In the comments at the LATimes’ article about Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous:
My great hope is that he interviews Arthur Blessit, the wild man preacher who was the one who converted “W” into a born again. In the 1960s, of all the crazies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and there were plenty, Blessit was considered by most to be the craziest.
In his traveling revival show in 1984 that was in Midland, TX, one of his followers, a car dealer, brought the then Vice President’s son to be converted and he was in a private ceremony.
The Bush family has had the record revised, as it has on other recorded occasions, and claims it was Billy Graham.
I would love to see Bill Maher interview Arthur Blessit about the Shrub’s conversion.
Craig Unger, author of “The Fall of the House of Bush” and “House of Bush, House of Saud” suggests that Mr. Bush did not become a born-again Christian after talking with the Rev. Billy Graham at the Bush compound in the summer of 1985, as the president recounted in his autobiography, but that he’d already been born again, more than a year earlier in Texas, thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessit.
Blessit once ran a “Jesus coffeehouse” on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, where he preached to “bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men.” [NYTimes]