Since the evening of September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush quoted Psalm 23 and declared the day’s events to be the opening salvo of a cosmic struggle of good versus evil, there has been a heated public debate about his openly religious language. Standard and appropriate, or unusual and dangerous? The latter, say more than 200 U.S. seminary and evangelical leaders who last October signed a petition condemning what they called a “theology of war” regarding the administration’s convergence of God and nation in the campaign against terrorism. One of the signers is Sojourners magazine editor-in-chief, Jim Wallis, whose book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It became a national best seller in early 2005. In chapter one Wallis says this: “I have never seen such outrageous behavior by a political party in trying to manipulate religion for its own agenda while so disrespecting the faith of millions of other believers who disagree with the Republican political agenda.” Not so, say many administration officials and supporters who consistently have claimed that President Bush’s mixture of religion and politics is nothing new in the American presidency. Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things, told the Washington Post last September that “there is nothing that Bush has said about divine purpose…that Abraham Lincoln did not say. This is as American as apple pie.” Similarly, Michael Gerson, Bush’s primary speechwriter during his first term, told a group of journalists in December that “it’s not a strategy,” “it’s also not new,” and “I don’t believe that any of this is a departure from American history.” Perhaps both have a point.
Source: Liberty Magazine
Source: Liberty Magazine
