Posted on 02/12/2003 8:35:27 PM PST by rwfromkansas
In the spring of 1999, as George W. Bush was about to announce his run for President, he agreed to be interviewed about his religious faith -- grudgingly. "I want people to judge me on my deeds, not how I try to define myself as a religious person of words."
It's hard to believe that's the same George W. Bush as now. Since taking office -- and especially in the last weeks -- Bush's personal faith has turned highly public, arguably more so than any modern president. What's important is not that Bush is talking about God but that he's talking about him differently. We are witnessing a shift in Bush's theology – from talking mostly about a Wesleyan theology of "personal transformation" to describing a Calvinist "divine plan" laid out by a sovereign God for the country and himself. This shift has the potential to affect Bush's approach to terrorism, Iraq and his presidency.
On Thursday (Feb.6) at the National Prayer Breakfast, for instance, Bush said, "we can be confident in the ways of Providence. ... Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."
Calvin, whose ideas are critical to contemporary evangelical thought, focused on the idea of a powerful God who governs "the vast machinery of the whole world."
Bush has made several statements indicating he believes God is involved in world events and that he and America have a divinely guided mission:
-- After Bush's Sept. 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson called the president and said: "Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought -- God wanted you there." "He wants us all here, Gerson," the president responded.
In that speech, Bush said, "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." The implication: God will intervene on the world stage, mediating between good and evil.
At the prayer breakfast, during which he talked about God's impact on history, he also said, he felt "the presence of the Almighty" while comforting the families of the shuttle astronauts during the Houston memorial service on Feb. 4.
-- In his State of the Union address last month, Bush said the nation puts its confidence in the loving God "behind all of life, and all of history" and that "we go forward with confidence, because this call of history has come to the right country. May He guide us now."
In addition to these public statements indicating a divine intervention in world events, there is evidence Bush believes his election as president was a result of God's acts.
A month after the World Trade Center attack, World Magazine, a conservative Christian publication, quoted Tim Goeglein, deputy director of White House public liaison, saying, "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility." Time magazine reported, "Privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." The net effect is a theology that seems to imply that God is intervening in events, is on America's side, and has chosen Bush to be in the White House at this critical moment.
"All sorts of warning signals ought to go off when a sense of personal chosenness and calling gets translated into a sense of calling and mission for a nation," says Robin Lovin, a United Methodist ethicist and professor of religion and political thought at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Lovin says what the president seems to be lacking is theological humility and an awareness of moral ambiguity.
Richard Land, a top Southern Baptist leader with close ties to the White House, argues that Bush's sense of divine oversight is part of why he has become such a good wartime leader. He brings a moral clarity and self-confidence that inspires Americans and scares enemies. "We don't inhabit that relativist universe (of European leaders)," Land says. "We really believe some things are good and some things bad."
It's even possible that Bush's belief in America's moral rightness makes the country's military threats seem more genuine because the world thinks Bush is "on a mission."
Presidents have always used Scripture in their speeches as a source of poetry and morality, according to Michael Waldman, President Clinton's chief speechwriter, author of "POTUS Speaks" and now a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Lincoln, he says, was the first president to use the Bible extensively in his speeches, but one of the main reasons was that his audience knew the Bible -- Lincoln was using what was then common language. Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1912 speech to the Progressive Party, closed with these words: "We stand at the edge of Armageddon." Carter, Reagan and Clinton all used Scripture, but Waldman says their use was more as a "grace note."
Bush is different, because he uses theology as the guts of his argument. "That's very unusual in the long sweep of American history," Waldman says.
Bush has clearly seen a divine aspect to his presidency since before he ran. Many Americans know the president had a religious conversion at age 39, when he, as he describes it, "came to the Lord" after a weekend of talks with the Rev. Billy Graham. Within a year, he gave up drinking and joined a men's Bible study group at First United Methodist Church in Midland, Texas. From that point on, he has often said, his Christian faith has grown.
Less well known is that, in 1995, soon after he was elected Texas governor, Bush sent a memo to his staff, asking them to stop by his office to look at a painting entitled "A Charge to Keep" by W.H.D. Koerner, lent to him by Joe O'Neill, a friend from Midland. The painting is based on the Charles Wesley hymn of the same name, and Bush told his staff he especially liked the second verse: "To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill; O may it all my powers engage to do my Master's will." Bush said those words represented their mission. "What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."
By 1999, Bush was saying he believed in a "divine plan that supersedes all human plans." He talked of being inspired to run for president by a sermon delivered by the Rev. Mark Craig, pastor of Bush's Dallas congregation, Highland Park United Methodist Church.
Craig talked about the reluctance of Moses to become a leader. But, said Mr. Craig, then as now, people were "starved for leadership" -- leaders who sacrifice to do the right thing. Bush said the sermon "spoke directly to my heart and talked about a higher calling." But in 1999, as he prepared to run for president, he was quick to add in an interview: "Elections are determined by human beings."
Richard Land recalls being part of a group of about a dozen people who met after Bush's second inauguration as Texas governor in 1999.
At the time, everyone in Texas was talking about Bush's potential to become the next president. During the meeting, Land says, Bush said, "I believe God wants me to be president, but if that doesn't happen, it's OK." Land points out that Bush didn't say that God actually wanted him to be president. He said he believed God wanted him to be president.
During World War II, the American Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about God's role in political decision-making. He believed every political leader and every political system falls short of absolute justice -- that the Allies didn't represent absolute right and Hitler didn't represent absolute evil because all of us, as humans, stand under the ultimate judgment of God. That doesn't mean politicians can't make judgments based on what they believe is right; it does mean they need to understand that their position isn't absolutely morally clear.
"Sometimes Bush comes close to crossing the line of trying to serve the nation as its religious leader, rather than its political leader," says C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a clergy-led liberal lobbying group.
Certainly, European leaders seem to be bothered by Bush's rhetoric and it possibly does contribute to a sense in Islamic countries that Bush is on an anti-Islamic "crusade."
Radwan Masmoudi, executive director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, worries about it. "Muslims, all over the world, are very concerned that the war on terrorism is being hijacked by right-wing fundamentalists, and transformed into a war, or at least a conflict, with Islam. President Bush is a man of faith, and that is a positive attribute, but he also needs to learn about and respect the other faiths, including Islam, in order to represent and serve all Americans."
In hindsight, even Bush's inaugural address presaged his emerging theology. He quoted a colonist who wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?" Then Bush said: "Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate, but the themes of this day he would know, `our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.'
"We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another. Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today; to make our country more just and generous; to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.
"This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm."
'CatholicGuy' truly, the use of 'catholic' in your screen name is a total misnomer. Be wise and when next you grace these threads use sometning more applicable to your rants.
I believe it's more that we strive to be on the side of God. And I am sure of the outcome in that good will either prevail over evil, or it won't. And I believe that we are chosen to project the good, because no one else can, or will. And we must.
I reviewed Chancellor Palpatine's posts before I ever made an accusation that he was formerly known as One_Particular_Harbour. Here were my findings:
1) he is a relatively recent convert to Orthodoxy, 2) he is frequently engaged in discussions of legal issues/law cases, and uses language familiar to the legal profession (not medicine, as he has claimed to me to be in the med field) 3) he frequently discusses/criticizes the red-neck culture of his southern state and surrounding states (to the complete abscence of any comments about his earlier supposed location of Alaska, which he has since changed to "USA") 4) he is still obsessed with posting Catholic clergy scandal stories, and uses exactly the same phrases in his screeds, 5) he is still obsessed with anti-Catholic views that have no roots in reality, and 6) he pings the same anti-Catholics to threads now as he did under the OPH screen name, 7) he attacks the same Catholic FReepers as he did under the OPH screen name, 8) he makes the same anti-pro-lifer comments as he did under the OPH screen name, and 9) he makes the same inane statements about my own profession as he did under the OPH screen name.
He has never even attempted to clarify that he is not One_Particular_Harbour. Not once. Whener I make the charge to him, he flees the thread. The first time I made the charge, he was not seen on Free Republic again for several days, and then avoided Catholic threads for several more days.
I stand by my conclusions till proven otherwise.
That war was probably the last time that men,who were defending the Judeo-Christian concept of the United States,had an influence on our government's foreign policy. This is not to say that a few good men and,at least one good president,did not fight nobly for the cause most Americans,not in government, still believed.
There's been a lot of water over the dam since the early sixties when men with a different vision for this country either took advantage or orchestrated the deaths of Diem and Kennedy and used it to drive a giant wedge into the war effort. In the process they insinuated themselves and their unamerican agenda into the mainstream. They turned truth on its head and have proceded to sow lies and disinformation which have now penetrated the entire nation.
The numbers of those influencing our policies away from the Founders original intent for this country has been reversed and confusion reigns.
In 1966,my husband wrote that he was requesting a transfer to Search and Rescue. He said that strafing Viet Namese soldiers from above as they were advancing on a walled city,watching them scrambling to retreat as they faced certain death from inside the city and being trampled on by the troops behind them was more than he could bear.
The terror on their faces as they looked up and saw death from every direction,including the heavens,so to speak,was a sight he said he never wanted to see again. It was clear to him that many of the people in charge were not the least bit interested in providing a safe haven for North Vietnamese fleeing the communism of the North,or to prevent the spread of communism in southeast Asia and therein protecting our country. It was,to those in power,a chess game and ordinary Americans were the pawns.
My husband died less than a month before he was scheduled to come home while on a Search and Rescue mission.
xzins,you were so right on the animose and hostility those who survived or their families experienced. I was shocked when my boys,in the seventies,when they were still in elementary school told me not to say anything about their dad. They explained that they had told everyone their parents were divorced because their class mates said our soldiers were killers and they were ashamed.
I am listening to the radio,hearing about the thousands upon thousands of anti-war demonstrators,and I pray that God who is omniscient,omnipotent and omnipresent have mercy on us all.
Thankyou for your post it was very sensitive and very true.
As for Bush being more calvinistic..naw ..it is simply the nature of men to pick the verses and doctrine that feel good at the moment...I have read before that President Bush believes he was elected for just such a time..that can be a blessing or a curse..
I do believe that it is God that actually elects our rulers..and I ask always that His will be done
Everybody seemed to find their way here. I am glad. Your posts are spot on. Thank you.
St. Chuck, I'll toast you a glass of Wine, to that sentiment. (even if it does not, in fact, transmogrify into literal human blood).
LOL. Cheers.
That's a good, concise answer.
I don't agree that dissent is unAmerican. On the contrary, dissent is as American a value as one can find, and dissent without fear of reprisal and persecution is what the constitution is all about. This country was conceived by dissent (Revolutionary War)and weaned on dissent (Civil War). How can it mature on anything else?
On the other hand, blind allegiance is what is unAmerican, especially to unconstitutional actions by our government be it democrat or republican. It is a liberal tendency to have no tolerance for divergent opinon and conservatives should be especially conscious of allowing unimpeded political expression. To call into question the actions of our elected representatives is as American as you can get.
It was Catholicguy. Thank God.
Psst, CG. This is a war on Islam. And God is determining it, just as he determines all.
I will not post until I've read the entire thread.
I will not post until I've read the entire thread...
This resonates with me very deeply. When my nephew was killed in the Gulf War, I knew that he had served his country with confidence and thoroughly convinced that as a Christian he was called to serve his country.
Perhaps having a father who was a Marine accounts for my zeal for our troops and issues relating to housing and pay. I want to know that any military action will be waged with the will to win and to accept nothing less than total victory. Sadly, I have grave doubts left over from Vietnam about those who call the shots at the top. And as a citizen of this Republic I want to know that our troops are not just pawns in some geopolitical struggle we mere mortals can barely divine.
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