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On the evening of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, I frantically pounded out some commentary in which I invited readers to “spot the code” words in the text, those mysterious passages in which the president sent marching orders to the theocrats.
It’s time to play “spot the evangelical code words,” the game in which the Washington press tries to figure out when President George W. Bush is sending mysterious secret messages to those religious “values voters” who want to turn American into a theocracy.
The Ethics & Public Policy Center has posted its transcript of “Religion, Rhetoric, and the Presidency,” the speech White House speechwriter gave to two dozen U.S. and international journalists on Dec. 6. The text covers his remarks and then the response by National Journal White House correspondent Carl Cannon.
White House speechwriter Michael Gerson told a funny but poignant personal story as he began his Dec. 6 presentation at an Ethics & Public Policy Center seminar in Key West, Fla.
Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post has written a fairly good analysis for The Atlantic of religious believers’ role in the 2004 election. The central insight of the essay comes in this remark from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “I’ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.”
William J. Stuntz, whose “Faculty Clubs and Church Pews” essay drew a year-end endorsement from New York Times columnist David Brooks, now lists the issues on which he believes the secular left and the Christian right may cooperate: abortion, poverty at home, poverty abroad and spreading freedom/nation building.
Anyone who has been reading GetReligion in the wake of 11/2 knows I am convinced that one of the major stories of 2005 will be the early signs of what the religious left will do to help the political left address the “pew gap.”
In the year-end Who’s Next issue, Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman floats the Senator-Rick-Santorum-for-president trial balloon.
Two cheers for Nicholas Kristof and his realization that Christian conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback are the “new internationalists.” Kristof assures his readers that he considers Brownback “to the right of Atilla the Hun,” and he sees the prolife aspect of new internationalism as causing more suffering than it prevents. Nevertheless, Kristof expresses a more than grudging respect for Brownback:
