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"God has ordered you to cut their throats." Reading editorials in the last few months, you would think that line comes straight from President George W. Bush. In fact, this bellicose statement came from Saddam Hussein in the first week of the Iraq War. Yet it is President George W. Bush who alarms pundits because he often uses religious language to discuss his policies.

Georgie Anne Geyer, writing in the Chicago Tribune of March 7, argued that the President's intention to invade Iraq "is based primarily on religious obsession and visions of personal grandiosity." In The Times (London) of March 1, Stephen Plant wrote, "Bush's supporters have inherited the idea of manifest destiny. For them war on Iraq is not about oil, it is America's next date with salvation."

Three typical complaints can be dismissed quickly.

• Religion and rationality. On a recent McLaughlin Group broadcast, Eleanor Clift said she worried that Bush's "religiosity" doesn't allow "logical, rational thought," and Princeton University religion professor Elaine Pagels said, "Religious language … bypasses the brain and goes straight to the gut." It surprises us that, with Christianity's impressive intellectual tradition (consider Augustine and Aquinas), educated people are still saying such things. If one were mean-spirited, one might argue that secularism doesn't allow for logical, rational thought about religion.
  
  
• Religion and debate. "When you use religious language you stifle debate," said C. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist pastor and president of the Interfaith Alliance, and an op-ed piece in The New York Times repeated the charge. Apparently such commentators have never seen the sparks fly at a denominational meeting or a theological society. And they are apparently not reading many newspapers, for religious language seems to be having the opposite effect. That strikes us as a good thing in a democracy.
  
  
• Religion and alienating other faiths. "When he speaks in these terms," said Gaddy, "he leaves out whole segments of America." To be sure, a politician's language can needlessly alienate important constituencies, but in a pluralistic society, one hopes political leaders from various religious perspectives will use language that help us see their own deeper commitments. We don't have to agree with them, but we will be a smaller society if we tell everyone to leave their deepest convictions behind when they speak in the public square.
  
  

One concern does deserve more comment. As historian Martin Marty put it in a March 10 Newsweek essay, many are fretting about Bush's "evident conviction that he's doing God's will." For some, this worry is grounded in a nihilism that assumes we are alone in history and cannot discern God's ways for the world.

Marty would agree, we think, that humans can discern God's will in broad outline—God is against oppression and for liberty, for example—and that in prayer we can often discern his leading about specific steps to accomplish that will. Granted, our sense of that leading can be mistaken, but it is the Christian's duty to discern God's will and act on faith, relying always on God's mercy.

Some worry that talk about God's will is a symptom of megalomania, a mad certitude that brooks no dissent. This diagnosis fits Hussein's rhetoric, but it is difficult to see how Bush fits this description. As E. J. Dionne, hardly a champion of Bush's policies, put it in a February New York Post column: "Can we please stop pretending that Bush's regular invocations of the Almighty make him some sort of strange religious fanatic? In this, he is much more typically presidential than he's painted, especially by our friends abroad."

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May 2003, Vol. 47, No. 5