Saints and Sinners: Meaningful passages from the president
When asked about his faith over the years, George W. Bush often paraphrased a passage from the Book of Matthew, “I’m not going to try to take the speck out of your eye when I’ve got a log in my own.” As Bush explained to The New York Times while on the campaign trail in 2000, the verse reminds him that everyone is a sinner, and that he has much personal work to do.
Curious about the president’s favorite bible passages, I sought help from the office of Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine. With a little sleuthing from his staff, I learned that President Bush has no favorite Bible passages, but considers two chapters in the Bible to be particularly meaningful: Matthew 7 and Isaiah 40.
Matthew 7, one of the Bible passages cited by Bush, is the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. Its opening verses (“Judge not that ye be not judged”) may have been the source of the now popular phrase “rush to judgment.” The King James Version summarizes Matthew 7:1-6 with the words, “Christ reproveth rash judgment.”
The chapter also contains the Golden Rule (“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”) and the well-known “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
Isaiah 40 contains some of the most majestic words in the Old Testament: “Comfort ye my people, saith your God … the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God … The grass withereth, the flower fadeth but the word of our God shall stand forever.” And the famous “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Bush has told several reporters that he reads the Bible every morning and prays often during the day, sometimes at his desk in the Oval Office. Bush’s born-again experience in 1986 at age 40 occurred with the help of Rev. Billy Graham, during a walk on the beach at his parent’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
In a recent piece in The Weekly Standard, executive editor Fred Barnes writes, “Bush has probably talked more about religious faith than other presidents. While he readily invokes God, he carefully avoids mention of Jesus Christ. He calls for tolerance for all faiths.”
In a talk at a Washington prayer breakfast Bush said, “We can be confident in the ways of Providence, even when they are far from our understanding.”
“There is the notion,” writes Barnes, that “Bush projects too much of his Christian faith into his public pronouncements. On top of that, there is the related idea that the president, as an evangelical Christian, believes he was chosen by God to lead America into a war to depose Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq. This is widely believed in Europe and even among some of Bush’s American critics.”
Bush is hardly the first president to invoke God in his speeches. President Clinton frequently made citations of scripture.
Barnes raises another question about Bush’s religion in his article in the Methodist publication. Does Bush, he asks, think God is behind his foreign policy?
He answers by quoting religion professor Martin Marty who, in Newsweek, wrote, “the problem isn’t with Bush’s sincerity but with his evident conviction that he is doing God’s will.”
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)