Empire

Formal religious adherence is declining, but America’s longtime religious self-identity as a lodestar of democratic responsibility in the world continues unabashed.

I am grateful to Paul D. Miller for his recent review of “Between Babel and Beast.” Some of his criticisms hit home, some miss the mark. I respond to a few.

We need a theological critique of American nationalism and the way it shapes the American foreign policy. Such a work must be theologically grounded but also historically informed and politically aware. Peter Leithart’s book Between Babel and Beast meets the first criterion but fails on the second.

In Safe Passage, Kori Schake details how transitions in geopolitical power lead to violence, except when the United States slowly and peacefully took over the hegemonic role Great Britain played.

Many millennial American Christians hold apathetic views toward patriotism, and even worse, they advocate for a perspective that sees the US as an empire.

Would those Catholics promoting integralism instead of liberalism support a nationalist-isolationist foreign policy, or empire?

Last month Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—” was scrubbed from a mural at Manchester University because students believed that Kipling stood “for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights.” But his “The Ballad of East and West” can hardly be racism.

The current nationalist fervor could actually be a sign of nation-states’ weakness, a gasp that belies a lack of confidence in it as a form of government that can adequately represent a people and govern them fairly.

Preoccupation with “empire” by some American Christian elites may be back now that Donald Trump is president.