God's Country?

Evangelicals & U.S. Foreign Policy

September 26, 2006

In his recent article in Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead argues that as U.S. evangelicals exert increasing political influence, they are becoming a powerful force in foreign affairs. In recent years, evangelicals have voted overwhelmingly Republican, helping to put conservatives at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, while focusing their energies on a handful of specific issues, including support for Israel, the promotion of religious freedom abroad and the alleviation of hunger in Africa. But as evangelicals mature politically, they are showing interest in a broader array of foreign policy issues, including some, such as global warming, traditionally seen as liberal.

The Pew Forum invited a group of journalists to hear Mead discuss his article and asked Leon Fuerth, of George Washington University, and Richard Land, of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, to respond to it.

Speaker:
Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

Respondents:
Leon Fuerth, Research Professor of International Affairs, Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University

Richard Land, President, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

Moderator:
Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to improve readability. Read the full transcript.

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LUIS LUGO: Evangelical Protestants, as most of you know, constitute about a quarter of the American electorate. In the last presidential election, they voted 78 percent for George W. Bush, and that constituted about 40 percent of his total vote. Evangelicals have made a name for themselves, primarily through their involvement in domestic culture-war issues. But in recent years, they have also been building up a head of steam on foreign policy issues.

Everyone knows that evangelicals are stalwart supporters of Israel, and that has been the lodestar of evangelical foreign policy. But of late, they have also been branching out in significant ways, in areas such as human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and international religious freedom.

Just how are evangelicals influencing the priorities of American foreign policy? What is the extent of their agenda on these humanitarian issues? How do they view Islam and the war against Muslim radicalism? What are the main fault lines on foreign policy issues within the evangelical community?

To help us explore these and other questions, and the implications for the future direction of U.S. foreign policy, we are pleased to have with us three very distinguished experts. Walter, let's hear from you first.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: We can talk about the theological differences between mainline Protestants and evangelicals. I'm not sure that that would get us very far today. I have concentrated, in the article and in my work, mostly on evangelicals' impact on foreign policy.

One thing I didn't say in the article, but is very important to understand, is that their biggest impact on foreign policy is not necessarily a direct result of their own views. The fact that evangelicals, for largely domestic reasons, tend to vote Republican means that when people have made foreign policy in the United States, particularly in the last six years, they have been Republicans and not Democrats.

Nevertheless, evangelicals do have some rather specific foreign policy views that are politically relevant. In my article, I looked at two: one was their concern over poverty in Africa, and the other was a concern over Israel and Israel's place in American foreign policy.

I didn't say much about religious freedom in my article, but evangelicals have definitely been the major force in making religious freedom a much more salient feature in American foreign policy. When, for example, President Bush receives Chinese dissidents, they are now more likely to be members of house churches or groups like that than some of the more traditional dissident figures who might have visited past administrations. It doesn't mean that there is no concern for these other issues, but the secular human rights movement had more or less marginalized the cause of religious freedom and viewed it as one of many issues. For evangelicals, it is a central freedom, if not the central issue.

What we are seeing, then, is the emergence of a powerful force in American foreign policy. I believe the evangelical moment in American politics is not over and that the impact of evangelicals on American politics generally and on foreign policy in particular is likely to become greater. It is also likely to become less focused. As the group grows and matures intellectually and politically, you will see more diversity in the way leading evangelicals define their political agenda. For example, a few years ago, you would not have seen many evangelical leaders engaged in something like global warning; today you will find significant religious leaders in the evangelical community speaking out on global warning and saying the church ought to be involved with climate change.

You will see some learning through experience. Any group that hasn't been involved in a hands-on way with foreign policy tends to learn, once it has its fingers burned a few times, that foreign policy is complex, difficult, and sometimes requires counterintuitive steps – two steps backward in order to take a step forward a later date. But you will also see that American politicians must be increasingly able to relate the goals of American foreign to the religious and political concerns of evangelicals.

Why is this religious revival or this evangelical revival likely to continue in the U.S.? It is partly because liberal Protestantism is in serious decline. Liberal Protestants are the chief rivals of evangelicals for power and influence in the religious world, and the liberal Protestant crisis is a deep one. It's a demographic crisis; membership in the churches is shrinking.

It's also becoming a financial crisis. As denominational financial bases shrink, and more resources have to be devoted to keeping up shrinking congregations and aging buildings, there is less and less money available for the forms of national outreach that have characterized these churches. Seminaries and some others of the very elaborate and expensive institutional infrastructure that liberal Protestantism developed, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, are likely to come under increasing strain.

We will also see, I think, a theological shift toward a more conservative stance by some of these denominations in keeping with changes generally in American culture and religion. When brand X is working pretty well, brand Y starts trying to look more like brand X in order to be more successful.

Liberal Protestants are also less capable than they used to be of exercising the role of the convening body in American religion because of quarrels over abortion and other social issues with Catholics, and because of increased sympathy for Palestinians rather than Israel in the Middle East. Meanwhile, evangelical relations with both Jews and Catholics are far, far stronger than they were 30 years ago. Again, this is as much to do with domestic issues as it is with international issues.

LEON FUERTH: I'm an outsider to the religious strivings of the Protestant world. As I read Walter's article, I practically had to make a tally sheet to keep track of who was who. But I tend in the face of complexity to force simplicity, and what I derived is that there is an ongoing struggle over certain questions that are central to our foreign policy. One of them is whether the world is worth struggling over or whether it should be left to God entirely. Anybody who goes into government has already answered that question. You should not be in government unless you have an a priori conviction that the world is really worth struggling over.

But once you get into government, the next questions are what compromises are you going to make in the course of that struggle, and at what point in making those comprises do you run off the rails and reach a condition where what you are doing itself is destructive and should be abandoned. Those are eternal questions and any of us can think of their contemporary cognates.

One thing that has always interested me about the Pew Research Center is the image it creates of American opinion. It shows that the American people, by and large, are sane even when their leaders are not. The typical result of a Pew Research Center poll of American opinion, even on subjects considered to be red-hot and divisive, is a fairly clear rule of reason down the middle. I have always had this feeling that between theoreticians who understood where history was going and theologians who had the same sense, there were the American people who still looked at events with a critical eye and were open to argument and responsive to the facts. That goes to Lincoln's remark about how you can fool all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

With respect to this question of the range of foreign-policy topics that evangelicals are engaging in, my opinion is that range is destined to expand and expand in ways that one does not often think about at present. The interest in global warming, for example, is the front door to a lot else. One does not become interested in protecting the global environment as a religious obligation without marching into the interesting areas of economics, taxation, the ethics of use, the ethics of what is a common, the ethics of what belongs to this generation and what needs to be safeguarded for the next. When the evangelical clerics declared that the global environment was a fit topic for people of religion, they opened the gate to a great deal else yet to come.

In my work at the GW, I pursue work on something I invented called forward engagement. It's my effort to teach my students to think across the categories of disciplines – because in my experience in government, events did not obediently stay within those categories – and to think long range because the long range arrives on your lap soon enough, and very often, if you are not sensitive to it, the determinants of what the long range will be are actually in your hands but slipping through them if you're not thinking about what they are.

When I look at these long-range trends, I see things that no religion, not branches of the Protestant faith or Catholicism, or Judaism, or the rest, are ready yet to engage because of their speed and magnitude. I'll conclude by giving you an example. Last April I gave a conference at GW that I called three societal tsunamis. This was an effort to depict what I thought were three tremendously powerful forces capable of transforming the structures that we are accustomed to, and needing to be addressed now rather than later. One of these was what I call evolutionary succession. It was the result of my readings about the convergence of sciences such as genetics, nanotechnology, and informatics. I concluded that, driven by the marketplace, we will have sciences and technologies entering common use that enable us to select our destiny not only as individuals but as a species, and that this will happen in the lifetimes of those seated at this table, and that much of this will already be embedded before we can even ask ourselves whether it should be allowed to proceed down these routes.

From the point of view of the discipline that I try to inculcate, the future is already being shaped. The future is so dynamic that it is discontinuous with any of the experience that has shaped any of our religions. So in effect, all people of belief are going to have a hard time coming to grips with what is afoot.

RICHARD LAND: I very much appreciated Walter's article and where it appeared. I think he has picked up on an important underlying force in American social and cultural and political life.

On the three-fold grid [Mead] uses [evangelicals, fundamentalists and liberal Protestants], which I think is a very useful interpretive tool, I'm an evangelical. The vast majority of Southern Baptists are evangelicals. We do have Southern Baptists who are fundamentalists, and we do have Southern Baptists who are liberals, some of them rather famous, like Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Based on my experience of 18 years as a denominational agency head, I would say about 15 to 20 percent of Southern Baptists would fit into this fundamentalist category, and about 15 percent would fit into the liberal category. This would be reflected in the exit polling, for instance, from the 2004 election, which showed that people who identified themselves as Southern Baptists voted 84 percent for George Bush and 16 percent for John Kerry. That same exit polling showed that in 2000, they voted 80 percent for George Bush and 20 percent for Al Gore, which I think is probably the maximum vote someone like Vice President Gore could get from people who identify themselves as Southern Baptists.

Perhaps the most helpful thing to me about Walter's article was the concluding paragraph, because it helped me articulate what I already believe: "Evangelicals are likely to focus more on U.S. exceptionalism than liberals would like, and they are likely to care more about the morality of U.S. foreign policy than most realists prefer." I think that is true. Let me hasten to define how most evangelicals define American exceptionalism. They do not see it as a doctrine of empire; they do not see it as a doctrine of pride and privilege; they see it as a doctrine of obligation, of responsibility, and service in the cause of freedom under the rubric of to whom much is given much is required.

Most evangelicals I know would agree with me that they do not believe that America has a special claim on God, but they do believe that God has a special claim on them, that to whom much has been given much is required, and that we have an obligation and a responsibility to be the friend of freedom and to share freedom, to speak out in defense of freedom, and to help foster freedom. By freedom we mean more than just one vote, one time; we mean more than democracy. We mean what we believe are universal human rights of life and liberty.

I won't say that evangelicals deserve the major credit for the International Religious Freedom Act, which created USCIRF and the State Department's yearly report. But I will say, like General Patton did when there was a big fuss among the Russians and the Americans and the British over who should march first in the victory parade in Berlin, "We'll march last because no one can say we did the least to win the war."

Walter gets so much right in his article that it's hard to talk about the things he gets wrong, but I do think he gets it wrong when he talks about the evangelicals on Israel. I don't think most evangelicals wouldn't say this: "U.S. evangelical theology takes a unique view of the role of Jewish people in the modern world. On the one hand, evangelicals share the widespread Christian view that Christians represent the new and true children of Israel, inheritors of God's promises to the ancient Hebrew. Yet unlike many other Christians, evangelicals also believe that Jewish people have a continuing role in God's plan."

I think that is a conflation of what actually goes on. Within evangelical Protestantism there is a basic split. On the one side are people who accept what is called replacement theology, the belief that the church has replaced Israel, and that God's promises to the Jews and God's promises to Israel have been abrogated, and now the people of God are the church.

A majority of evangelicals reject replacement theology – I don't know any evangelical personally who would argue that the church is now God's children; they would argue that God still has a plan and a purpose for Israel, and that the promise that "God blesses those that bless the Jews and curses those who curse the Jews" is still in place. They would see the church and Israel as separate; that God is continuing to fulfill his promises with the Jews, but he has made other promises to the church. A majority of evangelicals would reject replacement theology, but there would be a significant minority who would accept it.

When you talk about liberal Protestantism and its demise, or its shrinking, you make a point that I think is made a little more tartly by Charlotte Allen in an L.A. Times column. She is the Catholicism editor for Belief Net. She says when your religion says "whatever" on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as another wise teacher, and refuses on principle to evangelize, and let's you do pretty much what you want, it's a short step to deciding that one of the things you don't want to do is to get up on Sunday morning and go to church

[Another] very important fact is the demographic one. Numerous articles show that conservatives in America tend to have a lot more children than liberals. This isn't just true of non-Christians; it's true of Christians as well. Liberal Protestants tend to have much lower birth rates than conservative Protestants, and this tends to show up 25 years down the road in a rather dramatic fashion. One calculation is there is a 41 percent procreation gap between people who identify themselves as conservatives and people who identify themselves as liberals in the United States.

The last thing is a little more parochial, but I think it's important. Southern Baptists are the largest evangelical denomination. We're the largest Protestant denomination. For the last 20 years, we have been growing at 12 percent a year outside the South and 2 percent a year inside the South. We have gone from being an intentionally white denomination – as late as 1970 – to being a denomination that is currently 20 percent ethnic. We have 750,000 African-Americans Southern Baptists, and about half-million Hispanic American Southern Baptists.

Southern Baptists were the de facto established group of the South. We consider ourselves insiders. We are far more comfortable with power than northern evangelicals have been historically. Once we were liberated from our Babylonian segregationist captivity, we have found it much more natural and much more comfortable to be involved in the public policy process than some of our evangelical brethren.

E.J. DIONNE: First, I want to assure Richard that my wife and I take our responsibilities to liberalism seriously, and we have three kids. So we want to make a difference. I always joke we have a 1950s Catholic family discounted for inflation.

Walter has been so instructive over the years in inventing revealing categories that allow us to see reality from a different angle. I want to ask Walter if, to speak in marketing terms, he can relate his current product to an earlier product, which is to say the interesting distinction you made a few years ago, very shortly after 9/11, when you went with some traditional categories of American foreign policy thought, including Wilsonianism, But the most interesting category was the Jacksonians. In my bastardized version of your Jacksonians, they are tough-minded, practical, more nationalist than internationalist, ready to fight but not eager to fight far away or for a very long time.

Two questions related to that: One is, it strikes me looking at opinion on Iraq, that the people whom the policy has lost may be your Jacksonians, that they thought it was a Jacksonian war; it turns out to be a Wilsonian war, and they don't like it so much. But secondly, I would like to see how your Jacksonians fit in with these religious categories because I suspect demographically a lot of the Jacksonians may be evangelicals, and yet I'm not sure there is a clear fit.

MR. MEAD: First, I think you're right, that some of the administration's problems have come from the fact that Jacksonians aren't so sure that a Wilsonian war is what they wanted. And a lot of Andy's polling is showing that where the administration has lost support has been often among Jacksonians. That would include issues like immigration.

If you look at things that Jacksonians want the government to do in foreign policy, they mostly involve protecting the American people from bad things outside America, which would include illegal immigrants, the loss of American jobs overseas, evil tyrants who were planning to attack us with WMD, and terrorists.

Once the WMD argument for the war in Iraq evaporated, Bush went to a Wilsonian strategy that hasn't helped him much. I have thought if he wanted to go up in the polls, he needs to talk less about how wonderful Iraq will be if we win and there is a beautiful democracy there, and more about how horrible it would be if al Qaeda controls all of this oil. He might get a second wind politically if he talks about the consequences of failure rather than the glories of success.

MR. LAND: Even as early as 1991 in the first Gulf War, George Bush's arguments and bankers' arguments that this was about oil fell like a dud among Southern Baptists. It was only when he started talking about St. Thomas Aquinas – as he famously said, "St. Thomas A-keen-us," (laughter) and this guy's a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale – that it began to catch fire among Southern Baptist constituencies, that this was something we should do. So I think it is more Wilsonian and will get more Wilsonian in the future.

ALAN COOPERMAN: Most of the foreign policy areas in which evangelicals are very active these days are areas in which there is a lot of common ground with liberals, both liberal Christians and liberals more generally, certainly in the Sudan and trafficking, and AIDS, and debt relief, and even religious freedom. There is not really much that liberals fear from evangelicals, except in one particular area, and that area is the Middle East, and it has to do with eschatology.

The question I want to ask – but first I'm going to burden you with a long mini-disquisition – is do evangelicals have a different attitude toward war in the Middle East than non-evangelicals? With a little bow to Leon and Leon's religious training, I would note that in Judaism, as I understand it, there is a bit of tension over understanding the question of whether we, living here in this world, can do anything to help bring about the coming of Mashiach, the Messiah.

There are two elements on this in Jewish tradition. One is the notion that we can do something; it is said that if all Jews in the world were to simply keep the Sabbath for two Sabbaths in a row, Mashiach would return. The other is, however, a Talmudic injunction against what is called hastening, that you should not do anything deliberately to try to bring about Mashiach.

Among evangelicals, in addition to in Walter's division, post-millennialists and pre-millennialists, there is also what Dr. Land referred to, a-millennialist. When I go out and talk with evangelicals, I find most have no fixed eschatology, but they do have an eschatology. They believe that the Second Coming is going to happen.

I just heard Dr. Land a moment ago say, "One important difference between us and our liberal friends is we believe God has a side; there is a plan." So I do not want to over-emphasize this. But I don't think most evangelicals, in my experience talking with them, actually believe we should try to bring about Armageddon. However, I do wonder whether as a general rule, a kind of attitudinal thing, commotion in the Middle East is less upsetting to evangelicals than it is to non-evangelicals.

If you watch something like CBN and the 700 Club, you will pick this up in the attitude presented toward events in the Middle East. The commotion that is going on there, the upsets, violence, et cetera, is seen both as upsetting and in a certain way as fulfilling of God's plan. I would wonder if Dr. Land could comment on the truth or falsehood of that.

MR. LAND: I have to take your word about CBN because I don't watch it, and I don't think most evangelicals do, if you look at their viewing audience. When you define "no fixed eschatology" as not claiming to have an idea of exactly how this is all going to play out or when, I would include myself in that number, and I think most evangelicals would, too. You'll find more fundamentalists who think they have got it all figured out and can play out the future of the world on a small flipchart, with only one flip, meaning that we are near the end.

Most evangelicals would take the view I take, which is that Jesus told us no man will know the hour or the day of his coming. And when he says no man, he means no man, even TV preachers on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. No one knows. It could be a thousand years from now; it could be next week. That is beyond our purview. Most evangelicals I know would agree with me that there is nothing we can do to either hasten or retard God's providence and God's plan; it will happen when God decrees it will happen.

MR. MEAD: Everybody has got their own view on this. But even though there is no direct connection between a war in Lebanon and the battle of Armageddon, the button is getting pushed that says, "God acts in history, the God of the Bible is the dominant force in shaping our world's reality today." When the Middle East looks like it's the center of world politics, it looks like religion is at the center of the secular world's concern.

This is one of the causal factors in the return of conservative Protestantism to a larger role. It's not the only one, by any means, but it's a real factor. It's a powerful apologetic argument, and not just in the United States. When I talk to Pentecostals and others in Nigeria, I hear the same thing – that for them, the fact that Israel is there is a sign that this Christian message is an important one. This is a real factor in politics, and it cuts in all kinds of surprising ways.

The first book published in the United States that predicted, based on scriptural prophesies, that the Jews would return to the promised land came out in the late-17th century, I think. It was published in colonial New England. So this is a very, very old theme. It has often been one that separated more conservative Protestants from more liberal Protestants, or more populist Protestants from more prophesy-oriented Protestants. It not only confirms for them that Christianity is true, and God is real, but also that my kind of Christianity is better than your kind of Christianity at predicting the future. To the empirical pragmatic American mind, that is a powerful apologetic tool.

Speakers at Pew Forum events are given an opportunity to review and approve their remarks. This transcript also has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

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