I found myself thinking about presidential humility once again after I heard last week’s inaugural address. Its tone and pronouncements, of course, were about as far from Christian humility as one could imagine. (For instance, the first reference to God in the speech was the line “I was saved by God to make America great again”).
But can a presidential inaugural address reflect genuine humility?
Yes, it can. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address was an exercise in a humble reflection on God’s mysterious purposes in allowing both sides in the Civil War to suffer horrific casualties.
But in the twentieth century, my top contender for a genuinely humble inaugural address is the speech that Gerald Ford gave on August 9, 1974, the day that he was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president.
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