This remembrance helps develop a confident, enduring Christian hope that is more than wishful thinking and leads to real-world action.

If Michael Doran and Walter Russel Mead insist that Christian eschatology is relevant to American foreign policy, it makes sense to at least mention and analyze amillennialism and preterism.

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

Ultimately, why Americans see the world through one theological lens or another has a lot to do with whether they identify more closely with a Hebraic or Hellenic kind of Christianity. Put another way, American Christians view the world differently depending on how much they read the Bible, believe the Bible is divinely inspired, and accept the Bible as authoritative in their lives.

Rather than simply securing our borders or pursuing our interests, Americans continue to believe that what happens here is the fate of the earth. The real challenge to this consensus would be a view of America as just another country, neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally evil.

Are we, in fact, seeking through foreign policy to protect ourselves from a pre-millennial apocalypse—or, perhaps, to bring about a post-millennial one? The intellectual and spiritual resources of Protestant Christianity have a great deal to add to this debate. But up until now, I haven’t seen much evidence that these resources have yet been brought to bear on these questions.