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Well, thanks for the welcome. I am not sure really how grateful you all should be that I’m here. I feel like being the first speaker at a conference with no breaks is a little bit like being the first leg of the Bataan Death March, you know. So all I can tell you is that this leg is going to be better than some of the others that are coming. I’d rather be the first leg than the last, I suppose.

When we think about the connection between Christianity and foreign policy, Christianity and national security, you know, we ask what these things have to do with one another. Oh, yeah, I’m sort of torn because there’s part of me that wants to say there’s actually not a lot of connection. In the sense of if you ask me what is a recipe for Christian cherry pie, I would say it’s not that different from any cherry pie recipe. The first thing that a Christian cherry pie has to be is a good cherry pie, and it doesn’t matter a whole lot who makes it. There’s no special holy ingredient that goes into Christian cherry pie.

Some have argued that a Christian cherry pie is made with love, and perhaps that’s true. But still, the concern with judging the pie as pie would be the same no matter who made it. I think a lot of that is true of foreign policy. It doesn’t help a bad foreign policy that the people who made it were trying to apply theological criteria or Christian ethical criteria to it. It doesn’t matter in many ways to a good foreign policy if it was made by atheists who didn’t give one single thought to religion while formulating it.

In that sense, not only is foreign policy not necessarily a religious activity, but it is something that Christians and non-Christians, religious and non-religious people can collaborate on, on a basis of real equality. I think that’s something that all of us maybe ought to remember, especially in a country like this, which is multi-confessional.

At another level, I think the relationship between Christianity and foreign policy is a very deep and important one. This is particularly, though not exclusively, in the American case. It seems to me that most voices in American foreign policy today are shaped by, or in the shadow of, a theological controversy. Even though many of the participants in this conversation aren’t aware of the theological roots of their worldviews or of their foreign policy views, these theoretical views are linked at a very deep level to some theological issues.

The starting point for trying to understand how this works is to look at the way American history coincides with a global phenomenon that I like to call the historicization of the eschaton. Now, isn’t this already feeling more like a death march? And what do we mean by the historicization of the eschaton, you might well ask? For me, what that means is this: the eschaton, as I’m sure all of you know, is a Greek word referring to the last, the end. The eschaton is our sense of what happens at the end of the world in a religious sense—the Last Judgment, the final things, things that are talked about in the Book of Revelation, etc. The apocalyptic has always been present to the minds of people.

There’s a sense that the world as we know it may someday come to an end. Personally, that’s connected to our own awareness that we as individuals face death. We don’t know when the apocalypse is coming for the whole world, but each of us personally is headed for an apocalypse where the stars will fall from the sky, the moon will turn to blood, and all kinds of other horrible things will happen, and we’ll be dead. There’s a sense in which this historical vision of where we’re all headed hooks into something very deep and personal for all of us.

For most of human history, the idea of the last days, the eschaton, was not really connected to our ideas about a historical process. For the world to end, something really supernatural was going to have to happen. God was going to have to do something big and dramatic to bring about the end of the world. Otherwise, it was just going to be one kingdom after another, one historical period after another. It would take a miracle to bring the world to the last days, and obviously, religious people expected and many were hoping for that miracle: “Maranatha, Lord Jesus.”

Beginning in the 18th century, and perhaps a few traces of it earlier, we began to move culturally to a place where the eschaton no longer had to be thought about in purely supernatural terms. We could think of history coming to some sort of an end, as my friend Francis Fukuyama would put it, as a result of human actions and a historical process. For example, the Enlightenment envisioned that the spread of knowledge and scientific technology would gradually enlighten the human race. War would come to an end, tyranny would come to an end—all of these things that we think of as history would come to an end, and at some point in the future, humanity would have a happy life. That was an eschatological idea, if you see what I mean; it was an end to history as we know it.

Carlisle tells the story that in the years right before the French Revolution, during the first balloon ascent from the French aristocrat watching this burst into tears. When asked why, she said, “Because I know it’s now true. Someday science will find a way so that humanity will live forever, but I’ll be dead before that happens.” This coincides in Christian religious thinking with what you would call a post-millennial view of the apocalypse. The spread of enlightenment and Christian principles would progressively change the world so that we have that thousand-year reign in a millennial era of peace and prosperity, and then at the end, Jesus comes back to crown this process of enlightenment and progress—much like the cherry on the top of an ice cream sundae, to carry out the cherry pie metaphor.

Then we also have a somewhat darker view of the eschaton, the premillennial view, which suggests that things aren’t going to end so well, at least in the short term. All the efforts at human science, enlightenment, and striving are going to fail. The church will fail, and there will be a reign of blood, terror, and persecution. Humanity as a whole will turn its back on God, and then at the end, there will come this cleansing act of God who transforms the world and brings salvation out of the ashes of human civilization.

We have these two views: both Christian views, both coming from people studying Holy Scripture, and both having a resonance in the thinking of secular and non-religious people as well. Now, America is a country whose existence, in a sense, begins with this view of a history where the eschaton is no longer a supernatural thing but is actually a direction in which human history is observably marching. America comes at a time of great hope, the hope of the Enlightenment, the hope that finally, superstition is being cast aside. Priestcraft and kingcraft are being thrown away. Ordinary people who can read their Bibles and study the laws of science and nature have the ability through their common-sense reasoning to reach true conclusions. The grace of God is flowing through a revived and purified church, and the principles of Christian living are now daily transforming the way the world works.

For Anglo-Americans, this was a reading of history that was almost second nature. If you lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the way you’d be looking at the past was that you had the ancient world, which was terrific, the principle Greece and Rome. You had liberty, you had a republic, and then you had Jesus coming and giving the true religion. You had the Apostolic Church, but then a long period of darkness: despotism in the secular world, papism in the religious world, superstition, and a degradation of the human experience. Then you get the Renaissance, which begins to recover the languages and the learning of the ancient world. The Reformation follows immediately afterward, introducing purified religious principles, and we get back to the sources of that golden era. In politics and life, you get English liberty triumphing through Oliver Cromwell, and even afterwards, England begins to rediscover the principles of market freedom, civil governance, and sound Protestant religion.

Now, this dynamo, which is becoming the most powerful country in the world—the UK—is also leading a civilizational and global transformation. The Americans then take their own view and say, “Well, the English have fallen by the wayside. They didn’t really get it completely, but we do.” They say the future of the United States is a world-transforming arc in which these true principles, now finally allowed to live free, are going to transform the world. The American missionary movement of the 19th century went out to China, and yes, they were trying to make the Chinese Christian, but they also believed that these Christian principles in China would end foot-binding, despotism, debt peonage, and all these other social horrors. They were bringing a light that was both civil and religious to the world, and it was America’s mission, duty, and privilege to play a key role in world transformation.

That’s a pretty foundational element of the American approach to foreign policy, which we certainly still find today. NGOs, State Department offices on religious liberty, and human rights agendas incorporated into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights come right out of that missionary movement. The sense of America as a country with a vocation comes from this optimistic spirit of 18th and 19th-century Protestantism, which sees its power and observes that the countries that embrace the principles of Christianity do better than those that don’t. The countries within the Christian world that are Protestant are doing better than those poor benighted Orthodox and Catholic countries, which was t

he way the world looked to people in places like the United States in the 19th century is that this progressive concept, the goal of foreign policy, is to serve a progressive and transformative end. It is as American as apple pie, if not cherry pie. Linking again in a very clever way, this is a debate that continues. You can see in American society that the darker view of the historicizing eschaton is also present.

The human race may not bring about the end of history simply by solving all of our social, moral, and civilizational problems so that we just coast into the millennium. Alternatively, we may foul things up so badly that we destroy ourselves. We can kill ourselves with nuclear weapons. Humanity could fall victim to a totalitarian ideology like National Socialism or communism. The powers of evil can win the historical battle against the powers of good.

During the Cold War, there was this sense of, on the one hand, the communist threat to everything good and decent about human life, and on the other hand, the nuclear threat to human life. You had to steer a path between these threats. You had to defeat communism while avoiding nuclear annihilation, which was a tall order. This approach puts American policy even today in an apocalyptic framework.

People in the green movement will argue that climate change poses a fundamental threat to the survival of the human race. If we don’t solve political and foreign policy problems in an ordinary political way, we could end up with an apocalyptic result—the end of human civilization or even the end of human life. We can also see in the progress of technology the possibility of altering the Tree of Life. People, particularly in Silicon Valley, talk about messing with human DNA to recreate ourselves as a species.

Finding computer analogues for human consciousness might lead to truly self-aware artificial intelligence or allow humans to upload their consciousness to computers, potentially surviving physical death. All of these things, which would have seemed like matters of supernatural traffic—demons or angels—are now considered real possibilities by reasonably well-grounded people in intelligent American society. They are investing money in companies that aim to move us toward these possibilities.

The realm of history, and therefore the realm of foreign policy, has gotten itself mixed up with realms that were once reserved for religious or theological understanding of the eschaton. From here, it should be a pretty clear step to understand that Christians have a unique ability to look at these theological issues, think them through, and bring clearer intelligence to these fundamental and troubling questions. The reality that we are at this point of apocalyptic tension drives many of the fanatical movements we see around the world.

Communism was certainly one engine of this, but movements like ISIS and other terrorist groups are driven by people who feel that everything is at stake. They believe that what we do historically as human beings can either bring on the apocalypse in a good sense or stand by while everything we value is destroyed by forces of secularism or other religions. In the midst of this chaos and confusion, Christians can bring two things to bear. One is a kind of skepticism about being so sure where the eschaton is going.

It is interesting that, when reading the New Testament, what Jesus says about his return or the Last Judgment suggests that nobody knows when it’s coming or what it will look like. The second coming may be like that—it might take us by surprise, and we won’t be able to predict it or even be sure what’s happening when it’s happening. That’s the only precedent we have for this, but Christians must remain grounded in the reality that we could be headed for a very good end of history. We could solve many problems, eliminate poverty, live sustainably, and achieve better relations among nations, but we might also fail and see the destruction of everything that makes life meaningful.

The second thing Christians can bring to the table is faith. In this historical storm where the stakes are clearly cosmic and the outcome unpredictable, it is crucial to trust in a God who is faithful. This faith provides the courage, strength, and stability to function effectively amid overwhelming stress and chaos. Christianity does not provide specific answers about whether the next 30 years will be good or bad. It cannot tell us where the boundary between Israelis and Palestinians should be or what our stance should be on the Paris Accord.

Christianity does not offer special answers that can be decoded from Bible verses. Like cherry pie, good and bad are not inherently religious or irreligious, but the ability to make intelligent decisions in the maelstrom of history involves faith and Christianity. I hope that the people in this room, should you survive the metaphorical death march you’ve embarked upon, will make distinct and important contributions to this critical period.

So, that’s an overview of my thinking on this topic. I’d be happy to take questions and open this up for conversation and discussion. Thank you very much.

Is that working all right?

Thank you, Walter. We’re going to take questions. I’ll start with the first question and try to model what I hope to accomplish. Typically, a question is a short interrogative with a question mark. I realize we may need to preface things occasionally, but let’s try to keep it limited so we can get as many questions in as possible. I’ll use the moderator’s prerogative to ask the first question.

You illustrate nicely how the 20th century demonstrates the horrors that can happen when you try to imitate or historicize the eschaton. At the same time, we don’t want to dampen the humanitarian impulses of the human heart. How do you navigate between an ambition for a charity abroad, say to defeat some evils one at a time, while not trying to immanentize the eschaton? What are some of the practical outcomes we could look for?

One thing is, I tend to favor the separation of church and state. I think we’ve gone a bit over the line in terms of the US government becoming the age of the change agent or missionary. I’m not sure the US government should operate an office in another country aimed at changing that country’s form of government. The blowback, such as Russian interference in American politics, can be seen as a reaction to our efforts to change Russian policy through various NGOs or quasi-independent groups funded by the government.

I think the missionary movement is a great example of American civil society engaging constructively with the world both in a religious form and also in a humanitarian and social form, and the ties in universities—the hundreds of thousands, the millions of international students who over the years have come to the United States to study—this has been terrific. So I think there are some things that the government can do, but we can’t forget that the government has a set of tasks related to geopolitical stability and the protection of core vital national US interests that don’t always align in a simple way with zeal for democracy. It may well be that the United States needs a stable Egypt, and that our government has no powerful power or ability to bring about a democratic Egypt. We’ve probably strayed a bit over the line and gotten ahead of ourselves in trying to make the American government an instrument of global reform. I don’t think we should, you know, I certainly don’t think things like disaster relief and some other things we should pull back from completely, but I think we need to, in order to do what we can do well, we need to think really hard about what the limits of government’s role as a social worker abroad can be.

Yeah, I can do that, or okay, I see one over here. Yes, please do introduce yourself. I’m behind Vincent. I’m at George Mason University. I’m interested in your thoughts on Augustine’s City of God, as it’s sometimes thought by some to be the first serious effort at Christian political theory.

But it seems to me he’s grappling with exactly what you’ve been discussing, which is how can Christian thinking inform political action in a meaningful way without getting lost in the weeds? Well, I think that is, you know, one of his contributions, is to kind of carve out the path there. I would say that overall, Christians who think about these issues, and for that matter, sort of idealistic non-Christians who think about these matters, keep running up against the Machiavellian problem that the prince who lives to do good may not be a good prince. If you’re so eager to obey all the ethical rules that you can think of that you lose control of your kingdom or you get deceived by enemies, or whatever, the consequences are worse than if you’d been a conniving Lucretia Borgia or something.

This ethical dilemma at the heart of Christian thinking of statesmanship remains, and it’s fundamentally how do you institute and defend good rule in a world of fallen people. This is where I think Christianity has something to say with the idea of the fall as a corruption of human nature. We can’t make government on the assumption that everybody is good, and that of course includes governors as well as the governed. I think some of the answers we’ve come up with in the United States, like limited powers and rule of law, while not perfect, are pretty good; at least they’ve worked for us reasonably well. But I don’t think that Augustine or anybody else—I don’t think Christianity is going to produce a cookbook for foreign policy or for domestic policy, for that matter.

Yes, right over there, to stay on the national interest Machiavelli line. Who are you? Daniel Strand, Arizona State University. The big conceptual idea of national interest seems to be controversial in academia, of course, America. The big themes are global citizenship, we’re people of the world, sort of cosmopolitanism.

And I think with Trump and the sort of backlash to the more global and international impulses in American foreign policy, you see a return to the supremacy of national interest—only national interest versus the sort of benign globalism. How do you think Christianity should inform our thinking about national interest? How are we supposed to grapple with this? Again, I think this question of national interest versus universal human interest, shall we say, is one of those ones that goes to the core of Abrahamic religion.

God chooses a people, and we have a universal God whose morality matters to everyone, the creator of the whole universe, but then chooses a particular people to be His instrument—to have a special relationship with. That tension between the specificity of this people and the universality of God and morality haunts the Jewish faith all through the biblical era. Some of the debates in Israel and in the American Jewish community over Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and its neighbors, we see these same questions coming up today. And obviously, they’re true in other cases. Do I have a duty to other Americans that I don’t have to everybody in the world?

That’s a hard thing. Again, this is not one of those things where you get something like obvious, you know, go to page 17 and look in chapter 3, and there’s gonna be your answer. I would tend to say this: for there to be any kind of effect, human beings are made in such a way that we act politically through communities, through commonalities of feeling, historical experience, mutual loyalty. I don’t think you can be a good cosmopolitan if you’re not a good American or French person, or whatever your citizenship or affinity may be.

I think if all states around the world were only held together by the rather weak bonds that unite on a cosmopolitan basis, I don’t think many governments would be able to do much of anything, and I think a lot of problems wouldn’t be solved. On the other hand, obviously, if we all become sort of fanatical fascist super-patriots and chauvinists who see the universe as a zero-sum game and just want to screw the other people, and we have an idolatrous relationship with our own national identity, that way lies disaster. I think 20th-century history has been very good at showing us that the cosmopolitanism of Kant or Leninism, which is against all nations, produces a graveyard, and so does the idolatry of National Socialism, Nazism.

So you take either of these to the extreme, and you get something unspeakable, which suggests again that what you’ve got to do is to try to integrate them creatively so that you are a good and loving and loyal citizen of your own nation, member of your local community and family. But nevertheless, you recognize kinship. I notice in the Bible one of the ways this is done is you think about the immense stress placed on hospitality in the ancient world, not just among Jews but frequently.

That’s almost one of the ways that you tell good people from bad people, and it’s through the exercise of the virtue of hospitality. That’s how you pay tribute to the universality of your moral obligations in this sort of, you know, that we’re all children of the same God and we are bound by deep ties with one another. So I think that’s a way to maybe begin a reflection on how to integrate these things. You’ve got to have a home in order to be able to be hospitable, but when you have a home, you damn well better be hospitable.

Other questions? We have one over here. Hi, my name is Kyle Hanson, and I’m a student at the University of Texas El Paso, master’s program. There’s a lot of what you’re saying I kind of see in readings from American historical writers in the time period that you’re talking about, but also there’s a lot of talk about the religious context that the views of human nature have upon both systems of government like the American system of government, as well as possibly international relations theory.

So in my view, kind of like theology, probably where most such as politics could be viewed as views of human nature and also eschatology, of course, you touched more on the eschatology. Even in views of human nature, the question is how good can or will history get? But the human nature question, which I think kind of precedes it, is how good can or will people get? And that kind of precedes eschatological. So my question to you is, do you think views of human nature should inform Christians as a more definitive way of looking at IR questions or foreign policy before eschatological ones because it’s more definitive? I believe the Bible is a little bit more definitive about human nature. So I’ll leave you that as a question.

Again, you know, to say that, okay, trouble is, if you think about the constitutional convention, you know, people forming our system of government, you had some pretty dyed-in-the-wool serious Calvinists, and then you had people like Benjamin Franklin. So our system of government does not reflect a single view of human nature. The people who signed and voted for that Constitution came from a wide variety of philosophical points of view, and yet they still found a certain common ground. That’s one problem.

But another is that, okay, if I say that humanity is fallen and we are not going to achieve perfection, and yet at the same time God is at work in the world and has sent His Holy Spirit into the world to transform people, it’s kind of hard to translate that into how good are they gonna get, you know, and how many of them are gonna get how good. We don’t know where the Spirit comes from or where it’s going, right? So I can recite some points of view in the Catechism, but they don’t actually tell me how well the people of Arkansas are going to respond to some events in Arkansas. You see what I’m saying?

So I think we have to actually, you know, we certainly have to have some clarity about these foundational beliefs and understanding our theological views and our hermeneutics. But at the same time, when it comes to the evaluation of practical phenomena and making actual choices and calculations, we have to be very, very careful. Very often, the people who make the worst mistakes are those who try to rigidly go from a sound theological position to some kind of contingent political strategy.

Back yes, you. I am Daniel Dean.

You explain better eschaton Christianity. What is an eschaton of foreign policy? Well, for example, foreign policy might be related to the eschaton in the sense that, I guess, maybe the easiest way to say it is, it seems to me that 1945 was the year that opened the historical era in which all of us live. Two things happened in that year. The first chronologically was that as the Red Army moved farther into Nazi-occupied Europe, the concentration camps and the extermination camps were open to view.

So the news of this terrible crime began to permeate the world. For people in a Western context, this had enormous significance because it basically torpedoed the idea that the Enlightenment is going to save us. Societies that science and education will cure what’s wrong with the human spirit, or at least enough of what’s wrong with the human spirit that we’re going to have a kind of moral progress. Here we saw in Germany, the best-educated country, deeply permeated with both the religious and the secular ideologies of Enlightenment and modernity, comes out of this kind of crime that you would read about in the Bible where some horrible Pharaoh tries to kill the people of God.

So you have that on the one side, and then you have Hiroshima and Nagasaki later in the year, where the technology that was supposed to, where this failed Enlightenment, has, however, placed the weapons of ultimate destruction in the hands of people who’ve been revealed to be fallible and flawed no matter how well-educated or technically competent they can be. At the same time that technological progress is moving to a new height, we’re being very powerfully told that technological progress, far from being the solution to all our problems, may actually be an engine of even deeper ones. What that does for foreign policy is it forces foreign policy to deal directly with questions in a sense of ultimate good and evil.

I think the world of foreign policy is kind of eschatological right there. Harry Truman, who becomes vice president and is an ordinary machine politician from Missouri without a college education or much knowledge of the wider world, is suddenly having to make these decisions. So the eschaton has arrived for foreign policy; it’s here.

Yes. Hi, Ashlyn Wave. Thank you so much. My name is Ashlyn Wave, and I’m a student at UT Austin. My question is on the difference between a public-facing faith and a personal one because a lot of the tensions you seem to be describing exist between when you take Christianity and try to impose it. You’re going to have some textbook answers to things, and obviously, it doesn’t work that way. But I wonder if that means that prevents you from using your faith in a public-facing way, or if in reality, as Christians, what we might be called to do is to have a personal faith that informs our decision-making rather than bringing theologically based questions into the public debate itself.

I don’t think religious faith should simply be a private thing that we don’t discuss in public. It seems to me, whether you know, I often speak around the world on American foreign policy. I often find myself speaking to non-Christian audiences, and I find it actually helpful to show them how some of the ideas I’m talking about are rooted in Christian theology. This way, they can see more clearly what I’m talking about and what it means, and then try to make sense of it coming from their context. So I think you have to. What I’m urging against—and this is true in private life as well as personal life—is that religion is not a cookbook.

For Christianity, this is even more the case. Our job is not to go to the books of the Talmud or look to Sharia law for divine instructions on how to treat your eldest son and your eldest daughter. We do actually have recipes for religious and non-religious cherry pie and many other things, but Christianity is not that. In fact, that’s maybe the biggest difference between Christianity and other religions in terms of daily life. There is no Christian dress, no Christian diet, no Christian inheritance law.

Jesus gave us none of that. In that sense, both in the personal realm and in the public realm, we have to represent a faith that is absolute but which doesn’t yield infallible divine guidance for each and every decision point during the day. Modeling that mix of faith that is confident, solid, and deep, but on the other hand, an openness to transitory events and pragmatic considerations is what being a Christian is about. You just don’t have the rulebook that’s going to answer every question.

Other questions? Yes, Jonathan Pavlik.

My name is Jonathan Pavlik, Arlington, Virginia, independent scholar, recently retired from the World Bank as a lawyer. Walter, I heard all you said about the eschaton being the compass driving the Christian approach to national security or national interest or national mission as you understand it. Especially in light of your response to this last question, I’m still troubled by how much you are throwing out the recipe. I think I’m hearing and still dedicated to a view that Christianity, in some respect, is a recapitulation of an older prescription.

Let’s say the nation of Israel, the directions Moses gave from God about the conquest of Canaan, how you treat the cities that stand in the way versus how you treat the cities that are actually in the promised land. You should offer them terms of peace. There is some sense of a set of instructions. The Puritans, the pilgrims, were they motivated by a sense of recapitulation or reenactment of the mission of God’s people conquering Canaan? Was Christianity or Christendom a chance to do it right and progress it further?

Rather than looking constantly forward to the eschaton and where we will presume that God has ordained for us to end up, and trying to advance there, are we being built up constantly on the relics of the past and the roots that have been laid down? How heavily, again, I’m challenging you, are you willing to discard the spirit and throw away the recipe that has been given from the law of Moses, whether it was the Talmud or the ancient Christian scholars’ dedication to that idea of recapitulation of the mission of the nation of Israel?

I probably repudiated utterly and totally that. It seems to me that the Puritans were at their worst when they decided we are the new Israelites and the Indians are the new Canaanites. We’re basically going to kill them and take their land. That was a horrible crime, and the same thing with the Boers, who were Dutch Protestants and took the same attitude toward many of the black South Africans. These were horrible crimes. They were not the nation of Israel, and these people were not Canaanites, but they arrogantly decided to view themselves in that way, and as a result, they committed crimes.

I think we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that

Puritan New England has nothing to teach us. They have a lot to teach us, but on that particular point, I think the instruction we can draw is negative rather than positive. Don’t do it that way. America has enemies in the world, and we have a clear right to defend ourselves against these enemies. As we do that, there are limits on the ways we can morally fight them, but we really do have a legitimate right of self-defense.

The Palestinians today are not actually the descendants of Canaanites, in particular. To try to apply these things from the Old Testament civil law—I don’t favor it. For example, I actually think we should let witches live, and I’m a hundred percent against killing adulterers. One of the important elements of Christianity is this: Yes, we are heirs to a long pre-Christian formation, and Jesus is the fulfillment of the Israelite religion. We have a special relationship, I believe, as Christians with Jews to this day.

However, the contribution we have to make as Christians is to reflect critically on the before and the after and integrate in a way where we’re not just borrowing up. If I’ve been unfair in simplifying the comparisons you’re trying to make, I’m sorry. We don’t have a lot of time, and I’m just trying to raise what I see as the highlights. It really does seem to me that thinking of ourselves as the new Israel with the right to occupy the land, and so on, I just don’t get that.

Faith McDonald

Hi, Faith McDonald from the Institute on Religion and Democracy. One of the things I see about Western government forces that believe in a secular eschaton is that they have a very different view of the rest of the world than we as Christians should have. For instance, the Bible says that every tribe and tongue will come before the Lord. This also connects with what you were just saying about having a right to defend ourselves. Other nations also have a right to defend themselves, but sometimes our secular eschaton thinks they know better.

This can be seen when, for example, a nation in Africa is prevented from defending itself. As Christians, can you say something about the use of moral equivalence in a secular eschaton versus right and wrong? One thing I would say is that Americans, generally, whether we’re religious or secular, have a tendency—we’re like the Germans in this respect. We have an instinct for the higher ground; we want to be the enlightened ones who know best and tell others how to live.

Ideally, among Christians, our sense of personal sinfulness and the universality of God makes us tolerant and self-reflective. We work a little harder to see things from the other point of view. I can’t say as a matter of historical fact that American Christians have always behaved this way. I think the intolerance and self-righteousness seen among some secular, enlightened people who think they have special insight into how everyone else should live is an issue.

Perhaps as Christians, we should view this as a mirror reflecting aspects of ourselves that we might object to. By going through that process, maybe we can reach some of these folks. It is definitely the case that the combination of the relative happiness of American history, where things have gone reasonably well for most people, and our success at growing our power internationally and our economy, gives us a tremendous foundation of smugness. This is slightly checked by recent political events, but overall, there is a kind of inherent smugness.

Americans start from this standpoint, whether we’re liberal or conservative, religious or secular. It’s just part of the air we breathe. So we need to check ourselves a bit and realize that despite how much light we have achieved, we may not yet be perfect. Thank you very much.

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