The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
a philosophy had no place for such biblical stories as that of the redemption of the prodigal Son (Bryan 1925).
Again, emphasizing that his central concern was less with biology than with social Darwinism, Bryan believed that the teaching of evolution would undermine love by teaching “a struggle of tooth and claw” (Bryan 1925). Drawing from his own pacifist roots, Bryan feared that science was both generating war and making it more deadly.
As he came to his summation, which repeated the words of the song “Faith of Our Fathers,” Bryan employed two classical images, one from Elijah’s confrontation in the Old Testament with idol worshippers (1 Kings 18:1–45) and the other from Jesus’s confrontation with Pilate (John 18:28–40), to say that “it is again a choice between God and Baal; it is also a renewal of the issue in Pilate’s court.” The question of “What shall I do with Jesus” must be answered. If the jury were to repudiate the law at issue, “there will be rejoicing wherever God is repudiated, the Saviour scoffed at and the Bible ridiculed” (Bryan 1925).
76
Because Bryan died five days after the trial, he never had a chance to give this speech in person, but it remains a reminder that it was possible for political progressives to be biblical conservatives and a testament to the fact that biological evolution has sometimes been the guise for social theories that could undermine both faith in the Bible and efforts to help the weak and helpless.
See also Fundamentalism; Scopes Trial; Social Gospel
For Reference and Further Reading
Bryan, William Jennings. 1925. “Text of Closing Statement of William Jennings Bryan at the trial of John Scopes, Dayton, Tennessee, 1925.” http://www2.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/wjb-last/wjb-last.htm.
Lawrence, W. R. 1956. “Democratic Keynote Talk Assails Nixon as ‘Hathet Man’ of G.O.P.; Lays ‘Indifference’ to President.” New York Times. August 14.
Noll, Mark A. 2011. “William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the King James Version of the Bible.” Theology 114(4): 251–59.
Smith, Willard H. 1966. “William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel.” Journal of American History 53 (June): 41–60.
Bush, George W.
George W. Bush (b. 1946) served as the forty-third president of the United States from 2001 to 2009, a time marked both by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the second American invasion of Iraq.
A graduate of Yale University, a former governor of Texas, and the son of former president George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush, who was raised in both the Presbyterian and Episcopalian Churches, is, with his wife, a Methodist. He describes how in 1986 he overcame alcoholism after a visit from evangelist Billy Graham. He said that he subsequently felt a call to run for president after hearing his pastor tell how the nation needed modern leaders like Moses and his mother told him, “He was talking to you” (Siker 2006). As governor, Bush supported a prison program that sought to rehabilitate prisoners through Bible reading and prayer (Goodstein 2000), and he declared June 10, 2000, to be “Jesus Day” (Siker 2006).
Supported by many evangelical Christians, during a debate with fellow Republican presidential aspirants during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush said that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. Bush read the Bible regularly. He told a reporter that his recommitment to Jesus was “one of the defining moments of my life,” and that “from Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life’s lessons. That what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true” (quoted in Goodstein 2000).
Although he kept his family Bible on which he took his oath closed to shield it from rain during his first presidential inauguration, he opened it to Isaiah 40:31 for his second one (Winder 2019, 20). That verse highlighted what had become another American symbol, by proclaiming, “But 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.”
77
Bush had run on a platform of “compassionate conservatism” and thought that private religious groups could often administer programs better than governmental bureaucracies. In his first inaugural address, Bush made an indirect reference to Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) when he said, “I can pledge our nation to a goal: When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side,” and soon after his election he created a faith-based initiative office (Heltzel 2009, 108).
At a memorial service at the National Cathedral for the victims of 9/11, Bush cited Romans 8:38–39 to assure the audience that nothing could separate God’s people from their love. As president, Bush connected to earlier notions of American providentialism. In his first inaugural address, he thus observed,
We have a place, all of us, in a long story. A story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story. A story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. (Smith 2008, 283)
In a speech that he gave in 2002 on Israel and Palestine, he quoted from Deuteronomy 30:19: “I have set before you life and death; therefore choose life” (Siker 2006).
Bush was known for salting his speeches with references to songs and biblical passages with which evangelical Christians were often familiar, but which it sometimes took the news media some time to discover. In a speech commemorating the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Bush ended with, “This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind . . . That hope still lights our way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.” This paraphrase of John 1:4–5 is from a passage used to describe Jesus and to identify Him with the Creator of the universe, a parallel that one theological studies professor calls “astonishing” because Bush moved “from nationalism to idolatry, envisioning America as the Word made flesh” (Siker 2006). Critics attribute Bush’s tendency to moralize with his invasion of Iraq and with other aggressive foreign policy moves.
Others, however, have suggested that Bush’s conception of the Bible was fairly bland. Summarizing four articles designed to discuss Bush’s Bible, one scholar says that “Bush’s Bible (as referenced politically and publicly) hardly exists as an actual corpus. It seems to amount to little more than a few scattered references to the Prophets (in a vague name-dropping sense); a range of quasi-biblicisms that seem to aspire to imitate the paradoxical language of the gospels (such as ‘We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers’); a few crypto-biblical and crypto-theological references to the ‘Author of Liberty’; the democratic-Christian mission against ‘tyrants’ and the commission by a vaguely theologized ‘history’; and the deliberately apocalyptic noun-ing of evil” (Sherwood 2006, 48). This scholar suggested that Bush’s Bible was the Liberal Bible, exemplified by the philosophy of John Locke rather than what she 78describes as the Absolute Monarchist’s