Some time ago, as I was struggling through a difficult professional decision, I sought advice from a friend who I knew was spiritually sensitive. When I’m in these situations, she offered, I sometimes ask myself: What would God want me to do?

I’m sure that my friend was not envisioning the Almighty as some sort of omnipotent career counselor in the sky. Rather, her suggestion reflected the hope that I would be helped by calling on God for strength and a clarifying sense of how my own values and priorities should shape my decision.

Judging by the slogan made popular a few years ago — What Would Jesus Do? — I’d say that many Americans ask themselves a version of that question on topics from the sublime to the ridiculous. God has been evoked by those who created this nation and those who have presided over it in times of prosperity and peril, and some of President Bush’s statements in Bob Woodward’s latest book fit neatly into a rhetorical context that dates to Jefferson, Lincoln, Carter and Reagan.

In “Plan of Attack,” Woodward writes that when Bush was asked whether he consulted his father, a president who also fought a war in the same daunting theater, he replied: “You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.”

No matter your religious persuasion, there’s a certain solace in knowing that the person making the lonely decision to risk the lives of countrymen and untold innocent strangers has a reservoir of faith on which to draw. But this president freely and aggressively goes a step further, by repeatedly framing America’s concept of political freedom as a gift from God, one we are obligated to spread, as he says, “to every man and woman in this world.”

This almost imperceptible switch from personal appeal to national justification is deeply troubling. It leaves the inevitable impression that the president believes he is doing God’s work by toppling the modern-day Satanic dictator in Iraq and portrays American foreign policy as a theologically driven struggle between good and evil, rather than a process driven by both values and reason.

As comforting as it is to imagine God on our side — not writing battle plans, of course, but as a legitimizing influence — the consequences ought to give us great pause. Ronald Reagan might have used similar language in articulating the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but that struggle, though it erupted into violence at the edges from time to time, remained more psychological than actual. Arguably, the imperative then was to avoid war, not create it.

Now that we have done so in Iraq, however, the questions must be raised: Did God intend more than 700 American servicemen and women to return home in the flag-draped coffins the public is not supposed to see? Was it part of a divine plan that, according to some estimates, more than 6,000 Iraqi military personnel and nearly 11,000 civilians should lose their lives since hostilities began? Are they not God’s children, too?

“I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God,” Bush told Woodward after giving the order to initiate the fighting. But then, as if to do just that, the president added: “Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible.”

Historically, presidents have been very, very careful to restrict God’s role in military conflict to blessing the nation and protecting the troops. Perhaps that comes from the recognition that the Almighty is summoned by many people on many sides. As Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address in describing North and South after years of conflict: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other.”

What would God do today in Iraq? I humbly submit that only God knows.