On the night of 9/11, I was huddled around the TV with a bunch of friends at their on-campus apartment, watching the news in quiet horror. There were ten or so of us there, all with very differing opinions of Dubya prior to the terrorist attacks, and a wide range of religious beliefs – from athiest to Catholic to Pagan – were represented among us. When the President came on to address the nation for the second time that day, we all sat up and took notice. We were all desperate to hear what our President might say to assure the nation, and every one of us, regardless of our feelings about him before that day, found that he was doing a fantastic job –
Until the end.
That was when he recommended that we put our faith in the hands of a high power and quoted Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” (this is, btw, entirely from my memory; I can try to find a news article to quote from if this is called into question, but I remember it fairly clearly.) Every one of us, from Catholic to Pagan, sat there with our jaws hanging open. We could not believe that he would quote Scripture to the country, even at this horribly trying time. The consensus we reached was that despite the majority of Americans’ being Christian, since our country has freedom of religion as one of its principles and there is still a good chunk of us who aren’t Christian, Bush’s quoting of Scripture was inappropriate. It may have reassured whoever was Christian (and Jewish, too, perhaps, though I honestly don’t know how the Jewish faith is about having Scripture quoted to them – I’ll go to GQ with that one), but it alienated the rest of us.
I took this question to my atheist-but-very-conservative mother, who was stunned that I was so upset by it. Her contention is that it was perfectly acceptable, and even expected, for Bush to find solace in his religion; also, since the majority of the country is Christian they did take solace in his words, and he needed to seek to console as many people as possible. I argue that he could have done so in a secular manner without needing to drag religion into it, and could probably have made more people feel comforted that way; Mom essentially thinks it’s my problem. I argued that if he found it absolutely necessary to bring religion into it, it would have been possible for him to simply leave it at “put your faith in a higher power” without quoting Scripture, thereby leaving his listeners free to choose their own higher power and alienating only the atheists and agnostics. Mom still wasn’t buying it and thinks I’m making a stink over nothing.
Now the question is yours to debate. Was this a snafu on Dubya’s part? Even though the majority of Americans are Christian, is it better to conduct matters of state in as secular a manner as possible, or should we be kowtowing to the majority religion? The latter idea makes me cringe because of that whole “separation of church and state” and “freedom of religion” thing, but I’ll stop mouthing off and let the venerable Dopers take over. one last thing, though, I’m very sorry if I’m bringing up something that’s already been discussed when this all happened two months ago – I did go back and look and didn’t seem to be able to find anything, so I figured it was worth a shot. Don’t hurt me if I’m rehashing something please 