Continuing with the subject of President Bush's use of religious rhetoric in various speeches: MOJ reader Jason Samuel, from Ave Maria Law School, points me to some interesting comments made by Michael Gerson, the President's speechwriter, during an Ethics and Public Policy Center conference in January. Gerson gives a generally persuasive defense of the religious elements in Bush's speeches.
One of the more recent criticisms, by a U. Washington communications professor, compared Bush's supposedly arrogant "declarations of God's wishes" with Franklin Roosevelt's more humble "requests for divine blessing." I suspected from the start that the professor was giving a selective use of quotations designed to make FDR look more humble than Bush, and Gerson confirms my suspicion by citing some other examples from FDR's speeches:
On D-Day, most of you probably know, FDR did his announcement to the nation entirely in the form of a prayer. He said, “In the poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer.” He asked for victory, for renewed faith, and said, “with Thy blessing we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogance.”
Or FDR’s State of the Union address a month after Pearl Harbor:
“They know that victory for us means victory for religion, and they could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate living room for both Hitler and God. In proof of this, the Nazis have now announced their plan for enforcing their new, German pagan religion all over the world, a plan by which the Holy Bible and the cross of mercy would be displaced by Mein Kampf and the swastika and the naked sword.
“We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of Genesis: God created man in his own image. We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage. That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives. No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been, there never will be successful compromise between good and evil.”
Plug in "Bin Laden" for Hitler, and you've got something that Bush might have said today -- and boy, if he had, wouldn't there have been an uproar among the editorial-page writers and the communications professors (and more than a few law professors as well). Actually, FDR went quite a bit further, it's my impression, than Bush ever has. Would Bush dare (especially in a State of the Union address) to call a victory over terrorists "a victory for religion" -- as opposed to a victory for freedom, justice, and democracy?
More and more, these efforts to define ground rules for what kind of religious language is appropriate strike me as evasions of the real issues. If the Bush administration has pursued too cocksure and dogmatic a policy on Iraq and terrorism, that case should be made on the merits of the policies. There are plenty of grounds to sustain that charge. But sustaining the charge would require actually analyzing the military, diplomatic, and cultural aspects of the Bush policies -- which are matters that communications professors (and we law professors) often try to evade because they lack real expertise in them. It's so much easier, isn't it, to just read a speech and pick at the language in it.
Tom B.
