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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (14940)	2/24/2003 6:20:53 PM
From: Giordano Bruno	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

President's language seems to assume everyone shares his brand of theology Posted on Mon, Feb. 24, 2003 Bush invokes God, divides Americans JANE EISNER Knight Ridder So here's what I did last weekend: The neighborhood Kabbalat Shabbat was in our home; the davenning was wonderful. There was a fine Havurah service the next day at shul, capped by an interesting d'var Torah on the shape of the mishkan and its relationship to the historicity of the Exodus. There was a shiva minyan down the street for a neighbor whose mother died. I don't usually speak like this in mixed company. In public, before non-Jews or even Jews who are not especially observant, I'd say that the prayers and singing at our Friday night service were wonderful. And the talk on the Torah the next day was interesting. And we gathered for prayers at the home of someone observing the seven days of mourning. Or I might not say anything at all. The haphazard mixture of Hebrew and English (with a smattering of Yiddish) thrown into the everyday lexicon of my private religious life does not easily translate into my secular public life. That's understandable -- we all shape our speech to our audience and intuit what to say and how to say it before those who may not share our religion, race, culture or language. It's a balancing act, performed every day by the Hispanic who leaves Spanish at home or the African American who judges when it's safe to use the cadence of the street. Misjudge the boundaries of generally acceptable speech, and you risk alienating and excluding your listener. President Bush, with his persistent use of the language of prayer and insistence on speaking from a particular brand of Christianity, risks alienating Americans who don't believe in God. He also risks excluding anyone of faith who doesn't share his theological approach to history. He has forgotten that he's talking to mixed company. I appreciate and respect the fact that he is a man of deep religious conviction. He doesn't wear his faith on his sleeve; it's his entire wardrobe, clothing his worldview in a fabric that seems sturdy enough to give him the strength and confidence to manage crises of global magnitude. But it's his faith, not mine or necessarily yours. Lately, the president has often sounded as if his worldview is normative when, in fact, it is not. For example, although Bush obviously believes in a life after death, how can he know that all the grieving families of the Columbia astronauts -- Christians, Jews and Hindus -- share that belief? Yet at the memorial service, he told them, "In God's own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come." Bush obviously believes in a God who intervenes directly in history, who guides, strengthens and, yes, sides with those who stand for liberty and justice in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Many of us who witnessed the massacres and the miracles of the 20th century have great difficulty with that argument. It is a serious issue on which good people of faith can disagree. To the president, though, there seems to be no room for disagreement. In the State of the Union address last month, he told Americans preparing for war with Iraq to "place our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history." I don't question the president's right to such beliefs. I question whether he has a right to frame the foreign policy of this nation in such terms. Bush's religious language seems genuine enough, a natural outgrowth of the well-publicized conversion that brought him away from alcohol and toward a sober, public service-oriented evangelical Christianity. But he needs to find a language that includes, not excludes; that unifies, not divides. He needs to remember that, indeed, this is a nation of mixed company. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jane R. Eisner is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.