fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Giuliani’s Religious Soft-Shoe

His keynote’s attempt at playing the God card seemed lukewarm when he said that American ideas are, “ideas that come from God,” prompting applause only from about only [sic] one-third of the ballroom’s 800-plus people. ~Hotline Maybe someone can help explain why Giuliani, not normally one known for the political God-talk, would choose to float this […]

His keynote’s attempt at playing the God card seemed lukewarm when he said that American ideas are, “ideas that come from God,” prompting applause only from about only [sic] one-third of the ballroom’s 800-plus people. ~Hotline

Maybe someone can help explain why Giuliani, not normally one known for the political God-talk, would choose to float this somewhat odd phrase while campaigning in California of all places.  It strikes me as an odd phrase in itself (what are “American ideas,” and what makes him thing that they come from God?), but it is even more odd that Giuliani would use it at all.  It is strange that the man would choose to use it, because it manages to avoid being too religious, much less Christian, while nonetheless indicating a view of historically contingent, tradition-bound ideas remarkably similar to Mr. Bush’s view that freedom is God’s gift to the world.  It is bland enough to leave believers cold, but spicy enough to disquiet Giuliani’s more reliable secular supporters. 

It is similar enough to Mr. Bush’s ahistorical liberation theology to worry all traditional, skeptical and secular conservatives, but not specifically Christian enough to give anyone the impression that Giuliani is now trying to take up the “Christian nation” argument.  It is also similar enough to vague nods towards some connection between “the Founding” and theism that would satisfy some of the scholars at The Claremont Institute, but it simultaneously would worry anyone remotely familiar with American history.

Yes, there is a figurative or even philosophical sense in which you might argue that all ideas (or at least all good ones) come ultimately from God.  There is the conventional sense in which people attribute great ideas to divine inspiration, but coming from someone like Giuliani it simply sounds like a sort of tired platitude that he thought he would take out for a test spin to see how the audience reacted.  There is a sense in which you can praise something as worthy by attributing a divine origin to it (even if you positively know that “American ideas,” which I assume here refers to American political ideas, come most immediately from, well, Americans, who are not, in spite of the confusions of some interventionists to the contrary, divine beings). 

Even acknowledging all these things, you still run up against the core of the claim, which is a fairly crazy thing to claim.  To say this is to say that “American ideas,” namely ideas of government by consent, equality before the law, no taxation without representation, the need for a division of competing and balancing powers to preserve liberty and prevent corruption, etc. (most of which are actually English ideas in their 17th and early 18th century forms), come from God, when they plainly come to us from English constitutional traditions and then from the minds of English and French political philosophers by way of learned American landed gentlemen without any hint of revelation having anything to do with it.  

This is not to say that all these ideas would necessarily contradict the truths that God has revealed, but it is simply to say that there is something quite wrong and foolish about attributing a divine character to political ideas that have their share of virtues and flaws.  To invest any set of political ideas with the importance of having their origin in God is to make them into another set of scriptures and to make a certain claim of absolute truth for the political creed one espouses, which has an ugly tendency of investing the political authority that theoretically embodies that creed with a sanctity that it does not really possess.  To make such a claim is to make the political creed into more than a political creed, and to make it also into a set of maxims instituted by the Creator.  The view implied in Giuliani’s throwaway line is intellectually sloppy and potentially quite dangerous.   

I don’t presume that Giuliani actually believes what he said here; I would be willing to guess that he couldn’t explain what he meant if he were pressed on the point.  For Giuliani, as for so many other people, I assume the phrase “ideas that come from God” is simply a grand way of saying, “really good ideas.”  I assume this is a prime example of something we are going to see more and more often: a robustly secular, East Coast Republican who happens to be nominally Catholic trying to speak in the unfamiliar idiom of generic American piety as a way of convincing the continental folks whose votes he needs that he is really not that different from them (sure, he’s been married three times and occasionally cross-dresses in public, but who hasn’t?).  We may as well also get accustomed to watching him fail in these attempts, as he did in this case.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here