http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact1THE BELIEVER
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
George W. Bush’s loyal speechwriter.
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06
snip
I once asked Gerson to describe the role that the Sermon on the Mount plays in his own life, and in Bush’s life. (The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls the Sermon an “impossible ethical ideal” for human behavior.) “The Gospel stands in judgment of all human institutions and ideologies. It’s not identical with any one of them,” Gerson said. There is a danger, though, in “proof-texting”—searching the Bible for policy instruction. “You can’t find the justification for anti-sodomy laws in the Book of Matthew,” he said. “There is this idea that you can know what Jesus would think about missile defense or S.U.V.s, but it’s wrong. . . . I don’t have any moral qualms about saying that free-market economics are the single best way to take millions of people out of poverty that the world has ever seen,” but he added that he didn’t learn this from the Bible.
He said that the Sermon’s influence on his writing, and on Bush’s thinking, is far more profound than its influence on mere policy. Bush’s vision of democratic universalism owes much to Wilson, and Jefferson. But Gerson suggests that Bush is sure of his path because God is the God of justice. He even suggests that Bush’s leadership style—and his oratorical ambitions—are informed by the example of Jesus. “The ideal that’s set out in the Book of Matthew is a high one,” Gerson told me, “and the Sermon on the Mount has played an extraordinarily challenging role in the history of the world. And you notice that it didn’t have a realist, pragmatic understanding of what is possible. So maybe this is an attribute of leadership, to help imagine a different world.”
Imagining a different world is not the same as engineering it, and Peggy Noonan is not the only conservative to have detected a whiff of messianism in Bush’s vision. In a column last year, George Will noted that, in the Cold War, “the survival of liberty meant the containment of tyranny. Now, Bush says, the survival of liberty must involve the expansion of liberty until ‘our world’ is scrubbed clean of tyranny.” Speaking about Iraq, Gerson’s own pastor, the Reverend John Yates, told me that he “had a hard time justifying this war, but I was so torn internally that I didn’t speak out publicly.” Yates is the rector of the Falls Church, an evangelical Episcopal church in a Virginia suburb that takes its name from the church. The Falls Church has a venerable history—George Washington was once a warden there—and today it counts among its parishioners the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and several Republican members of Congress. Yates praised Gerson as a devoted worshipper who is at church each Sunday morning with his wife, Dawn, who works on Capitol Hill for a Republican congressman, and their two young sons.
“Michael is a person of high morality,” Yates said, adding that he understands Gerson’s attraction to Bush. “The President’s vision of spreading democracy is a wonderful, noble vision, and I’m glad he has it, and I’m glad he has Michael. It’s just that often we Americans get into a situation where we find that we’re not nearly so knowledgeable about the world as we thought we were. Americans seem to be particularly vulnerable to that. Are there people who are not ready for democracy? I hope and pray that people are, but I don’t know.”
continued
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
