God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy

Conclusion

205 Jonathan Chaplin with Robert Joustra Conclusion To conclude this volume, we first present some interpretive reflections on recurring themes in the foregoing chapters and then ask to what extent this book has clarified the possibilities and limits of the program of developing a “Christian perspective on International Relations.” One way to summarize the conclusions emerging in diverse ways from this book is to observe that they cumulatively call attention to three distinctive but neglected features of religion that bear powerfully upon international politics: its pastness, its thickness, and its potency. Part 1 explicitly makes a case for “taking religion seriously,” but the whole book implicitly makes a parallel case for taking history seriously. Religion and history constitute mutually reinforcing elements of the inescapable social rootedness of all human activity, and religious narratives , grand or otherwise, continue to supply the orienting frameworks in which political action occurs. Religious commitments are more than mere shifting brand loyalties or markers of individual self-expression, as they are typically construed by Western modernists: they often have deep, sometimes ancient, formative histories that must be reckoned with if the religious dynamics shaping global politics are to be rendered intelligible. 206 Jonathan Chaplin with Robert Joustra As Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, we are “at best co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please . . . we enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.”1 MacIntyre also claimed that secularist liberalism has itself become a “tradition,” albeit one whose constitutive self-understanding compels it to deny its traditional character.2 In the introduction we ourselves proposed that secularist liberalism functions in many ways akin to a “religious faith,” and Scott Thomas echoes that view in claiming to discern beneath the conceptual apparatus of contemporary IR “the operation of a distinctively secular and modernist teleology, an entirely secular mythos of salvation history.” The uncovering of the grand historical narratives of a modern secularist faith, then, is just as important as attending to the histories of what are typically thought of as “religions.” This is complicated, of course, by the fact that modern liberalism is to a great extent an outcome both of the successes, and of the subsequent secularization, of Christian culture, just as modern Christianity has itself been partly formed by modern liberalism. So discerning the pastness of modern secularism involves a close critical scrutiny of those complex historical intertwinements over five centuries.3 Most of our authors, however , do focus on the role in IR of religion as traditionally understood. Andrew Preston illustrates the significance of the pastness of religion by calling attention to the often-overlooked religious influences at work in the history of American foreign relations. He compares, for example, the relatively high level of scholarly awareness of the ideological factors operative in the Cold War with the relative neglect of the impact of the Great Awakening on the Revolution. The undoubted definitional and methodological challenges confronting a study of the causal force of religious factors in diplomatic history are, he ventures, no more serious than those which have been faced, successfully, by those incorporating the study of race and gender into the discipline. Students of religion in diplomatic history can thus usefully proceed by learning the methodological lessons of the new social and cultural history. While, as he acknowledges, the study of religion will never settle particular historiographical debates, it will add to our understanding of U.S. foreign relations precisely by complicating and thereby enriching their history. James Skillen discloses how three quite distinct and historically rooted variants of “Zionism” continue to drive American Middle East policy, often in unrecognized ways. Skillen even reaches back to antiquity to suggest that events like the conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC have lasting resonance for foreign policy right up to the present day. The study of the Conclusion 207 role of religion in American diplomatic history is every bit as relevant to coherent and effective foreign policy today as engaging the specific political aspirations of our current interlocutors. A lasting peace in (and with) the regions of Islam in particular should strike us as unlikely apart from a serious, protracted engagement with the histories of its peoples and beliefs. Dates like 1258 and 1683 are not incidental blips on the inevitable march of all cultures toward Western modernity but...