God Bless America

A recent article in the Washington Post about Bush and religion does not inspire any new thoughts to debate. Same old story: many people are uneasy with Bush’s use of religion in the formation, implementation and discussion of his policies and some people say that his religious beliefs will inevitably translate into policy decisions. And some people think that’s okay. I don’t mind the use of religion for meditation, philosophy, and justification or rationalization for decisions that are made. Religion is a person’s own business and I expect it naturally plays a role in that person’s decisions. We knew we were electing a deeply religious man when we put him in office. I fully accept the role of religion in our President's processes.

I’m also not sure how his religious beliefs can be separated from attracting the satisfaction of his important Christian Evangelical constituency, so it’s difficult to say which policy decisions are to satisfy an important constituency or to satisfy himself. Or maybe he is satisfying his own religious needs by satisfying that constituency. Who knows? I really don’t care all that much.

What I do care about is the use of religion in speeches and forums that attracts world attention and generates a new perception of America abroad. That bothers me. It bothers me deeply when he invokes a sense of inherent virtue in our actions and decisions that is somehow rooted in some concept of God.

Nine days after Sept. 11th, 2001, he said this in a Joint Session of Congress:

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. - George W. Bush, Sept. 20th, 2001.

If we’re bringing God into this—God, in my view, being the most powerful notion among human beings—we better be pretty damn careful about the words we use. Freedom, fear, justice, cruelty AND GOD are all ambiguous terms. Even in a single context, like September 11th, they mean many things. And the world didn’t begin on September 11th and certainly didn’t end on September 12th. The concepts of these terms in the minds of people across the planet vary based on their own experiences. Naturally, I understand this is a problem for any figure who is giving a speech—the problem of speaking to the entire world is a daunting task for anyone. But surely we can do better than this. Surely we can do better than ignoring the troublesome nature of words like freedom, justice, and God and plowing ahead, tossing them around like we’re talking about the Jets playing the Giants.

Unless, of course, we don’t want to do better, which I suspect is the case here.