God and American foreign policy
America's foreign policy seems strongly influenced by religion. But that influence is much more complex than its critics suppose
SEPTEMBER 11th 2001 drew the transatlantic alliance together; but the mood did not last, and over the five years since it has pulled ever further apart. A recent poll for the German Marshall Fund shows that 57% of Europeans regard American leadership in world affairs as “undesirable”. The Iraq war is mainly to blame. But there is another and more intractable reason for the growing division: God.
Europeans worry that American foreign policy under George Bush is too influenced by religion. The “holy warriors” who hijacked the planes on September 11th reintroduced God into international affairs in the most dramatic of ways. It seems that George Bush is replying in kind, encouraging a clash of religions that could spell global catastrophe.
Dominique Moïsi, a special adviser at the French Institute for International Relations, argues that “the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare.” Josef Braml, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, complains that in America “religious attitudes have more of an influence on political choices than in any other western democracy.”
Is America engaged in a faith-based foreign policy? Religion certainly exerts a growing influence on its actions in the world, but in ways more subtle and complicated than Europeans imagine.
It is true that America is undergoing a religious revival. “Hot” religions such as evangelical Protestantism and hardline Catholicism are growing rapidly while “cool” mainline versions of Christianity are declining. It is also true that the Republican Party is being reshaped by this revival. Self-identified evangelicals provided almost 40% of Mr Bush's vote in 2004; if you add in other theological conservatives, such as Mormons and traditional Catholics, that number rises closer to 60%. All six top Republican leaders in the Senate have earned 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition.
It is also true that Mr Bush frequently uses religious rhetoric when talking of foreign affairs. On September 12th he was at it again, telling a group of conservative journalists that he sees the war on terror as “a confrontation between good and evil”, and remarking, “It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening” (in other words, an outbreak of Christian evangelical fervour, of the sort that has swept across America at least twice before). And Christian America overall is taking a bigger interest in foreign policy. New voices are being heard, such as Sam Brownback, a conservative senator from Kansas who has led the fight against genocide in Darfur, and Rick Warren, the author of a bestseller called “The Purpose-Driven Life”, who is sending 2,000 missionaries to Rwanda.
Refuting the preachers
Yet there are qualifications to this picture. First, Mr Bush has frequently crossed his religious supporters. In his enthusiasm for trade with China, he brushed aside evangelicals' worries about government persecutions of Christians. Rebuffing several powerful preachers, such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, he insists that Islam is a “religion of peace”. He makes a point of visiting Islamic religious centres (including a visit within a week of the September 11th attacks) and involving mosques in faith-based initiatives.
America's foreign-policy elite is also one of the most secular groups in the country. Douglas Johnston, a former Defence Department official, calls religion “the missing dimension in statecraft”. Mr Bush's most controversial policy, the Iraq war, arguably rested on a failure to take religion seriously enough. The administration was preoccupied with the idea that terrorism had state sponsors—hence the desire to remove Saddam Hussein. It also argued that reordering the Middle East might wean people off radical Islam. But both ideas ignore the fact that Islamic extremism is at base a religious movement. Holy warriors don't need state sponsors to be effective. And democracy may well hand power to religious extremists.
Third, many outsiders hate America not because of its religiosity but because of its highly secular pop culture. In Pakistan 60% of the public has an unfavourable view of the United States. But the proportion rises to 75% among people who think that America is insufficiently religious. America makes enemies, therefore, as much because it lacks morality as because it seems soaked in it.
Critics of America's “faith-based” foreign policy make two errors. They lump all religious Americans together into one mass, and then confound the lumping by quoting the wackiest people they can find. (Oddly, many of the worst lumpers are the first people to insist on the importance of distinguishing between radical and moderate Islam.)
Ethical impulses
So what role does religion play in shaping foreign policy? The Euro-secularists are right about one big thing—the influence of religious groups on policy toward Israel. Americans support Israel for lots of secular reasons too, including sympathy for a nation of settlers and the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. But the booming evangelical movement, convinced of the vital importance of Israel in divine planning, provides a solid core of popular support.
The Euro-secularists are usually blind to the other big influence of religion on American foreign policy. Christians are at the forefront of attempts to make American foreign policy more ethical. They have encountered fierce resistance from the realists in the State Department (particularly over deeper involvement in Darfur) and from business Republicans (particularly over China). But they have significantly increased the size of the constituency that favours a moral foreign policy.
Evangelicals have campaigned against sex-trafficking and drug-trafficking, against poverty and religious persecution, and against the genocide in Sudan. They have led the charge to deal with AIDS in Africa - see Holly Burkhalter, The Politics of AIDS: Engaging Conservative Activists, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004 - (the person who did most to persuade Mr Bush to pledge $15 billion to that cause was his former chief speech-writer, an evangelical who has been dubbed “the conscience of the White House”). A group of leading evangelicals recently signed a statement on climate change proclaiming that the problem is real, that human activity is an important cause, that the costs of inaction are high, and that those costs are disproportionately borne by the poor...
From the Economist, Setpember 14th 2006
SEPTEMBER 11th 2001 drew the transatlantic alliance together; but the mood did not last, and over the five years since it has pulled ever further apart. A recent poll for the German Marshall Fund shows that 57% of Europeans regard American leadership in world affairs as “undesirable”. The Iraq war is mainly to blame. But there is another and more intractable reason for the growing division: God.
Europeans worry that American foreign policy under George Bush is too influenced by religion. The “holy warriors” who hijacked the planes on September 11th reintroduced God into international affairs in the most dramatic of ways. It seems that George Bush is replying in kind, encouraging a clash of religions that could spell global catastrophe.
Dominique Moïsi, a special adviser at the French Institute for International Relations, argues that “the combination of religion and nationalism in America is frightening. We feel betrayed by God and by nationalism, which is why we are building the European Union as a barrier to religious warfare.” Josef Braml, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, complains that in America “religious attitudes have more of an influence on political choices than in any other western democracy.”
Is America engaged in a faith-based foreign policy? Religion certainly exerts a growing influence on its actions in the world, but in ways more subtle and complicated than Europeans imagine.
It is true that America is undergoing a religious revival. “Hot” religions such as evangelical Protestantism and hardline Catholicism are growing rapidly while “cool” mainline versions of Christianity are declining. It is also true that the Republican Party is being reshaped by this revival. Self-identified evangelicals provided almost 40% of Mr Bush's vote in 2004; if you add in other theological conservatives, such as Mormons and traditional Catholics, that number rises closer to 60%. All six top Republican leaders in the Senate have earned 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition.
It is also true that Mr Bush frequently uses religious rhetoric when talking of foreign affairs. On September 12th he was at it again, telling a group of conservative journalists that he sees the war on terror as “a confrontation between good and evil”, and remarking, “It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening” (in other words, an outbreak of Christian evangelical fervour, of the sort that has swept across America at least twice before). And Christian America overall is taking a bigger interest in foreign policy. New voices are being heard, such as Sam Brownback, a conservative senator from Kansas who has led the fight against genocide in Darfur, and Rick Warren, the author of a bestseller called “The Purpose-Driven Life”, who is sending 2,000 missionaries to Rwanda.
Refuting the preachers
Yet there are qualifications to this picture. First, Mr Bush has frequently crossed his religious supporters. In his enthusiasm for trade with China, he brushed aside evangelicals' worries about government persecutions of Christians. Rebuffing several powerful preachers, such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, he insists that Islam is a “religion of peace”. He makes a point of visiting Islamic religious centres (including a visit within a week of the September 11th attacks) and involving mosques in faith-based initiatives.
America's foreign-policy elite is also one of the most secular groups in the country. Douglas Johnston, a former Defence Department official, calls religion “the missing dimension in statecraft”. Mr Bush's most controversial policy, the Iraq war, arguably rested on a failure to take religion seriously enough. The administration was preoccupied with the idea that terrorism had state sponsors—hence the desire to remove Saddam Hussein. It also argued that reordering the Middle East might wean people off radical Islam. But both ideas ignore the fact that Islamic extremism is at base a religious movement. Holy warriors don't need state sponsors to be effective. And democracy may well hand power to religious extremists.
Third, many outsiders hate America not because of its religiosity but because of its highly secular pop culture. In Pakistan 60% of the public has an unfavourable view of the United States. But the proportion rises to 75% among people who think that America is insufficiently religious. America makes enemies, therefore, as much because it lacks morality as because it seems soaked in it.
Critics of America's “faith-based” foreign policy make two errors. They lump all religious Americans together into one mass, and then confound the lumping by quoting the wackiest people they can find. (Oddly, many of the worst lumpers are the first people to insist on the importance of distinguishing between radical and moderate Islam.)
Ethical impulses
So what role does religion play in shaping foreign policy? The Euro-secularists are right about one big thing—the influence of religious groups on policy toward Israel. Americans support Israel for lots of secular reasons too, including sympathy for a nation of settlers and the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. But the booming evangelical movement, convinced of the vital importance of Israel in divine planning, provides a solid core of popular support.
The Euro-secularists are usually blind to the other big influence of religion on American foreign policy. Christians are at the forefront of attempts to make American foreign policy more ethical. They have encountered fierce resistance from the realists in the State Department (particularly over deeper involvement in Darfur) and from business Republicans (particularly over China). But they have significantly increased the size of the constituency that favours a moral foreign policy.
Evangelicals have campaigned against sex-trafficking and drug-trafficking, against poverty and religious persecution, and against the genocide in Sudan. They have led the charge to deal with AIDS in Africa - see Holly Burkhalter, The Politics of AIDS: Engaging Conservative Activists, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004 - (the person who did most to persuade Mr Bush to pledge $15 billion to that cause was his former chief speech-writer, an evangelical who has been dubbed “the conscience of the White House”). A group of leading evangelicals recently signed a statement on climate change proclaiming that the problem is real, that human activity is an important cause, that the costs of inaction are high, and that those costs are disproportionately borne by the poor...
From the Economist, Setpember 14th 2006
posted by WESLEY at 08:39
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