Alas, the National Day of Prayer event was largely anticlimactic. I was hoping for a few scandalous or outrageous comments from Bush before a friendly evangelical audience, but like my friend Darrell, who alerted me to the online broadcast, I didn’t hear many fireworks.
As expected, Bush put on his evangelist-in-chief hat and preached to the choir (in this case, literally).
Americans do not presume to equate God’s purposes with any purpose of our own. God’s will is greater than any man, or any nation built by men. He works His will…. God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. And it is the deepest strength of America that from the hour of our founding, we have chosen justice as our goal.
That’s a little contradictory with the traditional fundamentalist argument, which insists that God does apply Most Favored Nation status to the ones He likes best (i.e., the United States), but this is otherwise boilerplate religious rhetoric for Bush.
This may seem like a trivial tangent, because it is, but I was a little surprised to see Ollie North in attendance last night. In fact, Col. North was the “honorary chairman of this year’s National Day of Prayer” and Bush singled him out for praise.
I know North is a religious right favorite, but it seems to me there was an incident in the 1980s called the Iran-Contra scandal in which North lied under oath to Congress — after placing his hand on the Bible. I’m not a theologian, but don’t evangelicals frown on that sort of thing?