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And above all, Bush

Here are a couple of good articles published recently on Bush and faith.

The first is Ron Suskind's profile from the 17 October New York Times [purchase]. When it was first published, I printed it out to read and regretted not mirroring it before they pulled it off the stacks. I'm grateful that others had the foresight to provide copies (and I'll follow suit now).

• From Deep Waters
• From brainthink
• From Messages from the Ether

For me, two quotes from the story stand out. The first is a Bush gaffe which will, I suspect, be considered a trivial mistake by his defenders. Coming from the president, it is anything but trivial and makes me want to sigh like Gore during a debate. During a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2002, a congressman brought up the Swedish army as a good candidate to act as a small peacekeeping force in Israel. Bush replied with I don't know why you're talking about Sweden. They're the neutral one. They don't have an army. During the meeting, no one could politely convince him that he was probably thinking of Switzerland.

To Bush's credit, weeks later he admitted to the congressman that he was mistaken. However, how often are mistakes dealing with basic facts of the world not corrected or acted on without review? Where other politicians have a depth of knowledge of world history, Bush must be convinced of freshman history facts. Is such ignorance at all acceptable in the office of the president? He's obviously more than a figurehead or symbolic leader--his simplistic understanding of the world affects foreign policy. Does anyone really believe that he has greater acumen with domestic policy?

The second quote involved Bush's faith. He was meeting with Jim Wallis, a religious leader who is a founder of a group called Sojourners. The Suskind article describes the encounter here:

Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, '''but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.'''

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism.''

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

The closing quote from the article is also from Wallis:

''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.

''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.''

And what is that?

''Easy certainty.''

This ties into, and is contrasted by, some comments in The Claremont Institute's review of three recent books on Bush and faith. Bush is quoted many times as emphasizing humility: Faith teaches humility. Yet this is paired with his blind faith as is evident in this quote: We find that the plan of the Creator is sometimes very different from our own. Yet, we learn to depend on His loving will, bowing to purposes we don't always understand. The reviewer concludes that [p]resident Bush does not regard himself as in control of his own destiny, let alone the destiny of the nation as a whole. He does not trust either his reason or his instincts, but reminds himself constantly, through prayer, of his fallibility and the fallibility of all human beings. In other words (?) rational thought cannot help us. That's frightening.

In a previous post, I quoted a lady at the RNC who said I'd rather have a leader who looked to God for leadership than a leader who looked at himself as a leader. Gore understood that faith without humanism only stagnates a society. Is that where we're headed?

[ via Arts & Letters Daily -> The Claremont Institute ]