Apart from its churches, which shine out among modest bungalows and offices, Midland's greatest assets lie underground. The land above the oil is high, treeless desert. Visitors to Bush's childhood home in the Fifties remember dark skies of sand, red walls of flying earth blown by infamous West Texas winds. By the Seventies, when Midland became Bush's business home, there were more people here, more streets in which mesquite grass could grow, but no less sand and no more trees.

Midlanders have long defined themselves as resilient and decisive: "That's what you've got to be here when you're gambling against nature," says First Presbyterian stalwart, oil man and former candidate for Texas Governor, Clayton Williams. "Just as a well is either wet or dry, so is the answer to a question always right or wrong." That is the answer of a hurried corporate lawyer at Stonegate Church, the newest multimillion-dollar address in the Midland Yellow Pages.

Stonegate pastor Patrick Payton sees a holy mission for Midland. He thinks it no accident that George Bush Sr came here in 1948, that George Bush Junior spent two long periods of his life here, that General Tommy Franks, US commander in the Iraq War, came from Midland, too, and shared schooldays with Laura Bush. "Midlanders have a special responsibility - based on their faith and the power to project that faith," he says.

These days there is a motor tour of presidential homes to remind everyone how special they are. In freezing desert winds in January 2001, George W. Bush told former classmates, teammates, campaign financiers and fellow Bible readers that this was his last stop before Washington, and that he would go there and govern by Midland values. As most Midlanders boast proudly today, that is exactly what he has done - and should be elected to do again. Their message to those who "just don't get" George Bush: come here and "try to get us".

At Kelview Baptist Church, the Bible class this morning considers the cost of failing to walk in the ways of the Lord. The world is divided between the "saved" and the "unsaved" (even in plain-speaking Midland it is mildly graceless to use the word "damned"), and Bill Collins, an oil-industry warehouse manager, has no doubts that he and George W. Bush are securely among the "saved". He is polite but not smiling. Salvation tickets are not angels-on-pinheads here. This is urgent.

"After 9/11, after the battles along the Euphrates and as the Jews get their full biblical lands, the Second Coming is closer every day," he says.

"The hand of God is guiding American foreign policy and I rejoice in that. The turmoil in the Middle East is growing greater and I rejoice in that. The greater the turmoil, the closer the Rapture."

The Rapture? This is the doctrine that Christ will return and his "saved" will be taken into the air to avoid the tribulations which for seven years will savage everyone else. So St Paul told the Thessalonians in a Bible passage which preachers often prefer to ignore. But not here at Kelview.

Bill Collins, grey-haired, grey-skinned, has just heard a sermon on the destruction of Sodom, the hailstone-and-fire fate for any Midlanders not yet "saved", those who sit in silence while the white crosses mark ever more abortion victims, while videos of Madonna set the moral tone (not that they are keen on the Catholics' Madonna either) and homosexuals marry in Massachusetts.

But if all this horror advances the calendar of salvation? To men like Bill Collins that is a boon. "The darker the night gets the lighter my heart gets," in the words of the 19th-century evangelist, R. A. Torrey, one of the pioneers of Midland values.

At First Episcopal Church, the closest neighbour is now the "George Bush Childhood Home" (give $50,000 and sponsor the First Childhood backyard).

Visitors this morning can also catch another view of the world's end, from the Book of Revelation, the banning from the Holy City of those who have practised "abomination on Earth". This is not extremist worship.