted by Livy, or the era of
the Warring States in China in Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." 

To these ancient pagans, Mr. Kaplan adds more modern figures like Machiavelli, Hobbes and
Churchill. Some reviewers were less than impressed by Mr. Kaplan's hodgepodge of history
and philosophy, but at bottom "Warrior Politics" is really about contemporary foreign policy.

It is a brief for a cold-eyed, hardheaded, self-interested American realism freed from the
constraints of a Judeo-Christian morality of good intentions.

"Christianity is about the moral conquest of the world," Mr. Kaplan writes, "while Greek
tragedy is about the clash of irreconcilable elements. As Machiavelli cruelly but accurately puts
it, progress often comes from hurting others."

In Mr. Kaplan's view, a world tottering on the edge of anarchy and chaos demands a kind of
stealth American empire that does not speak its name but wields its power to protect
democratic values, although not necessarily by democratic means.

There is much in his book that accurately describes the spirit now presiding over United States
foreign policy. Asked yesterday how he would rate the administration's Iraq policy by the
standard of his pagan ethos, Mr. Kaplan said, "Over all, pretty good."

He said, however, that there was not necessarily a contradiction between pagan means and
Christian ends. Indeed, while "Warrior Politics" repeatedly emphasizes "the distinction between
pagan and Judeo-Christian values," it also detects a "considerable overlap."

In fact, the Iraq war, Mr. Kaplan said, was "a classic case of using pagan real politik toward
ends that are compatible with Judeo-Christian morality."

But can one separate means and ends this way — and justify the former by the latter? That idea
may sit more comfortably with Mr. Kaplan's pagan ethos than with any ethos advocated by
evangelicals like the president or, for that matter, by most other religious believers. 

Their world is created and ruled by one God, who ensures an ultimate eternal order beneath
and beyond the apparent disorder of the moment. The world of Mr. Kaplan's pagans is one of
warring gods, who ensure disorder beneath and beyond even the moments of apparent order.

But suppose that Mr. Kaplan is right and that the foreign policy Mr. Bush has endorsed is really
one largely exemplifying a pagan ethos. It would be interesting to hear the president explain that
at the next White House prayer breakfast.