In 2008, Timothy S. Goeglein had to resign from his middleman post at the White House, connecting social-conservative groups, among others, with the administration, when he admitted to plagiarizing columns for his hometown paper in Indiana. Now a vice president for external relations at Focus on the Family, he is the author of the new book The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era and talks about it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You blame pride for what you did. Where does pride come from? Did you see it coming? Did you know it before you got caught?

TIMOTHY S. GOEGLEIN: The root of any sin is our fallen human nature. And yes, I think at some level all of us understand what our vulnerabilities and weaknesses are or could be. Bill Buckley once wrote it was a remarkable thing to be having a conversation with a president of the United States and see him taking notes while you are speaking. I was never a confidant of the president nor was I on the senior White House team. But I know what Bill meant. The contrails of that kind of power can be long and winding. The White House and its environs can be a heady place: the history of it all, its projection of influence, the place where the most powerful man in the world both works and resides.

I do believe the capacity for self-deception can be large, and so while I was aware that pride was taking root, I did not face it directly. I deeply regret that now, as I make clear in the book, and it is why I chose to begin my memoir with a powerful verse from Proverbs: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but with humility comes wisdom.” I learned firsthand the power of that passage, and it cut with a serrated edge.

LOPEZ: “Even as I write these words, the horror of that morning and the events of that day come back to haunt me with the pain and awfulness I inflicted on others but most especially the three people I love most in the world, my wife and sons. I embarrassed them all deeply in a betrayal rooted in self-centeredness and ambition, both of which were venal.” But Tim, you worked in the White House. Why did you need to show off in your hometown paper?

GOEGLEIN: Your question perfectly encapsulates my failure, and later, my confession and absolution in Christ. I did not need to do what I did, but pride seeks all kinds of vacuums and silos to fill. This is the nature of sin. When it is exposed, there is often no logic to it in hindsight, where everything seems so clear.

Truth has its own logic and provides such a clear way forward in life. But I had chosen the opposite, to be deceptive, and attempted to convey a writing capability I did not believe I had. I have come to see that the three most beautiful words in the English language are the ones T. S. Eliot penned: “Humility is endless.”

LOPEZ: “My life caved in, and it was all of my own doing.” But it didn’t, did it?

GOEGLEIN: When I resigned from the White House on a Friday and departed for home, I felt certain my life to a very large degree was over and that it had caved in. I felt an intense physical and spiritual anguish unequalled in my own experience.

In the political classes, when you embarrass a president, or a senator, or a governor, there is a kind of divorce that normally takes place. Usually, the offender is cut off, persona non grata. And I fully expected that would be my fate. I deserved it for what I had done. I had screwed up entirely, and it was all my fault.

But by God’s grace, that was not my fate, and a new and better chapter of my life would commence in a way I could never have imagined. Providence carried me through in a way I could not comprehend at the time. God was faithful in the midst of my unfaithfulness, and He brought into my path a remarkable family, set of friends, and colleagues who helped me and my family when I and they needed them most.

LOPEZ: “Whatever punishment was to follow that day and in the weeks to come, I deserved it completely.” Did you deserve the forgiveness you seemingly received? Or is that the point of the story?

GOEGLEIN: I did not deserve the forgiveness that was extended to me by President Bush, by my family, by my White House colleagues, and by my friends. I expected a kind of decoupling to take place, and to be cut off from those I loved and worked with — and whose friendship had been my joy and privilege.

By God’s grace and mercy, the opposite happened through no merit of my own.

I chose to open my memoir at the nadir of my life, and I describe in detail my Oval Office exchange with the president. I still cannot fathom his extension of forgiveness to me. It flowed from his own faith. He told me he had known grace and mercy in his life and was extending it to me.

The word I use in the book to describe my time in the Oval Office with President Bush when I went to see him after my plagiarism was exposed is “surreal.” It is, in fact, hard to understand why the leader of the free world would choose to spend time with me, pray with me, and offer his forgiveness and concern to me and for my family.

But I wanted to evoke for the reader the elemental nature of George W. Bush’s character and integrity. It is deep and wide, and I believe it goes to the heart of his internal moral compass, which points to a kind of greatness of soul.

It does seem, on its face, unbelievable that he would choose to offer his compassion to me in such a personal way with so many other things and people competing for his time. But he did, and it was the most incredible, surreal expression of grace personified in my life.

LOPEZ: National Review among others on the Right were not big fans of President Bush’s faith-based initiative. But something else for a moment. You write about it, “Religious groups seeking entrée to federal funding would not have to check their principles at the door as they were used to doing.” Is this quite a contrast from the current administration?

GOEGLEIN: On many occasions when I was with the president — in meetings related to the faith-based office and in many unrelated to the faith-based office — I heard him say the agenda of that office was really important to him, and to his larger domestic policy. In other words, what might seem to some as just another office in the White House matrix was central to the man who founded and created and nurtured it along for eight years, often in the face of heavy criticism from the Left and Right.

That is a contrast with the current White House. The office remains open, albeit with a slightly different title, but there is not a general sense that it remains as close to the heart of President Obama as it did to President Bush. President Bush uniquely paid close attention to the direction of the office and its legislative and Cabinet roles. It meant that much to him.

LOPEZ: “The single most important thing I learned from my own work with the faith-based initiative, however, had nothing to do with the constitutional battles over federal funding, or the related ideological disagreements on the Right and Left over hiring and firing rights for ministries receiving federal funds, or the internecine battles over the proper role of religion in public policy. The crucial thing I learned, and it sort of frightened me as first, is just how vicious some could be toward the president simply because he was willing to stand up and talk publicly about his faith.” After 20 years in Washington, really?

GOEGLEIN: The differences over fiscal and tax policy, foreign and security policy, and a host of other issues can be tough and toxic, to be sure. We see it almost every day in Washington. I recognize how those differences evoke strong sentiments and feelings in our national life, and I do believe they can spark a numbing toughness all of their own.

But if a man or woman in public life speaks out, from his or her faith, on how that faith informs his or her views or votes on an array of economic or social issues of the day, or how that faith informs his or her decisions or decisionmaking process, or how that faith shapes or forms or impacts his or her role in public life, there is too often — though not always — an almost predictable sense that the long knives might be drawn.

That is unfortunate because faith and public life go together in America. The relationship between religion and government, in the American experience, can be a healthy and good one. I do not believe America is going the way of a fully secularized Western Europe. I believe Michael Novak was right when he said America is a religious republic. We remain that.

When men and women in public life root their decisions in their faith, and speak out about how that faith informs those decisions, they should do so without the kind of raw, withering critique that too often flows forth in almost predictable torrents. This was true in the presidency of George W. Bush.

LOPEZ: “He made a sound decision to go to war in Afghanistan; he made an equally sound decision to go to war in Iraq.” How can you stand by such a statement as we pull out?

GOEGLEIN: I do not support a pullout. I believe the foreign and security policies President Bush made in the post-9/11 period were the right ones, and removing our troops from those two countries, I believe, potentially creates further dangers to America.

LOPEZ: Why is the “unseen pillars of civilization line” from his January 2004 State of the Union address significant to remember?

GOEGLEIN: Because I believe that George W. Bush was right about the foundational nature of the nuclear family to society. If we want a healthy, productive, confident country, culture, and civilization, we must work to cultivate healthy, productive, flourishing families. The confidence of great nations is rooted in families that are intact and unbroken.

Too often in America, that is not the case. The divorce rates, while leveling off, are too high. The out-of-wedlock birth rates are too high. Young people in our inner cities, in our suburbs, in our exurbs, and in our rural communities know too much brokenness in this new century.

As a nation, I believe we owe it to the rising generation of young Americans to nurture strong families, strong marriages, strong parenting, and the sanctity and dignity of every life. I am genuinely hopeful on this score. I spend a lot of time with young people in my work at Focus on the Family. They inspire me, and they give me hope. This is a remarkable generation of young Americans.

Young people consistently tell me they want to be married; they love their families. But they have lived through a broken sociology in their own homes and lives, and they are prudent and cautious about entering into marriage too early. There are some important trends in America that are going in the right direction. This is good news indeed. Among those encouraging trends: This generation is more pro-life than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

LOPEZ: “My role was to be a reliable middleman, to absorb and feed into the White House the best of what was conveyed to me from equally reliable outside stakeholders.” What lessons did you learn in that role about executive-branch policymaking and coalition building? How can a Republican White House best deal with conservatives? And vice versa?

GOEGLEIN: I learned that the conservative movement, broadly defined, is stronger than the Republican party. I learned that American conservatism is not of a piece, but has many avenues, and that is a good thing indeed. American conservatism has grown up, and with it have grown institutions that are doing excellent work on both the policy and the coalition-building sides. I learned that not only do ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver famously wrote, but that as Bill Buckley wisely said, only ideas have consequences. If the ideas give you the firmest and most excellent policies, the coalition-building that is necessary in American politics to support those policies will flow forward. LOPEZ: What do you, a Lutheran, mean when you say that President Bush has a “Catholic sensibility”?

GOEGLEIN: The Bush White House was an intellectually and even theologically muscular and stimulating place. It drew upon the best Catholic traditions of subsidiarity, for instance, in the way it crafted compassionate conservatism on a host of fronts, both in policy and in personnel. The Bush presidency was the most pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro–religious liberty/individual conscience in the contemporary era.

The stem-cell decision, which I write about at length, and the prime-time speech that flowed from it, had a Catholic sensibility in language and tone. President Bush’s friendship with Pope John Paul II is an important part of the Bush presidency, and I write about that friendship and its impact on policy and tone. President Bush is the only U.S. president to have attended a papal funeral, and President Bush hosted Pope Benedict in a luminous South Lawn event when the pope made his first visit to the United States.

I am uncertain how many U.S. presidents ever quoted a parable of Jesus Christ in their inaugural addresses, but when President Bush did so in that first inaugural — the parable of the Good Samaritan — he rooted its telling in a compassion growing from mercy which was simpatico with the president’s largest domestic goals, many of which were strongly supported by the Catholic Church. George W. Bush, I believe, is an evangelical with a kind of Catholic sensibility.

LOPEZ: Can you defend your contention that President Bush’s conversation with John Paul II on stem-cell research was “one of his most important discussions on that subject ever”?

GOEGLEIN: It is not a coincidence that the two men met on the cusp of the pending White House announcement. Timing in policymaking is crucial. The views of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church mattered, and they mattered deeply. President Bush wanted and welcomed a host of views and input in making that decision, but there were Catholic scholars and writers whose views, I believe, carried special weight with the president and the White House. Their views were fully in line with and often were most influenced by John Paul II’s brilliant, remarkable “culture of life” narrative. That narrative, I believe, was the most influential, important collection of concentrated wisdom and thinking affecting President Bush’s pro-life record and decision-making across eight years in the White House.

LOPEZ: Does Washington “push couples and families apart”?

GOEGLEIN: I write a chapter about the pace, tempo, demography, and subculture of Washington, which has a dynamic all its own and is often bewildering to families who are moving here for the first time. If families are not especially attuned to that subculture, I believe its dynamics can be tough on family life. It is just not the expense of home-buying or traffic — though those can be factors of stress or pressure on families, to be sure — but it is city often defined by the primacy of a career. When a profession is at the center, it can crowd out the space that is necessary for a thriving family life. Also, Washington is increasingly a city of young, bright, smart people who may not have getting married and forming families as their first or primary goals.

LOPEZ: What do you mean by “the fields are ripe for an imaginative conservatism”?

GOEGLEIN: I believe that conservatism at its finest is not an ideology with a political agenda. Rather, it is a way of life, and it helps guide the life well-lived. It prizes a moral order that is lasting and immutable; it defends the sanctity and dignity of every person, born and unborn; and it puts a premium on tradition not for its own sake but for traditions that are worth preserving. All this gives to life a kind of stability, continuity, and order that makes creativity and imaginative thinking flourish.

I agree with Russell Kirk on this point. He eloquently wrote in The Conservative Mind: “The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of spirit and character — with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.”

Edmund Burke, who influenced Russell more deeply than any other person, used the beautiful phrases the “moral imagination” and “the unbought grace of life” to illustrate the points he was making. This was consistent with other eminent British conservatives such as Johnson, Coleridge, and Newman.

A wonderful 21st-century legacy of American conservatism would not only be a healthy political and policy contribution to our great country but also a creative, imaginative conservatism which recognizes the centrality of impacting culture and advancing that which is beautiful, just, and true.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.