THE WIND whistles through Midland, a remote town in Texas surrounded by open fields where nodding donkeys silently extract oil from the ground. It was here in the 1950s that the future President George W Bush spent years as a boy and later returned to find his faith in God.

While many Europeans remain cynical over Bush’s impassioned rhetoric about spreading liberty around the globe, the president’s old friends from Midland are in no doubt that it springs from his religious convictions.

Although it has fewer than 100,000 people, this unprepossessing town has become an unexpected hub of activism for international human rights and the promotion of democracy.

Local evangelical Christians have joined forces with neoconservatives in Washington to lobby the White House and State Department on issues such as ethnic slaughter in Sudan, repression in North Korea and the European Union’s proposed lifting of the embargo on arms sales to China.

Abortion, gay marriage and Darwin’s theory of evolution meet with little approval here, but many of the Christian faithful, galvanised by Bush’s re-election, are more concerned with spreading liberty abroad, including the freedom of worship, than with domestic moral and political issues.

It is in Midland that clues can be found to Bush’s “fire of freedom” inauguration speech and his shared belief with neoconservatives in the virtue of fostering democracy, whether peacefully or by force of arms.

A left-of-centre commentator for the New York Times recently warned that while “liberals traditionally were the bleeding hearts” they were ceding the ground to members of the Christian right, who were becoming ardent “new internationalists”.

Bush became a born-again Christian in the 1980s after attending a men’s Bible study group in the town, 300 miles from Dallas, the nearest city. “If you want to understand me, (you) need to understand Midland,” he has said.

He remains its favourite son. Democrat supporters are scarce and bumper stickers supporting “W in 04” for president are still plastered on the giant pick-up trucks driven by oil-rich locals.

In a magazine interview last week, Laura Bush described the weekly prayer meetings as “one of the big influences” on her husband and said he retained a “very close relationship with all those men”. Her mother still lives in the town.

Deborah Fikes, 47, a director of the Midland Ministerial Alliance, has built a smart guesthouse filled with Texan memorabilia at the back of her garden to house the stream of foreign visitors and VIPs to the town.

John Garang, the rebel leader who is set to become vice-president of Sudan in a new government of national unity, has stayed in her back garden and met Fikes this month for breakfast in Washington after he had addressed the United Nations Security Council on Darfur.

Fikes has the warm smile of an evangelical Christian and the political skills of a seasoned lobbyist. She regularly shuttles to Washington, where one of her chief allies is Michael Horowitz, a neoconservative at the Hudson Institute and a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Horowitz, a Jew, has become a hero to evangelical Christians by linking the abuse of human rights to the lack of religious freedom in countries such as China, North Korea and large swathes of the Middle East.

One of Bush’s best friends is Joe O’Neill, 59, a hearty Irish-American who has known Bush since schooldays and introduced him to Laura at a barbecue in his back yard. He calls the president “Bushie” and is a regular visitor to the White House.

“The do-good streak was always in him,” said O’Neill. “It didn’t show up for a while in his bachelor days, but it was deeply ingrained in him.”

In this week’s New Republic magazine, EJ Dionne, a Democrat commentator, argues that the left needs to acknowledge the potency of some of the ideas of the Christian right.

“Liberals could begin by abandoning prejudices about people of faith. Liberals, after all, do call on others to abandon their own prejudices,” suggests Dionne.

They could do worse than take a trip to Bush country.

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