Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Steven Tipton . February 7, 2003

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with Steven Tipton, who teaches ethics and the sociology of religion at Emory University and at the Candler School of Theology:

On President Bush's speech about the space shuttle Columbia disaster:
One of the things that religious language in public does is speak to the meaning of what can seem meaningless, tragic or just dumbfounding. If you look at that speech, what jumps out is there's Isaiah 40:26 paraphrased pretty closely -- that the God who made the heavens, set the stars within them and calls each star by name, knows the names of each and every one of the seven souls being mourned, and by implication that God knows our names, too. So the story about creation, the moral order of the universe and of our place in it and about God's grace and goodness, and most of all God's love and that kind of personal relationship between God and each one of us -- that is actually a kind of key to the way you can read the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in context; those are chapters and verses that really underscore God's almighty power.

The verse just before what's quoted actually talks about God reducing the princes of the earth to nothing, to cutting down the rulers who come and go and are cut down like the wheat, the stubble of which the tempest blows away. So we've got a Bible quote and then we've got it turned in a way to a particular occasion, turned, too, in a way that sounds familiar to us, particularly as it's read through the prism of a certain kind of evangelical Protestant American emphasis on that personal relationship between God and each one of us and God's love that touches our heart in way that we respond to and care for one another, in the way we pray, as Bush puts it in the eulogy [at the Houston memorial service], that in God's time the day of our reunion will come between those we've lost and those who mourn them.

On the appropriateness of the president's religious language:
It depends partly on the occasion. It depends on what's present, what's possible, what's lifted up and what's left out ... For example, in the second speech [in Houston], or what amounts to a kind of funeral eulogy, more than half of it is taken up by what seem to be descriptions of each and every one of the seven astronauts. If you also look at those descriptions, they have a kind of evangelical, revivalist ring. Each one is kind of witnessing or giving a kind of testimony: Rick Husband -- a kind of testimony given in relationship to "How Great Thou Art," that hymn and its lines that we look at the stars and hear the mighty thunder and God's power displayed. Michael Anderson -- he assured his minister that if things don't work out right, he's just going on higher to the life to come. And Willie McCool -- a man who was blessed, and all those who knew him, friends and family, were blessed, and then too the nation was blessed by knowing all of these persons and remembering them, and then again this vision of the life to come and of our reunion in God's hands.

This is language that is... personalistic and focused on God's love and consolation and comfort rather than, say, God's justice, and you can say in cases like this -- tragedy, catastrophe, crisis, loss, mourning -- that that has a kind of fittingness or appropriateness, at least to some ears. There may be other ears, for example, ears that are bred in more Calvinistic terms, though American Protestant, that are more focused on God's justice and what is meet and just and righteous, or more Catholic corporatist, natural law teachings, or orthodox Jewish.

Maybe not on this occasion, but on other occasions folks have raised questions about not just compassion and love -- for example, in the beautifully honed Inaugural Address -- but [have said to the president], "Say most about justice." You compare compassion and justice, but that [Inaugural Address] is a speech that really gives first place to compassion and says, again, that we are all created in God's image and created equal. So there are claims of justice, but the first virtue of citizens is to be compassionate, to be like the Good Samaritan, not to pass by on the road to Jericho, and in the quiet of the American conscience to realize that every child, but especially the children of the poor and needy, need our help, and we can and should give it freely as a matter of love and compassion -- rather than emphasizing the moral argument or public debate in which language of justice -- "Roll, Jordan Roll," or "let the least of these be raised up, let the proud and arrogant be leveled" -- that language is not so evident here.

It depends whose ears are hearing what, what's the occasion, and what's missing as well, or what else is possible when we speak of religious language, or even biblical language, remembering that it's like a great multi-vocal chorus sometimes, but also like a covenantal argument between God and God's people -- the prophets who cry out for justice for the widow, for the orphan, and who call the nation to account. Depending upon the auditor, the interlocutor [is] sometimes full of praise, sometimes criticism (it depends where we look), including folks who say that the main point is to practice what you preach.

Religious language in public is also related to public policy and, in a more negative or critical way, to party politics The effort in the work of [presidential speech writer] Mike Gerson and in the president's intent in many of these speeches is not to separate or polarize; it's the unify us, to heal us, to recognize that we're one body, that we're interdependent, that we are connected by bonds of love, but also by the call to justice. What that means in practice as well as how the religious language lifts up or leaves aside -- that's part of this story and it is part of the argument about what's appropriate or not.

On fitting the speech to the occasion:
There are real differences in occasion, and one of the things that's most revealing about religion in public or religious language and moral rhetoric from the public pulpit, particularly from the president podium as public pulpit, bully pulpit, is: what is the occasion, and where is that language concentrated -- at the beginning or the end, say, of an Inaugural Address? [The language is] typically more pervasive in the face of national tragedy of crisis or catastrophe that calls for mourning, a little bit like the National Cathedral speech [on Sept. 14, 2001], a national day of remembrance and mourning, a kind of funeral, [versus] that war-time variant of a State of the Union speech that followed in the address to Congress on Sept 20, 2001. Religious language and imagery runs through much though not quite all of that National Cathedral speech and culminates in the invocation, really the promise of Romans 8:38-39 "neither love nor death, neither angels nor powers nor principalities nor height nor depth ... can separate us from God's love"... Actually you can hear that little rewrite of Paul's "separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord," -- very appropriately written, because this kind of civil religious rhetoric can and should be not just biblical in resonance and cadence but not specific to this or that denomination or even faith tradition, that is, Christian as opposed to Jewish. There is an effort, certainly, in Mike Gerson's writing to make this kind of unifying embrace rather than to say explicitly "Christ Jesus."

But there are these evangelical resonances through much of these speeches. There are in that speech, too, other not so biblical moments: "Somebody else started this, and they did it at their time and in secret, in stealth, and we're going to end it on our terms, in our time" and "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." States have a kind of relationship to the whole matter of the use of force in God's name or otherwise. I think there is in George Bush's own self-understanding as, indeed, he said at one point in response to a question: "I'm a loving guy, but I've got a job to do." There is the job of the president as commander in chief on the one side and governor or chief executive on the other, let alone the kind of interplay we can talk about in terms of the prophetic and the pastoral.

In some ways, we've seen on these occasions George Bush serving as a pastor comforting the afflicted rather than the conventional distinction, the prophet afflicting the comfortable. Some critics talk about social spending or tax policy or unemployment or welfare and charge that even if there's concern in rhetoric for comforting the afflicted, tax cuts that favor the top 1 percent are in fact a way of comforting the comfortable, and a failure to sustain public housing or care for the aged or social security represents the danger of further afflicting the afflicted.

On Muslim and Jewish responses of approval:
One way to understand the diverse responses is to look in particular at the kind of religious language that's being used and its relationship to other forms of language, of rhetoric, of address. There is something here that's not susceptible to liberal versus conservative political criticism, but to different forms of cultural response that are partly religious but don't always line up denominationally or in terms of a faith tradition. For example, there might be more criticism from a liberal Protestant or a not so secular humanist point of view that there is this emphatic evangelical, pastoral, almost revivalist language -- that testimonial language for each of the astronauts within the speech and that emphasis on the devote, warm and tender-hearted relationship between each one of us and a certain face of the divine -- rather than that "it's too religious and leaves out secular folks."

This is partly a story, too, about the relationship of religious to classical humanistic or Enlightenment deist language in the American vernacular, and there is a little bit of that at least in these two addresses about the shuttle... for example, the notion that we don't just choose exploration and discovery missions such as this as an option, programmatic or political; rather, these aspirations are a desire written in the human heart. Written by whom or what? By God as the author of the universe and human nature within it. [It follows on] a note that, indeed, we human beings are distinctive, a special.part of creation that seeks to understand the whole of creation. That has at least a little bit of 18th-century American Enlightenment deist ring to it -- Thomas Jefferson rather than Billy Graham or your evangelical preacher of choice.

There are real differences here; we need to get a feel for the texture of specific forms of religious language, of specific voices within the biblical or even the Christian tradition here... What's emphasized? What's deemphasized or left to the side stage or left out? How does the language bring forward one issue rather than another or turn a certain kind of facet of the issue to it?

You can contrast Ted Sorenson writing for Jack Kennedy. Some have said Michael Gerson is the most important speech writer (in terms of the way the president thinks and the policies formulated) since Ted Sorenson. In Ted Sorenson there's some explicitly biblical language, but virtually no evangelical language, and there's a lot of classical Greek Enlightenment language -- he's as likely to quote Aeschylus as Isaiah. That's not there in the Bush canon, and quite intentionally. Most of these speeches, particularly the ones where there's time to do it, are very finely crafted, very finely honed in order to get that kind of plain spoken, plain style, from-the-heart directness and character. It's not just writing down to a president who's very intelligent interpersonally but not so verbally intelligent by conventional measures; it's actually a kind of writing up to make what is subtle and complex relatively clear, straightforward, and of course that's been the object of criticism too -- that it's too black or white, good versus evil, freedom versus fear, particularly when it comes to issues of war and peace that resonate within biblical tradition, specifically Christian traditions, with a certain point of view usually labeled "crusade" and for fairly obvious reasons downplayed, at least after the first misstep -- this is not a crusade against infidels to remove them from the Holy Land, but still "in Gods name, with God on our side, we will rid the world of evil."

That kind of pledge, that kind of powerful all-or-nothing commitment is more characteristic of that tradition within Christian thought on the crusade than it is of an alternative tradition that's a voice there, too, of just war, which is more nuanced, which has a whole set of conditions worked out over centuries, really, about the need for violent force only in the case of self-defense or defense of the helpless who are in clear and imminent danger or are being attacked. Rhetoric there pushes toward questions not just about evidence, in the case of Iraq, but questions of rhetoric and argument, of something like moral justification, whereas many presidential speeches and maybe to some extent the temperament or inclination and religious resonance of this president are more moral inspiration, moral intuition, a trust that in our hearts we know what's right.

We know what's wrong, too. We can intuit it in the case of Kim Il Sung, who starves his own people, not just in the case of a tyrant in Iraq who tortures, jails and gases his own people. Moral justification, moral reason-giving within religious traditions, not just moral inspiration or intuition -- there's interplay there, too, not to mention a long tradition of Christian pacifism typically always in a position of dissent against those who must govern and rule and consider the difficulty of turning the other cheek in the face of evil and not giving in to it. But there's a tradition, too, particularly now among more liberal Protestants, Catholics, and others of "just peace" that asks not just have you met the conditions of just war in approaching going to war and then in conducting war, but have you considered the justice or injustice of the conditions among nations and within them that lead to war, particularly for a global superpower that responsibility may be deeply expanded for Americans and very, very difficult if not daunting to face. That's part of the argument, too, when it comes to war and peace and moral rhetoric and religious meaning.

On this year's State of the Union address:
The emphasis on providence is important through any number of speeches by George W. Bush, and it of course figures importantly in presidential speeches across the board, from the very beginning of the American story. In the Inaugural Address, [providence] is one of the subconscious and central motifs. From beginning to end, as the inaugural address concludes, there has been this providential angel riding the whirlwind of history -- surprises, reverses, tragedies, catastrophes, calls to war, national emergencies, this providential angel in whom we trust. And beyond, we trust the authorship of the creator and the orderer of the universe and the orderer of history, too. That carries through from the Inaugural to the State of the Union to the National Cathedral and the other addresses that follow more or less immediately on 9-11. It also figures in these [space shuttle] addresses, too. Even when we can't know the order of the universe, Bush says we pray for comfort, for consolation, for strength to get through the day, for hope, but we also pray that God's will be done. In effect, [the speeches] are prayers to surrender our will to a will greater than our own -- to recognize that God's purposes are not always or not simply our own and to give ourselves to those purposes even when we can't know them fully. So providence [is] sometimes narrowed to "God is on our side, our cause is just." The events of 9-11 were terrible evils visited upon the innocent; they were expanded to the kind of human predicament where we can't always know the whys and wherefores, and in faith, hope and love we submit our will to the will of God.

These kinds of ideas, ideals of providence run through the presidential canon in the last couple of years, really from the Inaugural. And I think they interplay in significant ways with the pre-9-11 emphasis on compassion and the whole array of speeches that initiate and develop and advocate the faith-based initiative, even in the face of considerable opposition -- not just political opposition, but religious and moral, rhetorical opposition [about] conflating church and state, imposing a certain kind of proselytizing of evangelical Protestants on communities that are more diverse and varied than you can see. In those speeches, [there is] an emphasis on God's love, but also God's blessings, the need to share it, the need to be free in doing so and also to be fair across particular communities of faith -- mosques, temples, as well as churches -- and not just favor some over others, not just favor the big ones over the small ones.

On the dangers of religious imagery:
Which religious imagery? If it is, for example, the imagery of the crusade or the imagery of a world that has two sides -- freedom and fear, the children of light and the children of darkness, if you will, which is explicitly not a part of any of the Bush speeches but nonetheless seems to ring not simply with moralism but with the resonance of a certain powerful Christian crusading tradition -- then that may be cause for concern on two levels. One is that there are other elements of Christian thinking about war and peace, let alone in its relation to the nature of law in American public life more broadly, not just in its religious dimension and global law and the cultural and moral understanding that's highly diversified, as well as sharing in common certain sorts of notions about the universal rights of human beings and the sovereignty of conscience. Also, law across nations and governments to which they are responsible -- all of that represents cause for concern that you can respond to, in this case in the context of a biblical or even Christian tradition, by weighing the claims of "just war" and now "just peace" understandings of this kind of moral decision making and the justification required in order to go to war.

But that's just one line of religious revelation or moral rhetoric. [Then there are] questions about the facts or the consequences or "real politick" -- whether it's oil or military logistics or geopolitical change in the Middle East. The two are interrelated. That's one way of thinking about both the possibilities and the dangers of such language.

On the language of justice versus compassion:
We can recognize at least in the ideal aims and the practical ends of Michael Gerson and the other people writing these speeches and the president himself [the desire] to unify, to heal, to draw together. But the dangers of divisiveness, of polarization, of what seems to be the gospel truth to some, reassuring in its resonance, its cadence, whether it's revivalist testimony or the lines of "How Great Thou Art" -- if you're another kind of believer, or even on the face of it a nonbeliever, who is fervent in your belief, or a liberal or humanist, a certain kind of parochialism or specificity can be off-putting.

[There are among critics] the exhortations to practice what we preach. If you look you can find, at least in the best and biggest of President Bush's speeches, a kind of recognition of justice, of the commonweal, even if it's given a subordinate place in what resounds with the primacy of compassion or the possibilities of saving society one soul at a time.

Much of the faith-based initiative's language is concerned for social transformation and improvement, but it focuses on the saving grace of souls transformed one at a time by God's touch, God's presence, God's grace, and then sharing it with others -- being moved and having one's own life transformed, whether it's by an explicitly evangelical born again experience or by the mentor's touch or the pastor's prayer of whatever sort, and then going out and volunteering to help others, particularly those who are in need.

Remarkably enough, in George Bush's commencement speech at Notre Dame in June 2001, he presents a five-stage justification for this kind of compassionate action and volunteering that is quite nuanced, quite strong, and subtle, too. At least for many liberal Protestants and Jewish and Catholic and other folks, it has no kind of companion in the careful, nuanced and powerful moral justification given to issues like social welfare spending for jobs, for tax policy and the like. It's more of an intuition, for example, that people shouldn't pay more than one-third of their income in taxes. For others of a more Reformed Protestant tradition, the central emphasis is not to deny the power of God's love and the human heart in all of its goodness and compassion, but to think hard about what God asks of us in the name of love and justice for the least of these, and that requires some debate, some argument, for example, about growing economic inequality. You can't just say one-third and no more can be paid in taxes. It depends on the common good and the common need and the background conditions, for example, that have made it harder for the least of the lesser of these folks, everybody but the top fifth, in the last 20 years. That is tied, not just to tax policy, but the changes in the economy, the global division of labor, the drop of unionized labor. If you are high-school-educated worker, often times you are making, effectively, a fifth or a sixth less than you were in 1980. Critics say, let's open up discussion on these types of issues too and not just trust the grace of God and the compassionate heart of each loving neighbor to take up the social slack and make up the difference -- that government has a powerful kind of responsibility, and we as citizens have a moral responsibility for the common good.

On Protestant allusions and references in presidential speeches:
How we pace, where we pause, the kind of cadence and rhythm, the preacher, the priest, the rabbi, a certain kind of creed and confession and continuity within the Christian tradition -- that is significant here. And the same goes for the biblical Abrahamic traditions of faith and their relations to the other great world salvation religions. The fact is you can't speak every language at once. There is really no moral and religious Esperanto that takes in everything, but the voice is significant here and so is the recognition that every religious and cultural tradition, every legal, democratic, republican tradition of American public life is a continuity of conflicts. They are a conversation where there is both common ground and where there are arguments that are ongoing over centuries, over eons, about how we should live together. What is the interrelation of faith, hope and Christian charities with the classical virtues of justice, wisdom, temperance and fortitude? In the Bush Inaugural Address, for example, there is a listing of the importance of civility, of courage, of compassion and character. There is a pairing of justice and compassion that tends to punctuate the emphasis on compassion and the transformation of character in ways that resound with the warm and open heart of personal relationships with one's Savior, even if those explicit evangelical, Protestant doctrines are not spelled out. And in the Inaugural even Mother Teresa is invoked, as she is, as it were, being brought into one's local neighborhood with the emphasis on volunteerism, on doing good person-to-person, in ways that would be and are familiar to almost all Americans. There is that resonance of activist but volunteer, Protestant, free-church ideal.

That is part of the story of the heritage of American public institutions. Our society is peculiarly tied to dissenting Protestantism and to its associational idea of churches, of free churches, rather than THE church. And that makes for a little bit of tension if you think about the United States -- whether it is troubling or uplifting for "the nation with the soul of a church." We could ask: What church? Whose church? What about the mosque, what about the temple, what about the ashram? That's an ongoing debate itself that doesn't have one neat answer.

On the debate over religious language in public speech:
[The is some] increased moral urgency or difficulty of religious language in public when it is always this or that religious language and where the interrelation of different forms of public theology -- language, motif, resonance or cadence, let alone the words of this or that hymn, interact with a kind of tradition. Some have called it a civil religious tradition that adds its own Enlightenment and theistic elements. That is an ongoing argument. It is an argument that Jefferson, Adams, Madison and others focused on very powerfully 200 years ago. But it is not all settled. How these different faith traditions interact with something like a kind of civil religious tradition is entering a new chapter, and there are different answers. Some are ecumenical. Some are more classically enlightened and have to do with humanistic legal traditions -- ways of talking about the common good and our shared responsibilities as well as our individual life in terms of public philosophy, in terms of constitutional rights as well as the rich language of the Declaration of Independence which starts, after all, with "nature and nature's God." It is precisely because that is the source of our rights that they are inalienable. They don't come from a state legislature or a stroke of the president's pen, but they are inherent in human nature. We can talk about human nature, and the desire written in the human heart to explore and discover, in ways that aren't narrowly parochial, evangelical, as opposed to liberal Protestant or Catholic or Jewish covenant and Talmudic law. That is part of the challenge of doing this kind of [public] writing and thinking, as well as delivering a good speech.

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