True and Righteous Altogether
With God on His Side. Throughout America's history, there has been one ally presidents have invoked above all others. By Garry Wills. [New York Times: Politics]
The nation's executive mansion is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery. A sly dig there is ''Missed you at Bible study,'' as David Frum reported in ''The Right Man'' with a ''twitch,'' since ''Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory, either'' when he was in Bush's White House. Friends going to intimate dinners with the Bushes should be prepared to lead the prayer said before the meal.
This is a great article, a good capsule summary of how presidents have used religion in American History. It's a pretty sad story.
We believe, on the one hand, that the individual must save himself or herself. One of the people in Karl Rove's Rolodex, for instance, undoubtedly told him that help for people to get housing ''ran counter to compassionate conservatism'' because it undermines ''personal responsibility.'' So do affirmative action programs, which include people as part of a social group rather than in terms of individual merit. No Congregationalist church sent people out to struggle for their souls more stringently than do religious conservatives when it is a matter of state action to help people cope with their problems. They are their problems, their souls to save.
To me, Matthew 25:40 was always a good rebuke to this: "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. "
On the other hand, when it is a matter of recognizing God's authority, the state can impose uniform standards of prayer. It can quash pornography, forbid the choice of an abortion, dictate the way evolution is taught (if at all). At this point, the communitarian becomes the authoritarian. The people as a whole must be saved from the consequences of their own sin. They have souls we all have to save for them, to pay homage to the authority of God.
... [Bush's] calm assurance that most of the world and much of his nation is wrong comes from an apparent certainty that is hard to justify in terms of geopolitical calculus. It helps, in making that leap, to be assured that God is on your side. One of the psychological benefits of this is that it makes one oppose with an easy conscience those who are not with us, therefore not on God's side. They are not mistaken, miscalculating, misguided or even just malevolent. They are evil. And all our opponents can be conflated under the heading of this same evil, since the devil is an equal opportunity employer of his agents.
Must reading. Scary, scary stuff. Scary that we have a president who really seems to believe that God is on his side (and, as Wills said, this is really taking the Lord's name in vain). Scarier still that so many people seem to believe him. Who else thought that God was on his side?
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