By Nicole Greenfield

The news that longtime White House speechwriter and policy adviser Michael Gerson was leaving Bush behind didn’t excite the media nearly as much as the resignations of press secretary Scott McClellan and chief of staff Andrew Card did. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less significant.

The effect of Gerson’s departure could be monumental not only in light of the comparison between Bush’s scripted and unscripted words, but also if we consider the ideas that David Domke puts forth in his book God Willing?. Domke analyzes the connection between religion, politics, and the media since September 11th, explores various key phrases that Bush employs in his speeches, and examines how the press echoes Gerson’s words as eloquent statements of Bush’s politically fundamentalist worldview.

Gerson, an evangelical Christian, is known for saturating President Bush’s speeches with religious language and is most famous for creating phrases such as “axis of evil” and “armies of compassion.” He is also responsible for aiding in the development of Bush’s plans for “freedom and democracy” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for publicly attaching religious significance to the United States’ presence in those countries.

Domke opens God Willing by looking at two of the clearest examples of Bush’s (that is, Gerson’s) use of religious language. The first is Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address which focused on the need to confront Iraq and Saddam Hussein. “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world,” Bush declared, “it is God’s gift to humanity,” a concept still reiterated by the administration today. Four days later, after the space shuttle Columbia exploded, Bush quoted the prophet Isaiah–“Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing”–and said, “The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

These two speeches sparked a popular interest in Bush’s explicit use religious language and in his faith in general. Domke lists numerous publications that ran stories on the topic that year and argues that as a result, “Bush’s religious outlook was no longer merely a personal or even political matter; it had now been absorbed into the discourse of popular culture.” But when mixed with political language, he continues, such a religiously fundamentalist worldview became a kind of political fundamentalism, which “offered familiarity, comfort, and a palatable moral vision to the U.S. public in the aftermath of September 11th.”

And, until now, Michael Gerson has been the man in charge of this entire process. More importantly, he has been very effective at making the process run smoothly, at using precisely the right words in order to achieve the determined goal of the administration. Because no matter how many people disagree with the president’s words and actions, the words Gerson writes are constantly being adopted into public discourse and made safe for consumption.

According to Karl Rove, “There’s no way to replace him—he is a once in a generation. He helped take the president on his best day and represent what was in the president’s spirit and soul.” There’s no telling what will happen when the president loses his “voice” in a few weeks. But given Gerson’s success over the past seven years and his status as the only irreplaceable member of Bush’s team, those who remain will surely be struggling to find just the right words to represent their leader’s “spirit and soul.”

[For an interesting profile of Michael Gerson, read Jeffrey Goldberg’s February 2006 New Yorker piece, “The Believer.”]