Just the Right Amount of God

"WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE political philosopher?" a group of Republican candidates were asked early in the 2000 race for president. And the frontrunner at the time, a Texas governor named George W. Bush, calmly answered, "Christ, because he changed my life."

Well. You could barely hear the other candidates' answers in the crash and clatter of overturned chairs as reporters scrambled to reach the phones and call in the story. Some commentators decided Bush was nakedly pandering to Evangelical voters in a Machiavellian ploy so bold that he should have said his favorite political philosopher was, um, Machiavelli.

Most of the nation's chatterers, however, decided that this wasn't the devious Bush but the stupid Bush. Couldn't he come up with the name of an actual philosopher? Plato had a scribble called the Republic, Aristotle managed to jot down a few notes on politics, and in the long years since the ancient Greeks there have been a few other philosophical types who've set out a thought or two on the political order. A little more study time--a little less fraternizing with his drinking buddies--and Bush might have heard their names while he was an undergraduate, even at Yale.

And then there was the mockery the candidate faced for his confusion of piety with philosophy. The holy name of Jesus doesn't have much purchase on people for whom "Christian" is mostly shorthand for "life-denying bigots who want to burn all the books they're too ignorant to read." Besides, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible that Bush claims to follow manifests deep suspicion of the philosophical. The Lord will do "a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder," as the prophet Isaiah put it, "for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." If Bush understood the Book of Acts, he'd remember the Apostle Paul didn't have much success preaching the Resurrection to philosophers in Athens.

Bad theology, bad philosophy, and bad politics--this was the high-minded consensus at the time. The identification of Jesus as a life-changing political philosopher was either a stroke of electoral genius, or a mark of jaw-dropping feeblemindedness, or--well, that's always been the problem for Bush's opponents, hasn't it? "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot," John Kerry whined to his aides during the 2004 campaign, and George W. Bush still remains impenetrable to those who persist in seeing him as some impossible combination of Dr. Evil and Forrest Gump. Anyway, the consensus was that he didn't mean--couldn't mean--anything philosophical by his answer to a reporter's question.

Funny thing. On a cold, bright day in January 2005, with the sun off the snow crinkling his eyes, President Bush gave his second inaugural address. And it seems he did actually mean what he had said before. The speech was as clear an assertion of a particular Christian political philosophy as we're likely to hear in these latter days. "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom," the president declared. "Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul." There's even a name for this kind of theistical philosophy. It's called natural law. An inaugural address, by its very national purpose, walks the tightrope between powerful abstractions and empty platitudes, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. "In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak," Bush said, and is that a truth or a truism? A wrenching call to greatness or a self-congratulatory pat on the back?

A little of both, no doubt. But the most interesting things in Bush's inaugural rhetoric are the moments where justifications are offered for the various truths and truisms. The chain of explanation in his speech is always the logical progression of the natural-law argument. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals," Bush insisted. And why? Because there is, in fact, a universal human nature: "Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." If "across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government," the reason must reside in the enduring essence of human beings as simultaneously corruptible and morally valuable: "Because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."

As it happens, a natural-law explanation carries philosophical reasoning a step beyond the mere assertion of a nature for human beings. The problem for ethics is always how to match empirical and logical claims ("Humans want to be free") with moral claims ("Humans should

Now, any philosopher would point out that this is possible only if the moral law itself is real: a set of eternal truths that vary not in content but only in application as the temporal order changes. And, sure enough, there the necessary postulate is in Bush's speech: "Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before--ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever."

And watch it all come together as Bush reaches toward his peroration in the speech's penultimate moment: "When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty."

So, we've got an enduring and universal human nature ("ancient hope"). We've got final causation ("meant to be fulfilled"). We've got a moral problematic (the "ebb and flow of justice"). We've got intelligible formal causes (the ideal of "liberty" as shaping a "visible direction" for history). And we've even got a prime mover ("the Author of Liberty"). There isn't much more a natural-law philosopher could want in an American president's inaugural address about nature and nature's God. I'd guess not a lot of gloating is allowed around the throne of the Maker of heaven and earth, but somewhere in the vicinity, St. Thomas Aquinas must be smiling.

BUT IN CERTAIN SUBLUNARY REALMS, there are others who are not smiling at all. "Way Too Much God" ran the headline in the Wall Street Journal, over a column in which former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan bemoaned the president's triumphalist religiosity. The speech concerned Bush's "evolving thoughts on freedom in the world," Noonan observed. And "those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty." She had in mind, of course, the curious humility and even melancholy of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address--as well she ought, for Lincoln remains the high-water mark of presidential rhetoric, and Bush's speech was clearly striving at points to echo its unmatchable predecessor.

And if a solid Republican like Peggy Noonan is bothered by the president's God-besotted, un-Lincolnian immodesty, you can imagine what the reaction was among the president's detractors. But what's missed by all those who unfairly compare Bush's zeal with Lincoln's call to humility is, in part, the timing of the latter, for the end of the Civil War was at hand by the time Lincoln spoke, while we are still in the thick of the struggle Bush describes. Even more, there is a hard edge of determination for victory that runs through Lincoln's speech--a steel in his sadness that gives a hidden force to his demand for national humility. The 1865 inaugural address was not the breast-beating some read in it today.

Perhaps that's why Abraham Lincoln delivered the most theological presidential speech ever given. It is our great national sermon. "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

In this sense, Bush's speech in the Washington snow isn't theological at all. This is not Christ the sacrificial lamb, or Christ the New Adam who breaks the curse of Original Sin. This is rather Christ the philosopher--and George W. Bush has just delivered the most purely philosophical address in the history of America's inaugurations.

As it happens, the natural-law philosophy the speech asserted has a little bit to bother everyone in it. The president's Evangelical supporters may have been reassured by the public religiosity of the occasion--the prayers, the Navy choir singing "God of Our Fathers," the bowed heads. But the god of the philosophers ain't much of a god to be going home with. A deistical clockmaker, an impersonal prime mover, a demiurge instead of a redeemer: This is hardly the faith Christian Americans imagine the president shares with them. There was not a mention of the Divine in Bush's speech that Thomas Jefferson couldn't have uttered.

Still, all that God-talk--all that natural-law reasoning--was heading somewhere in Bush's speech, and the president's cultured despisers, those who tremble or rage at any trace of divinity in public, are right to be afraid. Just not for the reason they think. It would take an act of perverse will to suppose that the 2005 inaugural address signaled the onset of a Christian theocracy in America. Every rhetorical gesture toward God was either universalized up into a sectless abstraction ("Author of Liberty"? Which faith group can't say that?) or spread down in careful pluralistic specificity ("the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people").

No, President Bush's opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk--about everything. With his inaugural address, President Bush has just delivered a foreign-policy discourse that relies entirely on classical concepts of natural law, and, agreeing or not, everybody in America understood what he was talking about.

In other words, the argument over abortion changed the way the nation speaks of every moral issue. "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," the president declares--and thereby carries natural law out to the world.

This is a claim about the universal, which the old foreign-policy realists rejected. This is a claim about the moral, which the libertarians despised. And this is a claim about the eternal, which the Social Darwinists renounced. But these older strains of conservatism have lost the battle to set the nation's rhetoric. They are welcome to come along for the ride, but George W. Bush announced, there in the bright cold of a Washington January, that the nation would be moving to the beat of a different political philosophy.

Noooo. Your unease is justified and certain does not reflect faith/character shortcomings. Just the opposite. It might reflect a simple misunderstanding of his meaning.

You have a wonderfully polite way about you. That is what reflects your faith/character. I should be more that way myself.

All of your points are excellent and very true. And this is true, too:

I don't doubt that the Left, or even secular intellectuals of any stripe, will condemn this speech.

Curiously enough, I don't think they have any idea what they are condemning. I think the speech went right over their heads.

Is an American President a philosopher-king or a universal legislator? I'd rather have a more traditional address, that recognized universal moral laws and an American role in the world without making America world policeman.

One question to ask about an address like this is, how would you feel if someone from the other party -- Clinton or Carter or Johnson or Roosevelt -- had delivered it? Would some of the lines and the apparent assumptions in the speech about American power and involvement in world affairs make you uneasy?

" Curiously enough, I don't think they have any idea what they are condemning. I think the speech went right over their heads."

You know, you may be wrong here. Of course there will be those who heard what they wanted to hear, the mouthings of an evangelical simpleton. But I suspect that most of the educated Left and secularists will almost instantly recognize what he said. It won't give them that smug sense of superiority the former might have, but it will anger and terrify them.

Michael Gerson is the President's speechwriter. Karen Hughes was on tv on Thurs. saying that the President called Gerson in on the day after the election to start working on the speech. She said what the President delivered on Thurs. was the 22nd draft of the speech.

Well, you threw a lot at me in post 47, and I am not prepared to answer all of it. I do not have a problem with weighing each one of those issue on a moral scale. I would need more details on each issue to give an opinion.

It comes from being sick on Thursday and having nothing to do but lay in bed watching the TV. Actually I was lucky to have heard this. I never heard all of the President's Inaugural address because I fell asleep. I fell asleep again later during the replay and missed it again! LOL!

we are all still made in God's image, no matter how flawed

God is perfect and eternal. Since we are made in God's image, therefore, we are perfect and eternal. Of course, "we" means spiritual beings.

>"What good is it to gain the world but lose your soul."<

I believe God blesses our President, and that his faith is strong. I also believe America was founded as a nation under God. But the world, though He also created it, is not under God. Our Consitution was written for a Godly people, but we live in a world which is Satan's domain, and so yes, we are hated by unbelievers. I admire GWB's ambitions to bring freedom and peace to the world, but I am enough of a realist to know that that can be done only by prayer. (Oh, and perhaps a little war here and there to secure the country's or to deliver an enslaved people from an evil tyrant.)

As I've said on another related thread, our interference in other governments will only increase the hatred for us. We have been blessed to be Americans. We have been given the responsibility to maintain what we have inherited through the blood and grit of our ancestors here to ensure it's survival for future generations. The cold, hard facts are that we are now up against the enemy within our very shores. It is best we remain ever vigilant, alert and not naive, to preserve what we have been blessed with. The real war being waged is a spiritual one.

I am sure that any of the speechwriters could write write a perfectly serviceable speech from a short list of talking points. The large number of drafts indicates to me a serious collaboration and hashing out of each topic, explanation, and expression, combined with a careful integration of all of the parts in a very coherent and well-expressed whole.

I must say that even though I watched and listened, I had to read it more than once to come to my current opinion about it. For those who criticize its lack of focused Christianity, let me remind you that other equally constituted Americans, such as a Jew like me, do not see that as a shortcoming. Just as he is the President of Democrats as well as Republicans, he is my President as well as yours - and I am COMFORTED, not put off, by both his inclusiveness and his Christianity.

I concur with the article, and several other thoughtful posts on this thread about the speech, particularly regarding it as an expression of natural law. And I believe that any of his opponents who truly understood it must be silently gnashing their teeth in frustration over their incapability to match its depth and power.

I bet a lot of us could write speeches that good if we had professionals writing 22 drafts!

Each re-write is considered another draft even it only involves changing the punctuation. That's why there were so many drafts.

Apparently the way Gerson does it, is sit with the President and talk about what he wants to say in the speech. Gerson then goes and writes it, and brings it back to the President who edits it, sends it back, etc, etc. until it's done. The senior staff also has a go at the speech, writing notes in the margins, etc.

I've never undersood what's wrong with a Christian claiming Jesus as a favorite philosopher. President Bush is a committed Christian and if secularists think that makes him an American C.S Lewis, its their loss. Faith has a prominent champion in the post-modern age.

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George Bush delivers the most philosophical inaugural address ever.