10 notable Christian deaths of 2018

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Saturday, December 15, 2018

George H.W. Bush – Nov. 30, 2018

Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush arrives on the field to do the coin toss ahead of the start of Super Bowl LI between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons in Houston, Texas, U.S. on February 5, 2017. | REUTERS/Adrees Latif/Files

Former Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush, who served a term that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, died at age 94, months after his wife, Barbara.

A former World War II Navy pilot and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, from 1981 to 1989 he served as vice president under President Ronald Reagan before being elected president in 1988.

In 1991, Bush oversaw Operation Desert Storm, in which a U.S.-led coalition of nations liberated the Middle Eastern nation of Kuwait after Iraq, under dictator Saddam Hussein, invaded.

Raised in The Episcopal Church, Bush was known to be a devout Christian, according to historian Gary Scott Smith, retired chair of the history department at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

“Bush saw God as active and all-powerful and the Bible as divinely inspired and authoritative. ‘One cannot be America's President,’ the Republican frequently asserted, without ‘the strength that your faith gives to you,’” wrote Smith in a 2017 piece for The Christian Post.

“The Bible, which had helped shape America's values and institutions, Bush attested, ‘has always been a great source of comfort to me.’ He affirmed that Jesus was God's divine Son and frequently referred to Christ as ‘our Savior.’ Moreover, Bush peppered his speeches with biblical quotations, precepts, and stories to underscore his positions.”