Oct 26, Dallas Gingles, Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Perkins School of Theology at SMU Dallas, for a commentary about how George W. Bush exhibited ‘civic virtue’ during a visit to his theology class. Published in the Austin American-Statesman under the heading: In an SMU classroom, George W. Bush was a lesson on civic virtue: https://tinyurl.com/ftrp6b23
I had the rare honor in September of welcoming a former president of the United States into my classroom. President George W. Bush surprised the students in my seminar, “Presidential Rhetoric and American Political Theology,” at Southern Methodist University, by arriving five minutes into the class and staying for a full hour to take questions from every student in the room.
The 43rd president periodically makes these visits to engage with students in SMU classrooms – one of the great perks that comes with the location of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on our campus. On this visit, as always, President Bush was thoughtful, honest, reflective and wise. But more than anything he was an exemplar of civic virtue.
The 43rd president periodically makes these visits to engage with students in SMU classrooms – one of the great perks that comes with the location of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on our campus. On this visit, as always, President Bush was thoughtful, honest, reflective and wise. But more than anything he was an exemplar of civic virtue.
In election years, we think of exercising citizenship primarily in terms of voting — and so we should. We’re making decisions about who we want making decisions. Presidents make morally weighty decisions for the entire country. That requires two civic virtues in equal measure. The first is the moral courage required to make those decisions. The second is the moral humility to realize those decisions are sometimes wrong, and a willingness to admit it and be held responsible when they are.
This is what makes citizenship so risky. We’re voting for people based on the best information we have about them in the moment, hoping they will take their responsibilities to decide on our behalf as seriously as we take our responsibility to vote for them. And, at the same time, we must have the patience and forbearance to live with the results of the election regardless of whether our candidate wins or loses — and sometimes we have to have the honesty to admit that we made a wrong decision when we voted for the winning candidate.
In my course, we’ve been tracing a tradition of theological thinking about this set of overlapping moral risks and virtues. One of the geniuses of the American project is that it welcomes this sort of risk because that is what is required to entrust ordinary citizens with the right and responsibility to decide who their leaders will be. But it mitigates this risk by balancing the powers of those chosen to lead against one another. Another of the geniuses of the American project is that our elected officials, including presidents, are, like all of us, citizens.
No president can be a saint — civic or sacred. The moral burdens of the decisions they make are too heavy to bear on a direct road to heaven. Maybe it is enough to hope they are exemplars of the ordinary civic virtues that help us keep our republic.
As I decide who to vote for this year, a central question I’m asking is which of the candidates I would like to point to and tell my children, “That’s the kind of citizen I hope you become.”
Dallas Gingles is the Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Perkins School of Theology and Associate Professor of Practice in Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at SMU Dallas.