Evangelicals and Evil Empires
Religious voters have long had an interest in foreign policy.
BY NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Friday, November 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
In the days since Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid, reactions have run the gamut from confused to dumbfounded. Mr. Giuliani has been credited with doing the impossible: getting one of the biggest names on the religious right to overlook his views on abortion and gay marriage. And Mr. Robertson has been accused of compromising his principles--either to defeat Hillary Clinton or to hitch his own star to a successful politician.
But in endorsing Mr. Giuliani, the famed evangelist has been nothing if not consistent. Media Matters, a self-described "progressive research and information center," sent out an email immediately after the announcement. In it were nine quotes by Mr. Robertson. Six were about Islam, Iraq and Israel, but only one mentioned abortion.
In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, David Kirkpatrick describes the "evangelical crackup"--pastors being pushed out of churches for placing too much emphasis on protesting abortion and not enough on combating poverty. It is a liberal's sweetest dream, this idea that the evangelical rank and file is longing for a return to the social gospel. But Mr. Kirkpatrick's acknowledgment that Mr. Giuliani was easily the most popular candidate among the evangelicals he interviewed should put that notion to rest. The former New York mayor is many things, but Dorothy Day he's not.
That foreign policy, not economic inequality, is among evangelicals' top concerns should not surprise any student of 20th-century history. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission , traces this focus to the 1930s: "The only part of the country that had majority support for Roosevelt's interventionist policies was the South." But it was communism that really got them going. Beginning with Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, Mr. Land argues, "communism was seen as a direct threat to the Christian faith and Judeo-Christian civilization. Among Catholics and evangelical Christians, this message resonated first and with the most intensity."
Timothy Shah, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that communism "was the overwhelming focus of a lot of the statements of the National Association of Evangelicals and the editorials in Christianity Today for the postwar period."
Why did the anti-communist message resonate so deeply? Darren Dochuk, a professor of history at Purdue University, credits evangelical leaders like Walter Judd, a medical missionary in China before World War II who later became a congressman, with leading the faithful toward staunch anti-communism. L. Nelson Bell, the father-in-law of evangelist Billy Graham, and George Benson, a Church of Christ minister, saw "Christian missionary enterprises in China brought to a violent end" by communist officials, according to Mr. Dochuk, and spread the word upon returning home.
But it wasn't just national leaders who influenced evangelical attitudes toward communism. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, the literary journal associated with Christianity Today, recalls going to Sunday evening church services in the 1950s: "Every year, we heard a speaker or two who had come from 'behind the Iron Curtain.' They had harrowing tales to tell, sometimes first-person, sometimes not. There was a palpable sense of a world-scale conflict with godless communism."
Over time, these messages contributed to evangelical support for Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. Mr. Land argues that opposition to Soviet communism "was an absolutely essential ingredient in the Reagan coalition, shared by all the groups . . . including evangelicals."
But is the war on radical Islam like the Cold War? And is Mr. Giuliani the evangelicals' new Reagan? Mark Noll, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, cautions against this kind of comparison. "I do not think that there is the same kind of evangelical general animus against radical Islam as there was against communism," he tells me. And Mr. Dochuk doesn't believe "there is as clear a religious vision of foreign policy as there was in Reagan's era."
Mr. Shah, however, sees clear parallels. The tales of missionaries from Islamic countries may even be more harrowing than those Mr. Wilson heard as a youngster: "In the past you had missionaries come back and talk about being imprisoned. Now you have reports from people about beheadings and bombings." He also cites Voice of the Martyrs, a publication widely circulated among evangelical churches, "which contains lurid accounts of Christian missionaries being killed and attacked in mostly Islamic countries."
Evangelicals believe they are in a "violent and apocalyptic confrontation even more intense than that with communism," according to Mr. Shah. That the Middle East plays such a significant role in Christian prophecy has also had an effect on their understandings of radical Islam. Which raises the question of whether evangelicals view the current struggle as a crusade, as is often charged. According to Mr. Shah, it isn't so much that evangelicals consider America a Christian country as that they see the U.S. as having a special obligation to the rest of the world. "It means that they can't be isolationist," he says.
Mr. Noll notes that in the 1950s "you would find Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, as well as all of the religious leaders, basically saying the same thing, promoting the virtue of Judeo-Christian civilization over against the communist menace." Indeed, in his quintessential Cold War account, "Witness," Whittaker Chambers (a serious Christian, though not an evangelical) describes communism and freedom as "the two irreconcilable faiths of our time."
No reader in 1952 would have found a religiously tinged call for engagement against freedom's enemies remarkable. The same could not be said today. Most Americans no longer use the language of faith to describe our foreign conflicts. But luckily for Mr. Giuliani, some still do.
Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.
opinionjournal.com |
