Rick Warren and the Presidency

Barack Obama’s invitation to evangelical powerhouse Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation has angered abortion and gay rights advocates. They are overreacting. The invitation merely confirms Obama’s admirable willingness to reach out across a relatively broad ideological spectrum .

Too bad Rick Warren isn’t so open-minded. After his over-hyped and intrusive interviews of Obama and John McCain this last August, the best-selling author of A Purpose-Driven Life disclosed to his congregation at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Ca., the one kind of person he couldn’t vote for. “I could not vote for an atheist because an atheist says, ‘I don’t need God,’” Warren preached, according to the Los Angeles Times. “They’re saying, ‘I’m totally self-sufficient by [myself].’ And nobody is self-sufficient to be president by themselves. It’s too big a job.”

It’s hard to decide which is more laughable: Warren’s conception of the presidency or of atheists. Unfortunately, both conceptions are widespread among Americans.

Warren would apparently feel more secure if a president said: “After consulting God, I have decided to bomb Iran,” than if he said, “After consulting my advisors, all available intelligence, and our allies, I have decided to bomb Iran.” A Warren defender would likely say that the two statements boil down to the same thing. But if consulting God merely ratifies what a president learns from his human sources, then the consultation is a meaningless superfluity.

No, a properly religious President, in Warren’s view, is presumably prepared to change his merely human-derived knowledge based on what God whispers in his ear. If he is not prepared to revise his conclusions, then his decision-making is no different from that of an atheist.

So why would Warren be so confident that God has spoken to the president and that the president has properly interpreted the message?

If the president of Iran said: “After consulting God, I have decided to bomb the United States,” Warren (and most other Americans) would presumably be utterly certain that the Iranian president had not been taken into God’s confidence. But why? Perhaps Warren is naively ethnocentric. God, in this view, would either never answer a Muslim’s prayers, or would do so only in ways that protect America. But we know that God does not always protect America from attack.

Why is Warren any more confident that when a U.S. president says: “After heartfelt prayer, I have decided that Detroit needs a federal bail-out,” he has actually been given such divine advice? And if a citizen cannot know whether God in fact did convey the proper course of action in any given case, how is the public better off with a president who calls on such an erratic White House advisor?

Moreover, the task of persuading the prayer-inspired president that he is wrong about the wisdom of federal intervention in the auto industry, say, seems unduly daunting to me. If a president made the decision purely on worldly grounds, those grounds can in theory be countered with other evidence. Obviously, not everyone is open to contrary evidence. The ideal of rational decision-making is only imperfectly realized in practice. But I at least know the type of arguments I would make. I don’t know how you counter revelation, however. God is a political conversation-stopper, a trump card that constricts political discourse rather than widen it out.

But let’s give Warren the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he merely means: A president should possess humility, an awareness of his own fallibility and the limits of his own and others’ knowledge. I could not agree more. And the unreligious can be more obstinate and close-minded than many a devout believer. But on balance the sense that God can help you out with your presidential responsibilities seems to me to be less conducive to humility than an awareness that human knowledge—provisional, fallible, constantly subject to revision— is all you’ve got to go on.

Pace Warren, only a megalomaniac in the White House would say: “I’m totally self-sufficient by [myself].” A non-believer president would seek out the same wide range of assistance as a believer president. And if his human advisors give him lousy advice, he can throw them out and get a better set.  If they have lied or betrayed their office, they can be subpoenaed.  Neither option is available, unfortunately, with God.