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Just Another Word For Everything Left to Lose
In his second-term inaugural address on Thursday, George W. Bush used the words freedom or liberty, in some form, 49 times. Say this for the president: He can hammer home a message.

Among these instances was this declaration: “We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner ‘Freedom Now’ -- they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.”

Freedom. Liberty. God. Bush’s emphases on these, so consistently highlighted in his public communications over the past four years, both lay bare and obscure underlying truths about the administration. Regarding the former, the president’s linkage of freedom and liberty with divine wishes is indicative of how central an evangelical worldview is to his conception of the United States’ role in the world, particularly in the struggle against terrorism. At the same time, emphasis on these values masks the reality that the administration is determined to define what counts as freedom and liberty and who will have the privilege to experience it. Let’s consider each of these points. ...

...The certitude present in Bush’s rhetoric and in the support for Bush by Falwell (and by other Religious Right leaders such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Gary Bauer) is emblematic of fundamentalists’ confidence that their understanding of the world provides what religion scholar Bruce Lawrence terms “mandated universalist norms” to be spread across cultural and historical contexts. For Bush and the Religious Right, those norms first and foremost are U.S. conceptions of freedom and liberty. Since September 11, 2001, these values have gained a special resonance among Americans -- and the administration, both because of genuine ideological as well as strategic reasons, has capitalized. Since the attacks, Bush has consistently claimed that the freedom and liberty he seeks to spread is God’s will for the world....

...The claim that the U.S. government is doing God’s work may appeal to many Americans, but it frightens those who might run afoul of administration wishes-cum-demands. This is particularly so when one considers how declarations of God’s will have been used by European-Americans in past eras as rationale for subjugating those who are racially and religiously different, most notably Native Americans, Africans, Chinese, and African Americans.

Indeed, scholar R. Scott Appleby in 2003 declared that the administration’s omnipresent emphasis on freedom and liberty functions as the centerpiece for “a theological version of Manifest Destiny.” Unfortunately, this twenty-first century adaptation of Manifest Destiny differs little from earlier American versions: The goal remains to vanquish any who do not willingly adopt the supposedly universal norms and values of Protestant conservatives. The result, by implication in the president’s rhetoric, is that the administration has transformed Bush’s “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” policy into “Either you are with us, or you are against God.”

To the great misfortune of American democracy and the global public, such a view is indistinguishable from that of the terrorists it is fighting. One is hard pressed to see how the perspective of Osama bin Laden, that he and his followers are delivering God’s wishes for the United States, is much different from Bush’s perspective that the United States is delivering God’s wishes to the Taliban or Iraq....