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Evangelicals influence on foreign policy

"God’s Country" by Walter Russell Mead was published in the Sept-Oct, v. 85, no. 5, 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs. I think it was intended to reduce the fear among the Democrats about the power of evangelical Christians in the upcoming (then) election. Maybe it worked, or provided clues on how to fake it, because lots of Democratic candidates played the religion card and won after seeing how they lost the values battle in 2004. I personally think it was because so many Republicans bungled it so badly. Even so, it is a very good article and I learned a lot about the role of religion in politics.

When I was a young adult, the only political game for Christians was liberal. I was 34 when I left the liberal church for an evangelical, liturgical church and 60 when I left the Democrats. The two are not mutually exclusive. Mainstream Protestantism which sort of has a "y'all come" attitude toward other faiths, believes a kernel of truth is as good as the whole cob. And if you've studied or even observed religions, they each have some similarities and certain moral tenants on which they agree. The worst sin for a liberal would be--well, calling something a sin because Jesus was a teacher of ethics and morality.

Liberals dominated the U.S. worldview during WWII and the Cold War--although how we stayed so humanistic and optimistic after the Holocaust, and 100 million dead from a century of constant war, I don’t understand. However, church membership meant about as much as belonging to any other social club, so liberals lost their influence. Facing questions about sexuality and abortion, the drug culture, rampant consumerism, soaring divorce rates and growing socialism within our own borders, many American Christians left the liberals and joined one of the two conservative groups--the fundamentalists or the evangelicals.

Mead notes that many non-religious people and secularists tend to confuse the fundamentalists and evangelicals and their role in politics, so here's his score card, and I think it's pretty clear.

"The three contemporary streams of American Protestantism (fundamentalist, liberal, and evangelical) lead to very different ideas about what the country's role in the world should be. In this context, the most important differences have to do with the degree to which each promotes optimism about the possibilities for a stable, peaceful, and enlightened international order and the importance each places on the difference between believers and nonbelievers. In a nutshell, fundamentalists are deeply pessimistic about the prospects for world order and see an unbridgeable divide between believers and nonbelievers. Liberals are optimistic about the prospects for world order and see little difference between Christians and nonbelievers. And evangelicals stand somewhere in between these extremes."

If you've been calling President George W. Bush a fundamentalist, you're just flat out wrong and you need to read this article. Evangelicals believe strongly in responsibility for the world social order, and will cooperate with unbelievers to improve human welfare, which the fundamentalists wouldn't do. But they don't neglect the salvation message of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection for redemption, which the liberals ignore or downplay. Evangelicals are not just limp wrist fundamentalists--they really do see the Christians' role in society very differently. Since the 17th century, there has been a widespread theology that the Jews would return to the Promised Land--that's not unique to our current foreign policy and culture. You'll get nowhere criticising evangelicals or fundamentalists for their support of Israel. Mead writes: "The story of modern Jewry reads like a book in the Bible. . . proof that God exists." Here’s the whole article. It's been archived. You won't regret reading it.