Eric Patterson’s lecture at Christianity & National Security 2023.
Eric Patterson discusses the just war tradition, the Augustine nature of Christian realism, and international order. The following is a transcript of the event.
Mark Tooley: I am very glad that our first speaker today is Eric Patterson, the head of the Religious Freedom Institute, which has brought its own delegation of students here today. Eric is a longtime board member of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a contributor to Providence, and he writes or edits a book about every twelve months, so it’s very hard to keep up. His most recent book, A Basic Guide to the Just War Tradition: Christian Foundations and Practices, was just released, and I understand it’s only $16, so I encourage all of you to get a copy. Another book Eric released last year, which he edited along with Daryl Charles, Just War in Christian Traditions, to which I contributed a chapter, reviews how various Christian traditions have addressed the just war tradition. It’s a wonderful resource, and I commend it to you. Eric, thank you so much for joining us, and we’ve been looking forward to it.
Eric Patterson: Thank you. It’s truly an honor to be here today and to start off this conference. My remarks will frame what we call Christian realism, which is the shared framework for thinking about national security stewardship for our foreign policy and international relations that the speakers at this conference all operate from.
Before we get to this framework for Christian realism, let me take you back one hundred years to this month and year, 1923. We’re at two major, though horrific, anniversaries. This month in 1923, both a German Socialist Communist party took power in one German state, and two weeks later, Adolf Hitler and his followers led the Beer Hall Putsch to try to take over the state of Bavaria. How did we get to that point in 1923? There were two worldviews, two visions for Europe and the post-war order that came out of the First World War.
One of these you’re quite familiar with today. We call it a form of liberal internationalism, but it would be better called idealism or utopianism. Remember what it was like in 1918, 1919, and 1920. Six million dead in Europe, over 20 million dead worldwide as soldiers from Europe spread the Spanish Flu around the world. Western Europe was decimated. The former Russian Empire had fallen to the Soviets and was in a state of civil war after they were pulled out of the international war in 1917. We had a chaotic environment on the world stage and a retreat of the United States; we couldn’t get the Versailles Treaty through our own Senate.
America steps back from leadership. It was a time of destruction and deep sadness. You’ll hear about some of that sadness in Joe Lan’s talk when he discusses Tolkien and Lewis tomorrow. One viewpoint at the end of the war was that war was so destructive and terrible that we could never let it happen again. Idealists asked, “What can we do to banish even the thought of war?” One idea was disarmament. If we get rid of all our weapons or reduce them to very low levels and disband our army, like the U.S. military did, that will show that we’re not threatening to anybody, so everyone around the world will know we’re nice and won’t go to war.
Another idea was to create international laws that outlaw war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact and other treaties were specifically designed to make it illegal to go to war. So why would anyone go to war if it was against the law?
A third idea was to create international institutions like the League of Nations. “Let’s create an organization where, if there’s a bully, somebody somewhere will take care of it.” Everyone’s a part of it, right? Say we’re not going to go to war, and if someone breaks the rules, somebody in the organization will police them and stop it from happening.
That was the vision for the 1920s: free and open trade, open economies, etc. But what that resulted in was disorder. If you were a German in the early 1920s, you faced a number of negative realities. There were no battles during World War I on German soil. The Germans picked up from France and Belgium and marched home, so there was a sense in some quarters that they had been betrayed. Their leaders had betrayed them. But do you know why the German High Command sued for peace and accepted a harsh treaty like Versailles? Because at home, the fleet at Keel had mutinied. Hundreds of thousands of Communists were marching in the streets in 1917 and 1918, sabotaging factories and trying to stop the war effort.
The German High Command and elite families understood that their country was teetering and might fall into communism as happened in the Soviet Union in 1917. So they sued for peace, even though the Versailles Treaty was harsh. In the early 1920s, the Germans were paying reparations. The German leadership was very scared of communism taking over their country, and the government kept tottering and falling apart. In August of 1917, one U.S. dollar was equivalent to 200 German marks. Within a year, it was 4.2 million German marks to one U.S. dollar in twelve months.
That’s August of 1923, and we begin to see throughout 1923 fighting in the streets between Communists and the forces of the German government. We see the Communists try to take over Saxony in mid-October 1923, and at that point, a counterforce emerges. They saw that the international community was no help, with its idealistic notions of peace, love, and cotton candy, while they faced the Communists. The young Nazi party took its cue from the fascists in Italy.
The year before, Benito Mussolini and his forces had marched peacefully but forcefully across the country to Rome, the government collapsed, and the fascists took over. Earlier in 1923, the Bulgarians, who had been part of the Central Powers, allies of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I, had a military coup that got rid of a weak government. Hitler and those around him saw a hyper-nationalistic, chauvinistic, religious, cultural movement—a fascist movement—as what would restore German glory.
At the end of October, they planned a coup to take over Bavaria. By the way, you probably know the story. Hitler was marching alongside Göring and other early Nazis to take over, and they were stopped. Gunfire killed the man Hitler was walking with, pulling him to the ground and disabling his shoulder. What if that bullet had been a few inches over? History would have been different, right? Maybe Hitler would have gone to jail, and his speeches as a defendant electrified the country. By putting him in jail, they didn’t stop him; they gave him a national stage. It was in jail that he wrote Mein Kampf, setting a vision for a bold, aggressive, rearmed German state based on cultural and racial supremacy.
So in the 1920s, we have two visions. We have a vision in Italy, Germany, and Japan of racial superiority and an aggressive nationalistic state, and we have a wobbling international system hiding behind paper. The apogee of the West’s weakness was Neville Chamberlain a decade later, flying twice and begging Hitler for peace, and then flying home after selling out three countries—not one, not two, but three—and saying, “I hold here in my hand the signature of Herr Hitler. This is peace in our time.” And of course, it was peace for a few months, and that’s all
Are those our only two alternatives? No. What developed in the 1930s was a third way of thinking about international affairs, deeply rooted in a Christian theological perspective, not idealism—though there’s a lot of hope—but rooted in a realistic approach to world affairs. We call that Christian realism. We associate it with theologians like John C. Bennett and Reinhold Niebuhr, and also with historians, professors, and diplomats such as Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight, and others a few years later. People like John Foster Dulles clearly fit into this category. What I’d like to do is walk you through eight points of this framework because this will be the superstructure for much of what you hear over the next two days.
First, Christian realism is a strand of international relations or political science. Christian realism is rooted in social science analysis. This isn’t biology, but it is rooted in an academic study of how to think about international relations, national security, and political science.
Second, this tradition is theologically Augustinian, especially in its approach to politics and anthropology. Augustinian anthropology acknowledges that all have fallen short of the glory of God and are sinners. Humanity is a fallen race, but God has given us tremendous potential. We are meant to be stewards, to take dominion of the Earth, which means we have political and social responsibilities. “Dominion” here means responsibility for a domain, not domination. Stewardship involves managing a domain responsibly, not crushing dominion. This theological anthropology, which sees people as fallen but created in the image of God, gives us work to do and hope for what can be achieved.
Third, Christian realism in the Augustinian tradition emphasizes political order in a fallen world. We live in a fallen world, but that doesn’t mean we give up or chant idealistic slogans. It means we get to work. Romans 13 and models from the Old Testament show that government is a natural institution created by God. Government can take many forms, but its role is to preserve order, punish wrongdoing, and advance justice.
Fourth, Christian realism emphasizes power. We don’t talk much about power as Christians, yet power is a neutral category. It’s not inherently good or bad; it is a force that authorities are supposed to use for the common good. Power exists in different domains: parents have power in their domain, churches have ecclesial authority in their domain, and business leaders have power in their domain. Recognizing the goods that power can achieve, such as law enforcement protecting us, reminds us that power is not necessarily a bad thing. There are three ways to think about power: coercion, persuasion, and diplomacy (persuading someone that something is in their real interest). In national security or foreign policy, power should be used for the common good, often in the realm of mutual authority. Coercive power is sometimes necessary, as in stopping Hitler when diplomacy breaks down.
Fifth, Christian realism criticizes the potency of collective chauvinism, including hyper-nationalism, ethnic, religious ideologies, and materialist ideologies like Communism or Socialism. Christian realists are skeptical of any group claiming that its culture, language, religion, or ideology is superior to others. The Christian realists of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s criticized fascism, Communism, and ethnoreligious idolatry in each case. Why? Because it elevates the group—Germans, fascists, Japanese—above God, creating an idol of a people group and claiming that everyone else is subhuman, barbaric, or lesser.
Sixth, Christian realism analyzes social phenomena on three levels: individual, domestic society, and international. Often, a history book or analysis of a certain event focuses on one aspect. For example, Napoleon’s role in France for 20 years might be the focus, ignoring domestic politics or a weak international system. Another book might focus solely on global anarchy due to the lack of a world government. Christian realists recognize that when examining war, peace, and international life complexities, individuals and their personalities matter.
You can’t fully understand World War II without understanding Hitler, Churchill, and FDR, but that’s not all. We need to consider domestic political structures—what allows a regime to put the brakes on or go to war. How does decision-making differ between groups in a pluralistic society? We also examine the international situation—what factors at the international level are most likely to lead to peace or cause war? What are the irritants in international life outside the control of governments, such as terrorist groups?
Seventh, Christian realism is inherently anti-doctrine. Christian realism rejects most “isms.” In the writings of Christian realists, they avoid being tied to any partisan, policy, or viewpoint, and are critical of narrow thinking that imposes an ideological agenda on everything. During the Cold War, Soviet Communism and Chinese Communism, exemplified by Mao’s little red book, required everything to fit into an ideological box. If you didn’t fit the ideology, you were eliminated. These views lack the creativity needed for political phenomena and elevate a way of thinking above Christianity, above Christian witness.
Last, eighth, Christian realism always discusses limits and restraint. In the next couple of days, Paul Miller will talk about Afghanistan, focusing on limits and restraint. We can only do so much. Daryl will later discuss Ukraine, addressing the questions of limits, how far we go, what can be done, and how we consider tradeoffs. Christian realists frequently address unintended consequences. If we do this, what might happen? What might we not intend? What might be second or third-order effects of this policy? Rebecca Heinrichs, likely speaking on nuclear deterrence, is considering, “If we do this, they might respond in these seventeen ways.” How do we evaluate all the strategies we could employ for peace, and how do we consider the ways the other side might respond, including unintended responses? Christian realism is always concerned with limits.
The just war tradition is part of that, emphasizing restraint to prevent governments from becoming idolatrous entities unto themselves and considering secondary or unintended consequences. This is the Christian realism tradition. The leaders of this tradition in the 1930s and 40s went on to influence the U.S. Department of State and the White House.
On the 25th anniversary of Time magazine in 1948, who did they put on their cover? They could have chosen the President of the United States, who would have been worthy. Israel had just become a country, so perhaps someone from Israel. The United Nations had just been founded, so maybe someone from the United Nations. Maybe a famous baseball player, poet, or musician. No. The cover of the anniversary issue was Reinhold Niebuhr, the father of the Christian realism tradition, because of his impact on how the West would think about politics.
I’ll end here and open it up for questions. There’s a mic here to capture it for the video. Please raise your hand, and the mic will come to you. Identify yourself and your institution, and then we’ll take your question. If you’d like to tweet about this conference, the hashtag is 2023. That’s right. Mark, can anyone attach it to my MySpace page?
I’ll end here and open it up for questions. Please raise your hand, and the mic will come to you. Identify yourself and your institution, and then ask your question.
Q&A Session:
Question: My name is Daniel. I’m with the Gilder Iman Institute. Do you have any readings or comparisons of Christian realism and Christian Zionism? Are they complementary or combative?
Answer: Christian Zionism, depending on the flavor, is a minor tradition. There hasn’t been a clear analysis comparing the two. On the Providence pages, there are two articles, one by Marc LiVecche and one by me, that sketch out this framework in about a thousand words. This could be a research project for you.
Question: John Bush, U.S. Embassy Kiev. Although I’m just here as a private person. A lot of the elements you were describing line up perfectly with Russell Kirk and traditionalist conservatism. I’m curious, obviously, he’s active in the same era that Christian realism is being birthed. To what extent did the two groups interact?
Answer: Thanks for asking about that, and greetings from mutual friends. In the 1930s and 40s, many who became Christian realists were actually center-left. Niebuhr was, and others. This had to do with the political dynamics of the country, which were quite different at that time. For instance, the conservative movement in the country had a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism, Charles Lindbergh and others, so our parties don’t exactly map today to that time period. But I’d say that Christian realism, this Augustinian approach to politics, is not something new. When Augustine talked about Christian just war thinking, or when Victoria analyzed Spain’s involvement in the New World in the 16th Century, they were using these same categories. We just didn’t have this coherent name for this broad stream until the mid-20th Century. National security conservatives, who were really classical liberals, not reactionary conservatives, fit into this tradition.
You mentioned Kirk specifically. Anti-doctrine ideologies, worldview—all these points lined up perfectly. But you’re saying they didn’t really cross paths. In the big, classical, liberal tradition of the United States of ordered liberty, strong national defense, popular sovereignty, individual rights, all of those things, the answer would be yes. But when it comes to what the political coalition looked like in the mid-1940s, Niebuhr and others are not responding directly to Kirk, for instance, in that strain of conservatism. In the second generation of Christian realism, particularly in the Vietnam era, figures like Ernie Lefever, Paul Ramsey, and others who identified more with traditionalism did cite Russell Kirk, showing a pull towards a more traditional view.
Question: Alberto Lumas with Brownson Hyatt. How does Christian realism differ from traditional realism, the realism of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Cardinal Richelieu? How does it fully differentiate between Machiavelli’s realism, which tends to be more, maybe not necessarily moral, versus Christian realism, which does sound like it’s trying to find moral means or moral ends?
Answer: Within the larger realist tradition, we often find states have their own logic. There’s no sin in international relations, just realpolitik—it’s just the state doing what it has to for its own power and security. Or, there’s a Machiavellian view. Machiavelli was pro-democracy in some ways, right? You read the Discourses. But in The Prince, he suggests the leader has to do whatever it takes. There’s a political logic based on power. The Christian realist recognizes the world as sinful and fallen—that’s a real moral category. The state doesn’t just have a preservationist view where anything goes; there are categories. The purpose of the state is the common good—international peace, international security, the good of all people. That’s quite different from the other form of realpolitik, which focuses solely on power.
Our government has a responsibility to its own people, but that doesn’t mean it has no other moral responsibilities. We’re going to hear more about that in the next talk on Ukraine or Marc LiVecche’s talk on Hamas today. They fit into that category.
Question: Good afternoon. I am a professor at North Greenville University. How does, or did, Christian realism regard Christian pacifist traditions from the Quakers, Mennonites, and Amish? Were they completely incompatible, or is there commonality between the two as well?
Answer: I’m glad you asked. I was waiting for that question. When it comes to Christian pacifism during the 1920s, most American churches took a pacifist stance, but not out of rich theology. They didn’t, for instance, go to the confession of 1523 and expound a rich, fully orbed Christian pacifism based on Christians being outside of the world, etc. That was not the case for most churches, except those in the Anabaptist tradition, which only make up about 3% of Christians. They were the ones who held that way.
What happens in the 1920s is a kind of political pacifism, including in the churches, that says things like, “War is too horrible to think about ever happening again. We have to figure out ways to love our neighbor; we’re going to invest in international peace and security,” and so on. Christian realists, like Niebuhr in the 1920s, started as pacifists, as did many others like Bonhoeffer. They were responding to the horrors of war, feeling the need to find another ethic. The ethic they initially landed on was turning the other cheek. But as Martin Luther said, “If you tell the lamb to lay down with the lion, the lion’s going to eat the lamb.” What Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan did in the 1930s pushed Niebuhr and others to say, “We have to recover the historic Christian ethic and stand firm against evil.”
Question: Todd McDonald, student at Virginia Tech. I was thinking about how some of these principles would be applied. During World War II, there were many actions that hadn’t been traditionally done in war, like the bombing of civilian populations in Japan and Germany. What justifications or opposition would Christian realists offer for something like that? Are there specific thinkers you’re aware of who addressed these issues at the time?
Answer: I’ll answer this question by giving three different Christian perspectives on that specific issue. There were debates among Christians on this very topic. Mark LiVecche, who you’ll hear from later in this conference, has a new book coming out on Hiroshima and the justifications for it, so he’s a great one to ask about this as well. But here are three positions.
One position is that it was wrong—when bombs were dropped on cities and civilians were killed, it was wrong. For example, a famous Catholic thinker at Oxford, Elizabeth Anscombe, actually tried to get Oxford University not to give an honorary doctorate to Harry S. Truman because he ordered those attacks. My view is that she was wrong, but others felt strongly that, even if it meant saving other lives, civilians should never have been bombed.
The second view is the one Niebuhr and some Christian realists took, which I would call a lesser evil or dirty-hands view. In this view, we live in a fallen world, and we have no good options. Every option involves some killing and destruction. So, we will be guilty of killing. There’s moral guilt in those cases if we’re bombing military targets and accidentally killing civilians. We have blood on our hands, and we just have to accept that guilt because we’re in a fallen world. This is the tragic Niebuhr view.
The third view is the classic just war view. It says true leaders can make wrong decisions. Where does the first part of that sin occur? It starts when leaders act on an unjust cause or with wrong intentions. Did we bomb that military plant in that city because we were prosecuting an unjust war? After December 7th, it was not an unjust war for us to go after Japan. Were we acting out of hatred and vengeance? If so, that’s sinful. Or were we trying to end the war as quickly as possible to save civilian lives and the lives of our troops? If the bombings, like Hiroshima, were intended to bring the war to the fastest possible close, then it was legitimate.
Question: Isaac Weber, Patrick Henry College. I suspect we’ll get into some of the particulars as we go along with the conference, but in the meantime, is there a framework within Christian realism that helps us weigh issues like emerging technologies or transhumanism, which are not specifically addressed within the Augustinian tradition but that the Augustinian tradition can still speak to tangentially?
Answer: The answer is absolutely yes. The first step is getting human nature right. An Augustinian worldview is biblically based on God’s calling to people, the naturalness of male and female, and the reality of sin in human nature. It is morally and theologically orthodox in these ways. So, when it comes to evaluating something like transhumanism or other emerging technologies, we must start from a standpoint of biblical orthodoxy on what it means to be human. For example, if we consider genetic modification of the human person or implanting chips in our heads, which already happens in specific cases like for brain injuries in the military, we need to start from a position of Christian anthropology, Christian thinking on human nature.
The same principles apply to other areas like artificial intelligence or cyber warfare. People might say, “It’s out of control,” but that’s not really true. We start with categories Augustine writes about, which are found in the Christian just war tradition and within the larger Christian realism framework. We begin with authority: someone is responsible. We consider how cyber warfare aligns with the law of armed conflict and the just war tradition. We ensure that those who create these technologies operate within the limits and restraint of principles like just cause.
The value of Christian realism is that it’s not a static framework. It brings to bear the reality that we live in the real world. We have responsibilities and hope in Christ. In our vocations, we should be looking for the most creative ways to advance the common good.
Question: Elizabeth Nala from Taylor University, Indiana. You said Christian realism inherently rejects “isms.” Is there any space in Christian realism to use frameworks like colonialism or feminism in analyzing international phenomena? Could these be useful, or are they inherently harmful in interpreting situations?
Answer: This is a smart question to help us think about this. The Christian realist would say that none of these metanarratives, which are exclusive to the Bible, have full authority to answer life, the universe, and everything. That’s the critique.
However, Christian realists have no problem with academic study using what we call in the social sciences mid-range theories. These theories explain some things, right? A mid-range theory explains a, b, and c most of the time. We’re talking about millions of people: geography, war, economics—they don’t explain everything. When you read, for instance, feminist theory, or when you read Niebuhr deconstructing political ideologies and nationalism, it’s appropriate academic deconstruction. What are the power relations? What are they really saying? We find this type of analysis in the English school of international relations theory and social sciences today.
What Niebuhr didn’t say was, “Tear it all down,” and that this is a good end in itself or that any one lens is the ultimate lens for understanding everything in the universe. For Christians, the ultimate lens needs to be rooted in the Bible.
Question: Anna Brier, Internet RFI. To what extent were Niebuhr and others framing this new sense of Christian realism as a strand of civil religion, or was it distinctly Christian? How unifying was it? Did certain strands of Christianity have severe conflicts with it?
Answer: They started writing at a time of debate among theologians about orthodoxy and neo-orthodoxy. Some, like Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, were not all that orthodox in their theology at Union Seminary. But they realized that the Social Gospel, the idealists, the utopians, the Dewey-ites, and the worldview that we could educate ourselves out of our problems and that humans were always going to make progress, could build the kingdom of God here on Earth. By the early 1930s, they realized that sin is real. Human sin is a real category. They had considered it a storybook concept in the Bible, discussing the history of the Bible, analyzing the Greek versus the Hebrew. But then they were hit with the reality that evil is real. Human sin is real.
In the 1930s, much of their focus centered on understanding Soviet Communism, the gulag, and the Nazis through the lens of sin. While many of those early academic Christian realists in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were not theologically conservative, over time, in the second and third generations of Christian realism, there has been a significant swing back towards theological conservatism, along with a focus on national security. Writers like Jean Elshtain, George Weigel, Joseph Capizzi, myself, Marc LiVecche, J. Daryl Charles, Keith Pavlischek, and Mark Tooley have represented this shift over the past 40 years.
Thanks.
