Bush's Gospel
From the March 1, 2004 issue: The strengths and weaknesses of a love-thy-neighbor presidency.
by Terry Eastland
03/01/2004, Volume 009, Issue 24
AMONG THE EVENTS that doomed Howard Dean's candidacy, one that has been insufficiently parsed took place on January 11 during a question-and-answer session in Oelwein, Iowa. A Bush supporter, Dale Ungerer, got up and condemned the press and the Democratic candidates for over-the-top criticisms of the president. Ungerer invoked the biblical imperative to "love thy neighbor," telling Dean, "Please tone down the garbage. . . . You should help your neighbor and not tear him down." Dean responded, "George Bush is not my neighbor."
Ungerer protested, "Yes, he is," but Dean said, "You sit down. You had your say, and now I'm going to have my say." And he did, identifying ways Bush hadn't been "a good neighbor" to his fellow Americans. Dean added, "Under the guise of supporting your neighbor, we're all expected not to criticize the president because it's unpatriotic. I think it's unpatriotic to do some of the things that this president has done to the country. It is time not to put up [with] any of this 'love thy neighbor' stuff."
Press accounts of the exchange tended to frame it as another instance of Dean's temper flaring, while commentators wondered whether the candidate's treatment of "love thy neighbor" as mere "stuff" wasn't at odds with his recent expressions of respect for religion.
Unnoticed, however, was the fact that Dean had made a frontal attack on the Bush presidency. For if you look closely at the president's speeches and remarks and consider carefully the sweep of his policies, both domestic and
foreign, it becomes clear that Bush thinks of his presidency in terms of the commandment invoked in the Oelwein exchange. Indeed, central to George W. Bush's motivation as president is the ethic of "neighbor-love," as it is called in Christian circles.
We're not accustomed to a theological reading of a presidency. Yet it's evident, as Bill Keller of the New York Times wrote last year, that Bush's faith is "the animating force of his presidency." What hasn't been recognized is that neighbor-love in particular is what moves Bush and has helped shape his presidency. His faith teaches him to "love thy neighbor as thyself," and he approaches his job with that imperative in mind.
What this means in practice may surprise supporters and critics of the president alike. Bush's neighbor-love presidency envisions not merely a more compassionate citizenry, but a more compassionate government. It sees a larger role for religion in public life. It does not seek to establish any particular religion but is friendly to all faiths and vigilant about protecting the free exercise of religion. The trademarks of this presidency are religious pluralism and religious freedom. Overseas, the neighbor-love presidency is remarkably ambitious. It seeks to ameliorate human suffering, whatever its cause, and it is not reluctant to wage war on behalf of innocent people oppressed by the likes of Saddam Hussein. It stands for the defense and spread of freedom, because it believes that freedom is the God-given right of men and women everywhere.
The neighbor-love presidency is worth elaborating in detail, especially since we haven't seen its likes before, and because its implication for politics and policy is not a simple matter. It represents a modification, even a diminution, of American conservatism. And while its greatest triumphs have been abroad, Democrats believe it is vulnerable on the home front. The fall campaign could become an argument--like the one Dean initiated in Iowa--about what kind of neighbor Bush has been.
Part II:
Bush's Gospel
From the March 1, 2004 issue: The strengths and weaknesses of a love-thy-neighbor presidency.
by Terry Eastland
03/01/2004, Volume 009, Issue 24
Page 2 of 2 < Back
GEORGE W. BUSH grew up in mainline Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, and as an adult became a member of a United Methodist Church in Midland, Texas. But the turning point in his life--actually a turning period, by Bush's account--occurred in the mid-1980s, when, after a conversation with Billy Graham, he renewed his faith. He began weekly Bible studies with a group of men in Midland, and, after an especially wet celebration of his 40th birthday in 1986, he completely quit drinking.
Bush has not embraced the terms "born-again" or "evangelical" to describe his faith, though he has said he wouldn't reject the appellations, either. His faith appears to be what theologically conservative Christians generally believe, and he expresses his beliefs in a straightforward manner. Bush attends services at the chapel at Camp David and occasionally at St. John's Episcopal Church near the White House. He has a large number of Christian friends, including several pastors, many of whom he sees from time to time, and his closest friend, also a Christian from Midland, is in his cabinet, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans. Bush reads the Bible every morning, and he has said that he reads it through every other year.
Three aspects of Bush's faith stand out. One is his belief that God is in providential control over all that happens, including in his own life. Bush, who describes himself as a "lowly sinner," has told friends and associates that but for God's intervention he would now be in some bar in Texas, not
the Oval Office. A second is his belief that, whatever happens in God's providence, he is to accept and carry out each task set before him. Not incidentally, the title of Bush's campaign biography, "A Charge to Keep," was drawn from "A Charge to Keep I Have," the Charles Wesley hymn, which speaks of doing "my Master's will" and fulfilling "my calling." After the attacks of September 11, Bush believed that the charge of defending freedom had fallen providentially to him, as commander in chief of the United States, and this remains for Bush his highest priority. Yet even this task he sees in terms of a third aspect of his faith: neighbor-love. For Bush, "love your neighbor"--the second great commandment for Christians--is an injunction to be followed in every human task, however big or small it may be. In this understanding, Bush is hardly exceptional, for loving your neighbor is the calling of every Christian.
IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS, Bush made reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus related in response to a question based on the second great commandment, that question being the obvious one, "Who is my neighbor?" Bush pledged the nation to a goal: "When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side." In making that pledge, Bush assumed that people can need help for many reasons. Their wounds can be self-inflicted or inflicted by others (as was the case with the traveler helped by the Samaritan). In any case, as he said in the speech, "where there is suffering, there is duty."
In the second week of his presidency, Bush announced the Faith-Based and Community Initiative, which he touted as a new approach to helping Americans who are homeless, fatherless, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or otherwise in desperate need. He has described the initiative as "good public policy based upon the willingness of our citizens to love a neighbor just like you'd like to be loved yourself." Bush sees the initiative as one part of an effort to fight poverty, the other part being welfare reform. And he regards fighting poverty as flowing from an approach to governing that, during the campaign, he dubbed "compassionate conservatism." Bush defines compassionate conservatism this way: "It is compassionate to actively help our fellow citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on responsibility and results." Bush also sees the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress passed in 2002, as compassionate conservatism. And there are many other policies that he has accorded that label--ones dealing with health care, the environment, home ownership, and Social Security. Nor does compassionate conservatism stop at the water's edge, for it includes government aid to poor countries.
Moreover, not every "compassionate" policy is accompanied by the word "conservative." In 2001, when he signed his first tax-cut bill into law, Bush said that "tax relief is compassionate," explaining that it helps "families struggling to enter the middle class" and "middle-class families squeezed by high energy prices and credit-card debt." Likewise, in December 2003, when he signed the new prescription-drug benefit into law, he said that the reforms in the bill "are the act of a vibrant and compassionate government." He explained: "We show our concern for the dignity of our seniors by giving them quality health care" and "our respect for seniors by giving them more choices and more control over their decision-making." Or consider the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. In his signing statement, Bush said, the bill "protecting innocent new life from [partial-birth abortion] reflects the compassion and humanity of America." Just recently Bush added to his list of compassionate policies yet another--"defending the sanctity of life," which may entail support for a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.
In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush said, "The qualities of courage and compassion that we strive for in America also determine our conduct abroad. . . . Our founders dedicated this country to the cause of human dignity, the rights of every person, and the possibilities of every life. This conviction leads us into the world to help the afflicted and defend the peace, and confound the designs of evil men." Bush has sought to help the afflicted by stepping up U.S. involvement in the international battles against famine and AIDS. To fight "desperate hunger," as Bush has put it, the United States is now providing more than $1.4 billion a year in global emergency food aid. To fight AIDS, Bush has begun carrying out a relief program designed to prevent the disease from breaking out on a massive scale and to treat millions who already have what he calls "a plague of nature." Bush surprised almost everyone by the magnitude of the $15 billion request he submitted to Congress last year for this program. Asked to explain his decision to insert the United States so deeply into what he has called "a work of mercy," Bush told the Ladies' Home Journal, "The Bible talks about love and compassion. That's really a lot behind my passion on AIDS policy."
As for confounding the designs of evil men, Bush has moved Washington into the peace talks in Sudan, where the National Islamic Front government has waged a brutal civil war against a largely Christian and animist population that has claimed the lives of more than two million people. And he has ramped up the government's efforts to curtail human and sex trafficking, which, in his speech last fall to the United Nations General Assembly, he condemned as "a form of slavery." Bush has pledged $50 million to support "the good work of organizations that are rescuing women and children from exploitation and giving them shelter and medical treatment and the hope of a new life."
Of course, the universe of evil men includes terrorists, who have designs upon innocent people beyond the more than 3,000 killed by the attacks of September 11. They have continued to murder innocent people, a point Bush made last year in his speech at Whitehall when he cited the post-9/11 terrorist attacks in Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Bombay, Mombassa, Najaf, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Baghdad, and Istanbul. And, by every reckoning, the terrorists intend to kill more innocents. As Bush sees it, both justice, because what the terrorists do is evil, and compassion, because their evil is committed against innocent people, demand a military response.
The universe of evil men also includes oppressive rulers. Discussing the war in Afghanistan, Bush told a Connecticut audience that the United States liberated an innocent people oppressed by a barbaric regime. "We're compassionate," he said. "We care deeply about our fellow citizens in this world." While Bush justified the war in Iraq mainly on grounds involving weapons of mass destruction, he also thought he was saving the Iraqi people from an evil man. Over the decades, Saddam Hussein had killed and maimed millions of Iraqis. During a press conference in December, Bush said, "I believe, firmly believe--and you've heard me say this a lot, and I say it a lot because I truly believe it--that freedom is the almighty God's gift to every person--every man and woman who lives in this world. That's what I believe." He added that "the arrest of Saddam Hussein changed the equation in Iraq. Justice was being delivered to a man who denied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq." Justice was being delivered to Saddam, and, to place Bush's remarks in larger context, compassion was being shown to the Iraqi people. Nor does compassion stop with liberation. For Bush, it includes efforts to establish the kind of institutions in which "the rights of every person" can be protected. It envisions the spread of democracy.
Asked last summer by Christianity Today to describe Bush's foreign policy, Don Evans said, "It's love your neighbor like yourself. The neighbor happens to be everyone on the planet."
In a speech last summer to leaders of faith-based organizations, Bush fairly summed up both halves of his neighbor-love presidency: "The mission at home is to help those who hurt, and make the vast potential of America available to every citizen. The mission abroad is to use our good heart and good conscience and not turn our back away when we see suffering."
THIS, THEN, is Bush's love-thy-neighbor presidency, and there are aspects of it that deserve closer scrutiny. Consider, to begin with, that in many instances government employees are the ones showing compassion--prosecutors who bring sex-trafficking cases, say, or soldiers who fight terrorists. In still other contexts, compassion lies in a remodeled government--in lowered tax rates, for example. With the faith-based and community initiative, however, the point is to rally private "armies of compassion." As Bush said in his Inaugural Address, the work of compassion is that of a people, not just a government.
Historically, the work of compassion in America has been mainly that of a religious people acting through private groups. But with the rise of big government and the welfare state, religious charities have played a less prominent role. Bush's initiative contemplates a fuller employment of those organizations. Funding is crucial, and Bush has moved to stimulate charitable giving in the hope that more contributions will flow to religious charities, so as to enlarge their stores of compassion. He also wants to ensure that religious charities can compete for government grants on an equal basis with secular ones.
In 2001 the White House issued a report concluding that federal grant-making procedures often discriminated against religious charities on account of their religion. The administration thus has embraced the principle that where government assistance is generally available, religious groups eligible for it can't be discriminated against on account of religion. Because Congress has refused to legislate this principle, Bush has resorted to executive orders and regulations to establish it throughout the government. He has also adopted rules designed to protect the rights of religious charities to hire the individuals who in their judgment are best able to further their goals.
Bush often talks about "the power of faith to change a life," and he believes that faith-based groups can make a "unique contribution" in ameliorating stubborn social problems. Indeed, he has characterized himself as a "one-man faith-based initiative," the point being that his faith, and perhaps also the community of faith in Midland, helped him pull his life together. But the faith-based initiative isn't designed for Christian charities only and, indeed, given the principles that inform the initiative, it couldn't be. Bush himself has been quite clear on this point. "It doesn't matter what the religion is," he said on one occasion. And, on another, "I don't talk a particular faith." Religious charities of any and all faiths may apply for grants. Nor is there a preference for religious charities over nonreligious ones. "Our plan," he said early in 2001, "will not favor religious institutions over nonreligious institutions." In sum, as he said in a speech to leaders of charities last summer: "All groups should be able to compete on a level playing field, whether faith-based or secular."
Precisely because there is now a level playing field--because the field no longer tilts against religious charities--the likelihood is that they will receive more grants than they have in recent decades. Whether we will go all the way back to a future in which the work of compassion is once again mainly the work of religious charities, though now receiving more government funding, is unclear. Yet the future, as Bush would have it, will unfold guided by principles of pluralism. As he said in a 1999 speech on compassionate conservatism, "We will keep a commitment to pluralism--not discriminating for or against Methodists or Mormons or Muslims, or good people of no faith at all."
There happens to be a compelling theological argument for Bush's "principled pluralism," as the president's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has called it. But the deeper point about Bush's faith-based and community initiative lies in its assumption that neighbor-love is a precept intelligible to all individuals, regardless of what they believe or don't believe. Bush routinely speaks of "the universal call" to love one's neighbor, meaning that it is found in all faiths as well as in secular teachings. (He has not elaborated the point, but he would find the resources to do so in C.S. Lewis's "The Abolition of Man," which, under "the law of general beneficence," cites a variety of both religious and nonreligious sources.) Bush believes not only that persons of all faiths--or no faith--can respond to that universal call, but also that they can act upon it and do good works. More than a few religious conservatives would doubt whether "unregenerate" man can do much good. On the other hand, a defense of Bush might be that what motivates him as a theological virtue he commends generally as the civic virtue of neighborliness. In any case, Bush's bottom line is practical. Faith without works is dead. "The measure of true compassion," Bush often says, "is results."
The principles that the Bush administration is advancing on behalf of the faith-based and community initiative are being applied in many other contexts. Consider that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has changed the way it awards direct aid to properties damaged by natural disaster. Now it will provide aid under "genuinely neutral criteria" so that religious institutions are not discriminated against. The National Park Service has made a similar policy change; no longer does it refuse to award historic preservation grants to churches or other religious institutions simply because they are religious. And in Zelman v. Harris, decided in 2002, the Justice Department won from the Supreme Court a vindication of the nondiscrimination principle in a school voucher case. Zelman means that voucher programs encompassing church-related schools are constitutional so long as they are "neutral"--i.e., offering a "genuine choice among options, public and private, secular and religious."
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has sought to protect religious liberty by more aggressive enforcement of statutes forbidding religion-based discrimination. In an increasingly pluralistic nation, the beneficiaries of the department's actions have included Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists.
Bush is also interested in advancing religious liberty overseas. Indeed, it is in the context of foreign policy that the president has spoken most often about religious liberty, no doubt because it is abroad that so many denials of it, many even unto death, routinely occur. In his remarks on this subject, Bush has called religious liberty "the first freedom of the human soul." And when you open up his National Security Strategy of the United States, you find that it calls for "special efforts to promote freedom of religion and conscience and defend it from encroachment by repressive governments." For no other freedom does the strategy call for such "special efforts"--efforts, it is fair to say, that Bush sees as benefiting wounded travelers on many roads.
Of course, Bush will not find in the Scriptures a doctrine of religious liberty, for the Bible advises instead as to what man owes God. Nonetheless, a doctrine of liberty can be developed from the need to ensure that man can in fact exercise "the duty which we owe to our Creator," as the Virginia Declaration of Rights famously put it. Bush stands in a long and distinguished tradition stretching back to that document (and before) when he says, as he did in that December press conference after Saddam's capture, that "freedom is the almighty God's gift to every person." (Compare Thomas Jefferson, who said man's "liberties are the gift of God," and John F. Kennedy, who said "the rights of man come...from the hand of God.") For Bush, the freedom God gives includes religious liberty, probably first, but also freedom of speech, assembly, and the rest. It is on behalf of human rights abroad that Bush's love-thy-neighbor presidency shows ardent, if not always consistent, zeal.
And, as the case of Iraq demonstrates, it also wields a sword. Bush believes the war satisfied "just war" principles. The most important just-war theorist was Augustine, who argued that love does not foreclose "a war of mercy," indeed that it is in the nature of love to protect an innocent third party from oppression, by force if necessary. Liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam wasn't Bush's main public argument for the war. But it may have been a powerful motivation. Bush conceives of the United States as "a power," as he put it in his Inaugural Address, "that [goes] into the world to protect, but not possess, to defend, but not to conquer." In his 2003 State of the Union, he observed that "we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers." The ultimate sacrifice--the Scripture says there is no greater love than this--is to lay down one's life for another.
TO SAY THAT NEIGHBOR-LOVE motivates Bush is not to say that it justifies particular policies or actions he's described as compassionate. Neighbor-love is a principle of high generality. Put a bunch of people around a table, give them the principle, ask them to devise a policy to address Problem X, and you may get as many proposals as you have people. Most of Bush's "compassionate" policies have drawn disagreement, often sharp. Consider, for example, the debate over tax cuts or the No Child Left Behind legislation. Moreover, the faith-based initiative itself has divided religious conservatives in his own party: Fearing the church would be entangled with the state, not a few have objected to the use of direct grants and contended that vouchers and tax credits should be emphasized instead. Or consider the war in Iraq, to which there is outright objection in some evangelical circles. The work of justifying a particular policy is the business of politics, not faith, though faith can suggest, as it has for Bush, areas where policy might be needed.
The wonder is how many policies Bush presents as compassionate. In some cases--home ownership, for example--you wonder why the label is even there, unless it's to impress on voters that the Democrats aren't the only party of concern and care. In any case, Bush's emphasis on compassion seems to have come at some cost to conservatism. Bush hasn't vetoed a single spending bill (or any bill, for that matter), and his compassionate prescription-drug benefit is going to cost not what he first said it would, $400 billion over the next 10 years but, according to the latest administration estimate, at least $500 billion. Overall government spending has grown substantially, bulking up the deficit.
Conservative arguments about the size and limits of government, including those based on constitutional authority, are seldom heard from this administration. Indeed, the rhetoric sometimes cuts the other way. Bush has gone so far as to proclaim that "there is no question that we can rid this nation of hopelessness and despair." Granted, he says we don't need big government programs to do that--he thinks we the people can achieve it on our own, or perhaps with assistance from faith-based charities. But the goal he has articulated is one Democrats can enthusiastically agree with, even as they outbid him with more federal money and programs.
It is overseas where the Bush presidency is most ambitious and would appear in need of a limiting principle. For if, as Donald Evans says, our neighbor is "everyone on the planet," then the work of compassion is a daunting, even bankrupting, task, more than our military as currently supported can take on, and perhaps more than the American people are willing to support. Even so, it is the work of the Bush presidency abroad that truly distinguishes it. The Framers of the Constitution conceived of the executive as an office suitable for "arduous" and "extensive" undertakings of great public benefit, and there can be no question that the effort not just to defend the nation against further terrorist attack but also to liberate countries from oppressive regimes and plant seeds of democracy in places where terrorists take sanctuary and breed is arduous and extensive. And the efforts to counter AIDS and curtail human and sex trafficking aren't exactly minor.
Suffice it to say, the Democrats aren't intimidated by Bush's neighbor-love presidency, at least not by the domestic side of it. With his "Two Americas" speech-- "one favored, the other forgotten"--John Edwards has made compassion his central theme, and now that Edwards is nipping at John Kerry's heels, the Massachusetts senator is copying the North Carolinian. After narrowly winning the primary in Wisconsin, Kerry talked about how "you could just feel the pain" Americans were experiencing. He said "the heart had been ripped out of the heartland," and that, after repealing the tax-rate cuts for those making more than $200,000, he would invest in education, health care, and other programs. The fall campaign is likely to be fought over the very issues on which Bush has taken "compassionate" positions--taxes, poverty, health care, education, and the environment. Indeed, the Democrats may take the next step and declare, as Howard Dean did, that Bush has not been "my neighbor" because his policies have been inadequate or injurious. A party struggling for a way to peel off more moderate, religiously observant voters, who supported Bush in 2000, very well might take that step.
Whether the Democrats can win on economic and domestic issues alone is another matter. As Bush insists, the measure of compassion is results, and even if the Democrats can persuade voters on health care or education or jobs, the results of Bush's national security efforts have benefited the American people. They are concrete and, indeed, of world-historical importance, for they include the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the spread of human rights to places where no one would have thought that possible.
In any case, the big story this year will be either the rejection or the reelection of a Republican president motivated by an ancient yet enduring ethic.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard. |
