If You Only Read One Critique of the Prayer Breakfast Speech, Let It Be Ross Douthat’s.

Yesterday, I posted about President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. I agreed with much of what he said about humility as a helpful corrective in foreign policy and war, particularly since neither America nor Christianity themselves exactly have a spotless record.

Most of the rebuttals to the President’s remarks that I have heard have seemed to either spend lots of time justifying the Crusades or to object to the idea that Americans or Christians might actually have had some complicity with evil in the past. I have heard a lot of arguments that run along the lines of “Well, maybe Christians did some bad things in the past, but they weren’t AS BAD as ISIS.” Any one of these lines of rebuttal seem to me to be wrong-headed.

But I read a very good rebuttal of the President’s remarks today by one of my favorite conservative commentators, Ross Douthat of The New York Times. Douthat acknowledges that humility is a valuable trait for us to have. He admits that acknowledging one’s flaws is important. However, he says that the problem with President Obama being the one to urge us to admit our flaws is precisely because he is poor at admitting his own or his party’s flaws.

A third problem is that Obama is not just a Niebuhrian; he’s also a partisan and a progressive, which means that he too invests causes with sanctity, talks about history having “sides,” and (like any politician) regards his opponents as much more imperfect and fallen than his own ideological camp.

This seems to me to be a very fair point, and as always, Douthat is thoroughly respectful of the office of President even as he critiques President Obama. He makes a couple of other useful critiques as well. I encourage you to head over and read Douthat’s critique. If President Obama hopes to help our nation overcome its tendency to self-aggrandize, certainly he will need to overcome self-aggrandizement about his own agenda and party. Modeling humility would be a great start to moving the nation forward. Otherwise, the President risks playing into the argument that admitting one’s faults merely feeds more ammunition to the enemy (which in this case would be the Republican party). Truth is more important than such a cynical analysis would imply.

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