It’s Strictly Secular

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” That was President Bush in his State of the Union address in January, daring to point out that something should be done about the arsenals of mass destruction currently piling up in Iran, Iraq and North Korea before we have, say, another anthrax scare or Sept. 11 massacre. Naturally, our oh-so-sophisticated European friends couldn’t wait to ridicule Bush’s characterization of these rogue states as “evil” as yet another example of American moral “simplisme,” to paraphrase French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine--he of the land whose recent Winter Olympic Games pairs figure-skating judge admitted that she threw her vote under pressure.

But the oddest of all the takes on Bush’s choice of words was the church-and-state critique leveled by many media pundits. The idea was that by using the word “evil,” Bush was inappropriately injecting religious discourse, specifically the discourse of Christianity, into political matters that are supposed to be strictly secular--just as he had presumably done when he declared during his presidential campaign that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher. Here, for example, is an interpretation of “axis of evil” from Robert Wright of the online magazine Slate:

“It means Bush is on a mission from God ....It wouldn’t surprise me if he thinks that part of his mission is to teach a Godless society about moral absolutes--to re-inject the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’ into serious discourse. And, of course, if you take the word ‘evil’ really seriously, the ‘axis’ part follows; the various manifestations of evil are inherently coordinated, since they all have the same source. Iran and Iraq may hate each other, but they’re both on Satan’s team.”

For the likes of Wright, Bush has taken in too many Sunday sermons at the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, where he found his savior in a midlife born-again conversion.

Even some of Bush’s conservative admirers have been eager to find hidden religious references in both his State of the Union address and his statement on Sept. 11: “Today, our nation saw evil.” James W. Ceaser, politics professor at the University of Virginia, analyzes Bush’s words in the current issue of The Weekly Standard: “George Bush has been influenced to his core by his encounter with the Bible.” And, yes, it would be difficult to be a regular churchgoer reciting the Lord’s Prayer (“deliver us from evil”) and pondering the Scriptures (“because the days are evil”) without being influenced by both the language and the mental categories of Christianity.

Nonetheless, it is fairly clear that Bush’s use of the word “evil” in these two contexts was not an effort, conscious or unconscious, to bring theology to bear on matters of national security. The phrase “axis of evil” (by all reputed accounts, a coinage not of Bush himself but of his former speechwriter, David Frum), far from alluding to any passage of the Bible, seems clearly lifted, chapter and verse, from the Gospel According to Ronald Reagan, who almost never went to church. Remember “the evil empire”? And, of course, the word “axis” evokes the Nazi-led trio of nations that slaughtered millions during World War II.

Bush and his speechwriters selected the phrase “evil axis” because, first and foremost, it is rhetorically powerful, evoking the charnel houses that tyrannies of the right and left made of entire nations during the 20th century. During those regimes’ years of terror, every day was Sept. 11 for members of disfavored religions, ethnic groups and political affiliations.

“Evil” is a word that works, and not just for politicians and their speechwriters. Look it up in a quotation dictionary. You will discover that one of the most frequent literary sources for the word, after the Bible, is likely to be from William Shakespeare, master of rhetorical effect on the stage: “The evil that men do lives after them;” “Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, When evils are most free?”

This suggests something further: The word “evil” works in the public mind because it evokes something real, and everybody--everybody except a handful of pundits, that is--knows it is real. Hence, the spellbinding power and runaway audience success of “The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring,” a movie that has no overt religious content but is precisely about a struggle of good against evil, evil in all its grasping, corrupting murderousness. Because we know perfectly well that people have the capacity to create living hells for other people, we don’t hesitate to use the word “evil” when it is appropriate, even in our presumably “godless” society. The Holocaust wasn’t evil? The mass murders of Sept. 11--of children and rugby players and restaurant workers--weren’t evil?

Maybe it’s “simplistic” to think so, and maybe it’s an effort to inject moral absolutes where they don’t belong, but “evil” does happen to be the word that springs to mind. And if you should believe in Satan, you might logically attribute some of the mayhem to his fiendish cunning.

Not surprisingly, Bush and Reagan are hardly the only recent presidents to have used the word “evil” where it seemed highly appropriate. Former President Bill Clinton, for example, used the word in connection with the 1994 shooting of an Israeli soldier by Hamas militants, the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in an hate spree, the fatal pipe bombing during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga., and the Oklahoma City federal-building bombing of 1995. Few deemed the word overly judgmental.

At a dinner in 1999, then-Vice President Al Gore, referring to a number of mass shootings, declared, “My religious tradition says evil has always been with us, and we need to meet evil with good.” This was explicitly Christian language, yet no one accused Gore of “incoherence,” as Wright did in his Slate essay on Bush.

As for the contents of Bush’s “evil axis” reference in his State of the Union address, it is conceivably possible to accuse him of overstatement. Conceivably possible, at least in the case of starving, doddering North Korea, but only if you don’t take the possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons seriously, which is impossible to do after last fall. A recent article in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg details Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s genocidal war against his country’s millions of Kurds in the north, marked by deliberate starvation, inhumanly crowded and filthy concentration camps, and poison gas that causes death, blinding and cancer. If that’s not evil, what is?

Bush is unabashedly religious, and as such, he is like many Americans shaken by the events of recent months. There is no doubt that his Christian faith, including the Christian delineation of a clear line between right and wrong, informs his thinking. Such forthright faith, at this difficult time of war and looming war, obviously strikes many Americans as a good thing; the president’s popularity ratings continue to soar.

It is, however, just as crudely simplistic to attribute his every reference to “evil” to a caricature of Christianity as it would be if Bush himself were a caricature of Christianity “on a mission from God.” Evil, alas, is real, and it is sadly with us.