“Death creates an economy that makes life precious. One of the ways of naming that preciousness is friendship.”
Stanley Hauerwas

Christianity and US Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective

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American Protestant Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism properly construed doesn’t just mean someone who holds to something dogmatically. Its particular historical meaning comes from rifts within American Protestantism in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Fundamentalism sought to fight religious and intellectual modernism and all it represented. It insisted on the literal truth of scripture, but as historian Mark Noll shows, this wasn’t scripture as reformed evangelicalism would hold it. No, this was about what he called the ‘versification’ of scripture (carving it up into verses)—the taking of little pieces of scripture out of context, and insisting upon their self-interpreting authority. Sadly, and ironically, the result over the years has often been to undermine the authority of the Bible, by using it badly.

And these improper uses of the bible have had a direct bearing on foreign policy. Bad theology has produced bad politics. That is, American fundamentalism over the last 120 years gave birth to a whole new, now mainstream, genre of what they call ‘prophecy’ teachings. The Bible is full of predictions about ‘end-time’ events, they argue. They say Christians today need to decode the Bible’s prophecies on the one hand, and decode the real meaning of world events on other hand—and then match them up to see what is going to happen next.
  … in the post 9/11 years, we have seen an all too easy alliance between Christians and this neoconservative and ultra-nationalist foreign policy agenda.
 
 

 What this amounts to is the ability to view foreign policy in terms of an apocalyptic battle. Nations are read almost allegorically, representing the forces of good and evil. Currently in the US, you can see TV shows on cable about how American policy toward Iran is the next step in the apocalyptic equation. And it feeds into what George Marsden has called a paradox of paranoia. Fundamentalist-evangelicals have a sense of war in terms of domestic US culture wars: there are forces threatening to undermine the Christian-American way of life everywhere. Yet, paradoxically, the same people, the most vocal critics of government domestically, are the least critical of American government in terms of foreign policy: the evildoer shifts from being an internal domestic force (like pro-choice secular humanists) to non-American enemies of the State. That is, we move from fear of the State to dying and killing for the State—an odd paradox.

There have been numerous studies tracking the rise of the religious right. They went underground; avoiding the public square after the famous Scopes Monkey trial of the mid 1920s, and only began to resurface at a grassroots level in the 1950s. But it was in the 1970s and 1980s that they started to get politically organized into lobby groups and think-tanks: in short, to gain political apparatus and political weight. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were among the pioneers of this movement. And then they followed a similar track to the neocons politically - supporting Reagan over the avowedly Christian Jimmy Carter; being critical of Clinton, and as we all know, supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.

While they were mainly interested in a socially conservative, and perhaps fiscally conservative agenda, hawkishness in defense policy was part of the package. And it suited the evangelicals’ sense of patriotism, and sense of cosmic warfare. Hence the resonance of Reagan’s description of the USSR as the ‘evil empire.’

So to sum up, looking at the situation of post 9/11 US, we have to take into account these historical layers: American exceptionalism; the peculiar neoconservative mix of realism and idealism; and the rise of fundamentalism to political (and cultural) influence.
  While they were mainly interested in a socially conservative, agenda, hawkishness in defense policy was part of the package.
 
 

I should say at this point, that in terms of non-military foreign policy, such as aid, evangelicals including President Bush, have done an enormous amount of good, and have lifted spending significantly. This is most notable in Africa, for instance. (Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2006 gives a good account of evangelical influence on these less recognized aspects of foreign policy.)

So what can we do or say about all this?


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