Bush's Speechwriter on Christianity and Politics

Rob pointed me to this recent New Yorker profile of Michael Gerson, Bush's speechwriter, evangelical Episcopalian, and a vigorous proponent (though with limited success) of a serious "compassionate conservatism" in the White House.  It's full of ideas about the relation between Christianity and politics, idealism and realism.

Gerson told me that Bush finds no policy prescriptions in Christianity, but he believes that God’s desires helped to shape the ideas at the core of [his] second Inaugural [address]. “The President’s views about the universal appeal of liberty come in part from the fact that he is kind of marinated in the American ideal,” Gerson said. “They come in part from a view that human beings are created in the image of God and will not forever suffer the oppressor’s sword, that eventually there’s something deep in the human soul that cries out for freedom. That doesn’t mean he believes that God blesses this particular foreign policy or that particular foreign policy.”

There's a lot of exploration of "the distance between rhetoric and accomplishment in the Bush Presidency," especially the difficulties in the goal of replacing tyrannies with democracies around the world.  But the article omits perhaps the most striking disconnect between morals and reality:  the abuse of prisoners.  It would have been interesting to hear the speechwriter who crafted the President's moral argument for war in Iraq answer the challenge that the Administration was at best far too lax on this issue, both ahead of time and afterward, in a way that has crippled the nation's moral credibility around the world.

Gerson is also described as "somewhat apologeti[c]" and resigned "about faith-based [social service] programs, to which even some conservatives have argued that the Administration is insufficiently committed."  He says there's insufficient money in the budget to do much; but he also defends the high-income tax cuts with supply-side arguments about promoting economic growth.  On the other hand, the article describes Gerson's success in promoting and defending U.S. assistance to combat AIDS in Africa.  Finally, there's discussion of the recurring theme about Christian principle and political prudence:   

I once asked Gerson to describe the role that the Sermon on the Mount plays in his own life, and in Bush’s life. (The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls the Sermon an “impossible ethical ideal” for human behavior.) “The Gospel stands in judgment of all human institutions and ideologies. It’s not identical with any one of them,” Gerson said. There is a danger, though, in “proof-texting”—searching the Bible for policy instruction. “You can’t find the justification for anti-sodomy laws in the Book of Matthew,” he said. “There is this idea that you can know what Jesus would think about missile defense or S.U.V.s, but it’s wrong. . . . I don’t have any moral qualms about saying that free-market economics are the single best way to take millions of people out of poverty that the world has ever seen,” but he added that he didn’t learn this from the Bible.

Tom