God and Country: America in Red and Blue

Chapter 10. GOD AND COUNTRY, US AND THEM

Chapter 10 GOD AND COUNTRY, US AND THEM 181 The incomplete (and occasionally incoherent) synthesis of Americans’ Puritan and Enlightenment worldviews is particularly confounding in the foreign policy arena. If our Enlightenment-rooted reliance on science and empirical evidence has been the predominant influence on national attitudes about the natural environment, religiously rooted moral paradigms have just as decisively provided the context within which we approach foreign policy. Conventional wisdom categorizes foreign policy preferences as either realist or Wilsonian idealist, but a fair reading of American history suggests that these are relative terms for characterizing approaches all of which fall within a decidedly Protestant moralistic worldview founded in no small part on a belief in American exceptionalism. David Gelernter, an unabashed and selfdefined patriot, has written that “Americanism is in fact a JudeoChristian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion” (2005, 2). While American religiosity is neither the undifferentiated force nor the unalloyed good that Gelernter seems to believe, he is undoubtedly correct in identifying the largely religious paradigm that frames America’s approach to foreign policy. Of course, in foreign affairs as in domestic policy disputes, it is not always easy to trace the roots of conflict, or to distinguish between 182 / God and Country religious and temporal disputes. As the eminent historian Walter McDougall has written: In sum, the interplay of religion and politics has been and remains more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests. In some cases, apparent religious conflicts—from early modern times to the Northern Irish and Bosnian strife today—can be interpreted as familiar turf battles in which religious prejudice has played the role of a “force multiplier,” inspiring greater zeal and sacrifice from the masses. By the same token, the origins and outcomes of apparent political conflicts —from the Crimean and Russo-Japanese wars to the recent war in Afghanistan—were powerfully influenced by religion. It was Napoleon, after all, who recognized that “In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one.” . . . [O]ur notions of history are skewed by the tendency of Western intellectuals to think in dialectical terms. Thus, we set realism and idealism, or secularism and religion, against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. In fact, the most profound students of Christian moral theology from Thomas Aquinas to Niebuhr argued that whatever is “unrealistic” (hence contrary to natural law) cannot by definition be moral! Applied to statecraft, this means that to expect utopian results from diplomacy and war is inevitably to invite immoral consequences. . . . A truly moral approach to statecraft, therefore, takes human nature as it is, respects limits, and acknowledges the contingency of all human creation . . . there is no virtue in stupidity. (1998, 3) McDougall’s insight is important: American realists and idealists do not represent a conflict between amoral pragmatism and moral principle; they are advancing arguments about policy that are equally rooted in morality and religious culture, but they are drawing different conclusions —often based on differing analyses of the facts—about where that morality lies. Although today’s “neoconservatives have often been supported by those elements of conservative evangelicalism with a robust, militaristic, and nationalistic sense of America’s purpose in the world” (Thomas 2005, 25), partisans in these conflicts often fail to fit comfortably into their expected categories in the hypothesized “culture wars.” God and Counry, Us and Them / 183 Realists may thus include literalists who believe in original sin; Wilsonian interventionists can be found among both millennialists and modernist social gospelers. David Gelernter to the contrary, there is no single Judeo-Christian approach to Americanism. It seems more accurate to suggest that the uneasy and imperfect melding of Puritan religious worldviews with Enlightenment rationality , synthesized through our various national encounters with historical events, has given rise to a peculiarly American worldview, to what Roland Homet has called prevailing national attitudes and Richard Hughes has dubbed national myths, that profoundly influences American foreign policy preferences. Homet categorizes those attitudes as Triumphalism (including “the white man’s burden” and various apocalyptic beliefs), Beneficence (or liberal humanitarian imperialism), and Modesty (realism and humility) (Homet 2001). As we have previously seen, Hughes has identified myths of “The Chosen Nation,” “The Millennial Nation,” and “The Innocent Nation,” among others. Those attitudes and myths are a product of our national self-image and the (largely Puritan) narratives we have constructed to describe America’s place in the world. Our national stories have informed...