A mild defense of the Bush administration?

At On Faith, the Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite – president of the Chicago Theological Seminary – writes:

Since “stupid” is not one of the “Seven Deadly Sins” (though I think it should make the list), I’m going with pride as the deadliest sin for the United States of America in recent years. Deaths of U.S. troops, deaths of Iraqi civilians and military, death upon death has been the result of overreaching pride on the part of the United States in attacking a country that had not attacked us first. In theological terms, this is hubris, hubris or hybris from the Greek. According to its modern usage, hubris is exaggerated self-pride or self-confidence (overbearing pride), often resulting in fatal retribution. I’d say that fits.

Arrogance, conceit, self-importance and smugness—prideful behavior on every level is what caused this administration to violate 1,600 years of Christian moral reasoning, the Just War theory, and attack Iraq. “Rogue state” is the term usually applied to countries that engage in pre-emptive war; blind pride is usually the cause.

This kind of prideful behavior is not only a political and strategic error, it is a fundamental faith error. The Christian theologian who best grasped the magnitude and meaning of the sin of pride is Reinhold Niebuhr. He wrote, regarding the sin of pride, “But the self lacks the faith and trust to subject itself to God. It seeks to establish itself independently. . . .By giving life a false center, the self then destroys the real possibility for itself and others. Hence the relation of injustice to pride. . . . The sin of inordinate self-love thus points to the prior sin of lack of trust in God. . . . The anxiety of freedom leads to sin only if the prior situation of unbelief is assumed.”

I agree that our invasion of Iraq violated all sorts of established Christian principles, but for Bush and his flunkies none of that matters, since they head a secular government.  As president of the United States, Bush was elected to exercise leadership and judgement based in ideological priorities and empirical observation.  Now, it’s obvious that he did too much of the former and not enough of the latter, and for that we should hold him accountable.  But what we shouldn’t do is criticize him for a failure to hold to Christian moral standards.  To quote a friend of mine, “we elected a commander-in-chief, not a theologian-in-chief.”

Rev. Thistlewaithe should however take a page from Charles Marsh’s recent book Wayward Christian Soldiers, and criticize the American evangelical community for their nationalism-fueled war craze.  A large majority of American evangelicals wholeheartedly supported the Iraq War, and in doing so, gave the one-fingered salute to “1,600 years of Christian moral reasoning” and the broader (read: international) evangelical community. 

The political and religious climate would be better served if prominent Christian leaders – like Rev. Thistlewaithe – devoted at least part of their energies to repudiating the legacy of the radically individualistic conservative evangelical movement, and building in its place, an American evangelicalism actually committed to the social values of the Gospels