THE RIGHT IS SIMILARLY CONFUSED BY MARXIST RHETORIC:

Bush's References to God Defended by Speechwriter: President Does Not Claim Divinity Is on His Side, Gerson Contends (Alan Cooperman, December 12, 2004, Washington Post)

Like many evangelical Christians, President Bush believes that God is at work in his life. But he has avoided claiming that God is behind his presidency or U.S. foreign policy, his chief speechwriter said.

"The important theological principle here, I believe, is to avoid identifying the purposes of an individual or a nation with the purposes of God," Michael Gerson said. "That seems a presumption to me, and we've done our best to avoid the temptation."

At a meeting with reporters in Key West, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday, Gerson, who has crafted almost all of Bush's major speeches since 2000 but has rarely spoken to the media, defended the president's religious rhetoric. Although the session was off the record, Gerson subsequently agreed to allow some of his main points to appear in print. [...]

About 20 reporters from major newspapers, television and radio networks attended the session, part of a two-day conference on religion and politics organized by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Some participants closely questioned Gerson on Bush's frequently repeated line that "freedom is not America's gift to the world, it's the almighty God's gift to all humanity."

Gerson said the president wrote those words. They are, he said, a repudiation of the kind of "American exceptionalism" that holds that God has chosen the United States as his special instrument, and an echo of Abraham Lincoln's assertion that Americans should strive to be on God's side rather than claiming that God is on their side.

Gerson, a former journalist who studied theology at Wheaton College in Illinois and worked as an aide on Capitol Hill, rejected the allegation that Bush's speeches contain "code words" understood only by evangelicals. He noted that some speeches have contained allusions to secular literature as well as to scripture and hymns.

"They're not code words; they're our culture," he said. "It's not a code word when I put a reference to T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' in our Whitehall speech [in London on Nov. 19, 2003]; it's a literary reference. Just because some people don't get it doesn't mean it's a plot or a secret."

It's certainly an interesting question, how much explanation a speech should contain to help those who are ignorant of their own cultural inheritance.

MORE:
Gerson Talks Religion: George W. Bush's chief speechwriter opens up about faith, providence, and the presidency. (Terry Eastland, 12/23/2004, Weekly Standard)

MICHAEL GERSON deserves extra pay, or something, for agreeing to spend half a day earlier this month discussing with journalists a subject of some controversy--"Religion, Rhetoric, and the Presidency." If anyone was qualified for such a task, it was Gerson. He is President Bush's chief speechwriter, knows the president's mind better than anyone else in the White House (save perhaps Karl Rove) and--no small thing--shares the president's faith.

Gerson, the White House's resident intellectual, is a graduate of Wheaton College, where he majored in theology. He opened the discussion--part of a conference on religion and politics sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington--by pointing out actual instances in which Mr. Bush has used religious language. What they illustrate is a rhetoric that seeks to accommodate religious values, embraces religious pluralism and is quite aware of providence. [...]

Gerson's articulation of the president's rhetoric on religion won't satisfy those who think that pluralism requires silence on this subject. Nor those who think that only arguments grounded in secular ideas, and not religious ones, should have standing in the public square. Yet it's hard to maintain that Mr. Bush's rhetoric on religion constitutes either a departure from that of his predecessors or an affront to the values of a still religious people.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 16, 2004 1:59 PM