Why, God, oh why another mass murder? Because He's peeved...

In the wake of the news of the horrific mass slaying Friday in Newtown, Connecticut, I saw this image posted on Facebook:

My reaction was to think that whoever was posing as God here must think God's pretty weak and capricious.  Despite his power, he can't get into secular schools, and since he can't, it's people's fault if they suffer a horrific tragedy.  Talk about 'blaming the victim.'  And it seems grotesque to me to think that God would make the killing and traumatization of a school and community--which no doubt included many of his believers--an object lesson for the rest of us.

But maybe I'm wrong.  The author of the universe, the all-powerful God, according to the far-right evangelical, Bryan Fischer, will not go where his invitation has been revoked, not because he's a vampire, but because he's courteous. There is a strict etiquette, after all, governing divine providence:

We kicked God out of our public school system.  And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you gotta invite me back into your world first. I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted. I am a gentleman.  You know, I think back to when I was in elementary school, we had prayer in schools, and we...didn't...need...guns. I'm gonna repeat that. Back when we had prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments in schools, we...did...not...need...guns! (you can find this excerpt here, about eight minutes into the broadcast)

A more well-known and sedate evangelical, Mike Huckabee, agreed, in a Fox News interview:

“We ask why there’s violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools...Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

I suppose I should be used to this by now.  Chatting with Pat Robertson on the 700 Club, the late Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on "the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way..."  Pastor John Hagee, infamous endorser of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, told Fresh Air's Terry Gross that Hurricane Katrina was the "judgment of God" on a city that had a "level of sin offensive to God." And, turning back to the 700 Club, Pat Robertson attributed the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti to a Haitian deal with the devil back during the revolt against the French at the beginning of the 19th century.

So the logic here is that when a people disobey God's will--that is, do not follow fundamentalist Christian tenets--then God visits them with natural disasters or mass slayings, or permits them to occur.  Conversely, then, the more prevalent fundamentalist Christianity is in a given community, or among a people, there should be fewer disasters and mass slayings.  There should be fewer violent casualties in general.

If true, then why do Cubans, under a harshly secular communist regime, suffer significantly less from hurricanes and tropical storms then nearby Guatemala, where evangelicalism is flourishing? (See report on Cuba here, and news story on Guatemala here).  Why do Western European countries, far more secular than the US, experience far fewer mass slayings and gun-related deaths than the US?  As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein noted, "15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last fifty years took place in the United States. . .in second place is Finland, with two entries."  And as is obvious in the numbers below, there's a lot more bloody gunplay in the US than in countries that former presidential aspirant, Rick Santorum, once described as "dead from a faith perspective."

Country                   Homicide Rate by Firearms (per 100,000)
Belgium                     0.68
Denmark                    0.51
England/Wales           0.07
Finland                       0.45
France                        0.06
Germany                    0.19
Netherlands                0.33
Norway                      0.05
Portugal                      0.41
Spain                          0.20
Sweden                      0.41
United States              2.97
Source: The Guardian "Gun Homicides and Gun Ownership by Country"

I suppose, though, that a theology that poses a vindictive divine providence doesn't require empirical support.  After all, there is that convenient rebuttal: God works in mysterious ways.  And it's not a surprise that this kind of perspective on God's character should be prevalent among some Christians, like Fischer and Huckabee, who take a literalist approach to the Bible.  Think about how Moses had to talk God out of destroying his people for their idolatry (Exodus 32: 7-14), or how God helped the ancient Hebrews slaughter tens of thousands in their conquest of the Promised Land (Jericho, among other examples in the book of Joshua).  Or there's Jephthah vowing to God that, in exchange for divine help in the battlefield against the Ammonites, he will sacrifice the first thing he sees when he returns home.  God helps him win, and the first thing he sees turns out to be his daughter.  And he fulfills his vow (Judges 11: 29-40).  Really, the body-count at the hands of God or his human instruments is pretty incredible.

I know, though, that there are other sides to God's character in the Bible--his mercy and lovingkindness extolled in Psalms 145, for example, or his commitment to what today we would call social justice (see my favorite prophet, Amos), and there is, of course, the God of the New Testament, and the repeated lessons in the Gospels and the Epistles about loving one another, and being vehicles of God's love: "A new commandment I give to you, Jesus said, "that you love one another, even as I have loved you" (John 13:34), "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12: 31), or the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians 13, "Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous..."

And I am sure that Christians such as Fischer and Huckabee would not reduce God to moments where his providence allegedly results in slaughter.  I imagine they would agree with this evangelical's take:

It is true that the Bible contains graphic stories of sin, evil, and death. But it also includes the overarching grand story of love, redemption, and grace. It showcases a God who asks us to not criticize Him about His acts of justice, but instead One who kindly encourages us to come alongside Him and grieve over a world that has misused the gift of freedom given it to do wrong instead of right. When that happens, and God acts in His righteousness, the world discovers that consequences exist for evil behavior, which is something the prophet Isaiah speaks to: “At night my soul longs for You, Indeed, my spirit within me seeks You diligently; for when the earth experiences Your judgments the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness” (Isaiah 26:9, excerpt from "Is the God of the Old Testament a Merciless Monster," by Robin Schumacher).

Still, when Christians turn calamities such as the Sandy Hook school massacre into a proof, unverifiable though it is, of their religious critique, I am not chastened, much less edified.  I hear only a self-righteous, smug 'This is what you get and deserve for not agreeing with my particular religion.'

But I am grateful for the many Christians I know who do not share this smugness. I don't share the faith, but appreciate how they live out theirs, and I'll close with words of Paul Duris, a Foursquare pastor and my brother-in-law, posted on Facebook last Friday:

This is a day of mourning for all of us. I feel numb. But I've been thinking about the words from Romans 12:21, "Do not be overcome by evil...overcome evil with good." We can't stop hate, but we can be the ones that do good. We can raise the bar of kindness and love with the next person we talk to. We can be the ones that overcome evil with good.

How-To Guide to TV Punditry

On “Tax Day,” April 15^th, a federal judge declared

that the US law authorizing a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. US District Judge Barbara Crabb said the federal statute violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on government endorsement of religion. She issued a 66-page decision and enjoined President Obama from issuing an executive order calling for the celebration of a National Day of Prayer. The National Day of Prayer was first authorized by Congress in 1952. Since 1988, the date has been set as the first Thursday in May. The judge stayed her own injunction pending the resolution of any appeals.

“I understand that many may disagree with [my] conclusion and some may even view it as critical of prayer or those who pray. That is unfortunate,” Judge Crabb wrote. “A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant, or undeserving of dissemination,” she said. “Rather it is part of the effort to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society.”

On May 6, National Prayer Day, Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the matter, and it’s an exemplary model of how to turn a policy disagreement into a threat to the American way of life.

First, remember that your show is not about making a reasoned argument based on logic and evidence. It’s theater. It’s a show, so start with a simple, straightforward assertion, and add a dose of hyperbole:

O'REILLY FACTOR: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, today is a National Day of Prayer. It has been endorsed by President Obama. But there are legal challenges all over the place. And that of course, is dumb. The Constitution clearly states the government cannot impose religion on citizens. But setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.

Simple, right? The judicial ruling is “dumb.” ‘Nuff said.

And nevermind that there aren’t “legal challenges all over the place." One group, in one venue, the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit asserting that the federal government’s Day of Prayer violates the First Amendment’s proscription on government establishment of religion. But facts need not trouble us here.

Second, bring someone on the show who shares your view, someone who also enjoys authoritative weight among your viewers. Invite someone equally capable of oversimplifying a complex issue, and someone who won’t make you look stupid. Someone, say, who couldn’t even handle the marshmallow grilling she got at the hands of Katie Couric.

Now, a few weeks ago Sarah Palin said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska,: For any leader declare that America isn't a Christian nation and poking an ally like Israel in the eye, it's mind-boggling for--to see some of our nation's actions recently.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: All right. The governor joins us now. So why do you think America is a Christian nation?

PALIN: I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me, though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers' early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo- Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.

And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man. They come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.

O'REILLY: OK.

Third, don’t worry about coherence. Palin’s answer to O’Reilly’s question—is the US a Christian nation—is evidently yes, but she confuses “Christian nation” with “Judeo-Christian beliefs,” two distinct concepts. That’s okay because we want to stay unclear while sounding so assertively clear. After all, saying “America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs” is about as informative as saying the US’s roots lie in the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek and Roman thought, or Enlightenment principles. Sure, the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible are a part of the canon of US political culture—but that Bible is not the only text in that canon. Nor is there some sort of single, pristine Judeo-Christian belief system that traveled through time from the early Roman Christians to the doorsteps of the US Founding Fathers. But only dumb eggheads worry about such historical distinctions.

Follow the vague incoherence with some obfustication. Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution permit the “Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation” for those who choose it, or were simply born with it, but they do not mandate it. But make it sound as if they do codify the Judeo-Christian tradition. And then stretch the meaning of the texts. The Declaration makes vague theistic references with the words “God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” but for our purposes here, that’s good enough to say we’re a Christian nation. Unfortunately, the US Constitution—the text with the force of law—does not make any reference to a divine entity, except for the standard practice of saying “Year of Our Lord” after the date. And it’s the Declaration that says “inalienable,” not the Constitution. This gives us the fifth point--don’t let facts get in the way of making your point.

PALIN: So it's ironic that here, on the National Day of Prayer, you know, there's so much controversy about whether or not we're a nation that's build on Judeo-Christian beliefs and whether or not we can even talk about God in the public square is absolutely nonsense what we are hearing.

This is good. O’Reilly’s smart programming—addressing the topic of Christian nation on the National Day of Prayer, gives Palin the opening to turn a policy difference over the role of religion in government activities into irony, though it’s not really “ironic.” Irony would be something like an Alabama judge insisting, in the name of religious liberty, that everyone must respect his particular religious beliefs and allow him to plant a huge 10 Commandments monument on government grounds. Well, maybe that’s not irony. It’s just hypocrisy. Again, only smartypants worry about careful use of language.

O'REILLY: All I have to do is walk into the Supreme Court chamber, and you'll see the 10 Commandments. And so we know that you're absolutely correct. The Founding Fathers did base not only the Declaration of Independence but the constitutional protections on what they thought was right and wrong. And what they thought was right and wrong came from the 10 Commandments, which is Judeo-Christian philosophy. That is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sixth, be very selective with your evidence—what those social(ist) scientists call ‘massaging the data.’ And use that evidence to set up the simple equation. 10 Commandments in Supreme Court Chamber equals Christian nation. Easy. Don’t complicate matters by noting the others figures featured on the Supreme Court external friezes such as Menes, Hammurabi, Confucius, and Augustus, or Mohammed, Grotius, and Napoleon—or those pagan Three Fates near the main entrance.

O’REILLY: But here is what's happened. America has, as they say in California, evolved. And now we're a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776. So the opponents of spirituality in the public marketplace say, "Hey, this is a violation. We can't be pushing any kind of spirituality." And you answer?

PALIN: Well, that new kind of world view that I think is kind of a step towards a fundamental transformation of America that some want to see today, I think, again, that it is an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.

I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple. I think what's missing in...

Seventh—accuse those whom you oppose of doing what you’re doing (what psychologists call “projection”). O’Reilly trots out a quick version of the modernization = secularization thesis that no one really buys anymore. Palin then knocks down this straw man by labeling it revisionism, even though she’s revising US history to fit her argument. Whatever the case, times have indeed changed, perhaps more rapidly in recent decades. According to one survey study, the percentage of US Americans identifying as Christians has declined from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2008 (Another survey by Pew reports 78%). And a large proportion of those not identifying as Christians have not joined any other religious affiliation. Maybe O’Reilly and Palin are unaware of these data, but if they were aware, they were right not to mention them. You don’t name the secret fear—the growing pluralism of US society. And did you notice O’Reilly’s sly move? Opponents of federal government sponsorship of religious rituals really oppose spirituality in general. That suggests an eighth point. Never miss an opportunity to misrepresent those with whom you disagree.

O'REILLY: What do you say, though -- what do you say to the people in Chinatown and San Francisco and here in New York and other big cities, the Asian-Americans who come from a different religious culture? Do they not participate in the Judeo-Christian tradition? I mean, they don't believe it. They believe in something else.

PALIN: We get to say to them, "Yay, welcome to America, where we are tolerant and you have a freedom to express whatever faith. You can participate peacefully in whatever religion that you choose. That's what America is all about."

And we would ask, though, that there be respect by our courts. Look at Judge Crabb and this ridiculous ruling or her opinion that's come down that says the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. We would ask that there would be respect for what the Judeo-Christian beliefs are, too. It's mutual tolerance.

Here we see a nice repetition of the seventh and eighth points. Judge Crabb (perfect name!) and the courts are not keeping the state out of promotion of a theistic practice, they are discriminating against all those who share Judeo-Christian beliefs. And this suggests a ninth tactic—act as if you speak for all right-minded people. Your beliefs are common sense; those of your opponents are nonsensical, and this is so obvious that you don’t need to spell out why.

O'REILLY: What do you think drives -- what do you think drives Judge Crabb, who I agree with you is desperately wrong? Again, there is no imposition of religion on a voluntary National Day of Prayer. It's just encouraging people to be spiritual. You can pray to a tree. You can be a Deist. I mean, you know, Founding Fathers, some of them were.

PALIN: Yes.

O'REILLY: So there's no imposition. So what drives a Judge Crabb to say, "Hey, this should be illegal"? What do you think drives that?

PALIN: You know, you wonder what in hell scares people about talking about America's foundation of faith, and you wonder why in the world would she rule as she's ruled? And I guess she'll further explain herself.

But every state Constitution acknowledges God, because every state Constitution, which backs up our U.S. Constitution, can acknowledge that our unalienable [sic] rights came from God not from man.

O'REILLY: Why would Crabb do that? You must have thought about it. Why would Crabb do it? What does she want to accomplish by this?

PALIN: It is that world view that, I think, involves some -- some people being afraid of being able to discuss our foundation, being able to discuss God in the public square. That's the only thing I can attribute it to, is some fear of some people.

But look at our national motto, "In God We Trust." How inconsistent, then, to be told that we, on a National Day of Prayer, which, as you point out, isn't any kind of mandate or any kind of force for anybody to believe any certain thing, but how inconsistent to say that, though, in the public square we cannot talk about or talk to that God that is in our national motto.

O'REILLY: Yes, we can only trust in the God inside our own homes, but once we get out, we can't trust him.

A version of the ninth point. O’Reilly is figuratively shaking his head at the idiocy of people like Judge Crabb. Just a crazy world. Then a flourish of misrepresentation, incoherence and non-facts by Palin. Opponents of the National Day of Prayer have dubious motives (they fear believers), and the federal practice of a theistic ritual is not sanctioning a particular religion, but is a natural response to the roots of our country (also a nice confusion of a government-sponsored ritual and the entire public square). Nevermind that the National Motto was an early Cold War creation (1955), not a primordial creed of the nation. But again, don’t worry about historical accuracy. Palin could have passed off other Cold War religious innovations as existing since the founding: along with the National Day of Prayer (1952), there was adding “under God” to the Pledge (1954), and the National Prayer Breakfast every February (1954). The federal government even granted Billy Graham permission to hold an evangelical revival on federal grounds (1952). Man, those were the days.

All right, Governor, always good to see you.

PALIN: Bill -- Bill, OK, hey, we also need to remember, though, Margaret Thatcher and other foreign leaders and foreign observers thinking America is such a great and exceptional nation, because we do base our lives, our values on the God of the Bible, the Old and the New Testament.

O'REILLY: All right.

PALIN: If they can observe it, we should.

O'REILLY: We appreciate you coming on. . .

Yes—always good to end with some chest-thumping patriotism. In short—oversimplify the issue, misrepresent your opposition, don’t worry about accuracy, logical consistency, or historical complexity, and deliver it all with the upmost confidence in your righteousness, and the certainty of wrongdoing in others.

Christian Crusader

To my mind, the war and occupation of Iraq were like the first steps in a very long division problem. The first few calculations were wrong (mistaken or massaged intelligence, undermanned and undersupported troops, corrupt occupational government, Abu Graib, etc.), but the solver couldn’t go back and erase them, and start over. He or she just had to just keep plugging on, and no matter if all the rest of the calculations were correct, the answer will still be wrong.

But some, who may even acknowledge mistakes in execution, would still see the war and occupation as good works. Those Bible verses on the covers of DOD intelligence briefings suggested as much (discussed in my first posting), and I have wondered how widespread is the notion that the War on Terror (though the Obama administration no longer calls it that) is a Christian holy war. So I went swimming through the web and came across an interview with David French in Citizenlink.org, a part of Dr. Dobson’s Focus on the Family. David French blogs for the National Review on academic issues (Phi Beta Cons) and is senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group that takes on threats to Christian privileges in the public square.

The Citizenlink interview’s angle was French’s decision to resume active duty in the Army Reserves, and he served for a year in Iraq. But French’s explanation of the military’s role is what interested me—a frank statement of Christian crusade.

First, there is the common dumbing down of the enemy, a demonization, and a grandiose depiction of their threat.

. . .the depravity of the enemy has to be seen to be believed. In America, we have no frame of reference for this kind of evil, for individuals whose ability to inflict pain and death on innocent people is limited only by their imagination and power. We have no option but to defeat them, or we (and others in the world) will face truly barbaric terror.

Maybe this characterization of the enemy is inevitable, especially among those whose lives are at risk, and who may have to kill. We need only remember the American caricatures of Germans in WW I, the Japanese in WW II, or the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. And it’s certainly not just an American habit. I agree that the tactics of Al Qaeda and other insurgents are heartless and appalling, and I can’t imagine the depths of suffering that American and allied troops, and the many more Iraqi and Afghan civilians, have experienced. To portray the enemy as irrational beasts perhaps is a useful way to mobilize home-front support for a dubious war and occupation. But it’s not smart way to comprehend an enemy who no doubt has logic, a rationale, even if we find their means and ends detestable.

French goes on to quote the Bible to back up his claim:

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9

If a Christian doubts that fighting al-Qaida and trying to give Iraqis a chance to live a decent life is not “doing good,” then they neither understand our enemy nor the plight of the people of Iraq.

Well, this begs the question of what is “good,” yet, rhetorically, we are put in a position of not being able to ask this because the implication here is that if we’re not there with French, if we’re not sharing his role, than we cannot understand. While I agree I cannot know what it’s like to be in combat, being in the thick of it doesn’t necessarily give one the basis to claim that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is “doing good.”

But Captain French has another basis for making the claim. The war is about Christianity versus idolaters. In responding to a question of his opinion about the future for Christians in the US, he said:

. . .there remain millions upon millions of Americans who have not “bowed the knee to Baal,” and so long as that remains true, there is great hope.

If you don’t believe me, spend five minutes out here in eastern Diyala province, then go back to America. You’ll see our country with new eyes.

So we now have the picture. A powerful country with a core of proper believers who are holding moral decay of non-Christians at bay on the homefront, while engaging a barbarous, Baal-worshipping enemy abroad.

I suspect this picture isn’t widely shared among Americans, but it sure has been prominently displayed, and it mirrors the narrative we tell ourselves about Islamic fundamentalism--a core of jihadists bound and determined to rescue their nation from modernists and from the satanic West.

Rumsfeld, the mouthpiece of God?

Did you know that GQ publishes political pieces?  I didn’t, until I read about Robert Draper’s article in a Frank Rich op-ed in the New York Times.  Draper published an officially approved biography of George W. Bush in 2007, but in this piece we get a scathing review of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, based on interviews with Bush loyalists.  What I found especially interesting, though, is the slideshow GQ provides.  As Rich reports:

Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

If you go to the the GQ story, you’ll find a link to the slide show below the first page of the article. I know there’s a lot of people who will agree with Rich, alarmed by the prominence of conservative Christian evangelicals in the US armed forces.  See, for example, Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, Chris Hedges’s American Fascists, Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, or American Armageddon by Craig Unger.  The creepiness argument crudely summarized: The Fascist Family Kingdom Coming to Make a Theocracy of America and Drag Us All to Armageddon.  It’s not just left-leaning folks that are upset. Beliefnet’s Stephen Waldman, writing for the Wall Street Journal online, saw this use of Bible verses as more evidence that the Bush administration believed, to Waldman’s dismay, that God sanctioned policies that many Americans found abhorrent.

Let’s take a step back for a moment, though. The Bible, like so many other canonical works, has long been used as a fount of aphorisms.  Quotes are lifted out of context, but the phrases take on new meanings, and come to live a life of their own.  We see such, usually from the King James Version, on cheesy posters of misty scenes (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”—which is actually the opposite of the psalmist’s message, you don’t look to the hills and their idols, you look to YHVH), flowery embroidery (“The things which are impossible with men are possible with God”), or the string of lawn signs I see in one neighborhood on my way to work, all warning drivers they may be on the road to hell. And we can see these verses as part of general habit of placing pithy statements from widely known authoritative texts in reports (or articles, or theses, or books) to give them more heft, more legitimacy, and to spark a connection to the reader.

So, one could ask, what’s the big deal?  For those who opposed the Bush-Cheney-Rove regime, anything Rumsfeld might have put on these covers, including nothing, would have been occasion for criticism.  If we deplore a set of policies (and I did so deplore many of the foreign and domestic policies accompanying the Global War on Terror), the policymakers will never be able to dress it up to our satisfaction.

Still, it’s hard to ignore their triteness, and I’m not so much creeped out by the covers as I am angered by the intellectual and religious shallowness they reveal—a shallowness the Bush administration, and apparently many of its supporters, treated as a virtue.

A Pentagon senior intelligence officer and Christian, Major General Glen Shaffer, picked out the verses.  On the first GQ slide you’ll see armed soldiers, presumably praying.  The Bible verse is Isaiah 6:8, “Here I am Lord, send me.”  The sentiment of this clear enough—the soldiers are servants, willingly submitting to undertake an arduous task.  Take the analogy another step, and we get to what Waldman and others find so disagreeable.  They are undertaking the task on behalf of God, not the state.  We could take it one more step and come to the grotesque sense that President Bush is the stand-in for the Lord, though it would be a bit outrageous to believe that the President ever would have made such a claim.

It’s unfortunate that General Shaffer and his approving readers like President Bush didn’t bother at least a little with context.  Thus ironies abound in Shaffer’s selections.  The Isaiah verse is from a book chock full of criticism of the moral decay of God’s chosen people, and predictions of disaster that will result (see Richard Rubenstein’s fascinating exploration of Isaiah in Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah).

The next slide is a scene atop an aircraft carrier, with lines from Psalm 139: “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me, O LORD.”  The psalm ends with lines (verses 21-24) that seem contradictory to us today, but it’s a contradiction that I think encapsulated the Bush approach:

Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;  Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me; And lead me in the everlasting way.

Hatred and piety can sit comfortably with one another, and if God is on your side, then it’s not surprising that vindictiveness was the M.O. of the Bush response to political opposition.

Shaffer dips again into Isaiah (5:28) in the third slide, using Isaiah’s description of Assyrian imperial invaders (or whomever God would “whistle for” to punish decadent Judah) to describe US armed forces.  In the fourth, Shaffer juxtaposed a picture of a US tank with lines from Ephesians 6, “Therefore put on the whole armor of God. . .”  This is just too silly for comment.

The rest of the covers are equally cavalier, sophomoric uses of the Bible to suggest a providential role for the US military, and its Commander-in-Chief.  I realize there are people who do believe that the US is (or can be, or should be) a vehicle of God’s will in the world.  But when it comes to foreign policy attitudes, I'm not sure a whole lot of Americans back this or that foreign policy based on a providentialist ideology. A Pew report a few years ago assessed a series of surveys on US values and attitudes related to international affairs, and one conclusion is that “while Americans are clearly nationalistic and quite religious, there is little evidence that either their patriotism or their faith drives public support for the more activist and unilateralist U.S. foreign policy that has fueled anti-Americanism in recent years.” The question remains, though, if it wasn’t jingoism or religious arrogance that led so many Americans to back Bush’s War on Terror, what did? The fear following 9/11, and the politicians and pundits that stoked it?  That’s too simple.  Whatever the reasons, these covers, with a dash of the Bible, didn't demonstrate our leaders' insight, but rather a whopping blindspot.