“The Almighty has His own purposes”
by digby
Tom Ricks features a very provocative and interesting guest essay on his blog today about how the US foreign policy looks from the vantage point of Pakistan. And he makes a point about the “holy war” aspect of it all that’s something we should probably think about:
Moral behavior is still highly associated with religious belief and participation among the U.S. population. Over 90 percent of Americans profess their belief in God. Thus, actions to liberate or protect foreign populations from despotic forces tend to be framed in terms of religion. Theocentric arguments make American foreign policy more palatable to the people. And so in every war the people are lead into, God seems to be on America’s side.
But remember that ISIS holds very similar religious convictions. This makes compromise impossible, and a prolonged fight inevitable. In seeking to validate U.S. action against ISIS, Obama stated, “America is better positioned today to seize the future than any other nation on earth.” Such claims of divine righteousness lead to a need to enhance military capacity as the keystone of American foreign policy. Exceptionalism clears out everything in its path. Plausible alternatives, strategic wisdom and simply careful judgment are all clouded by the divine right of the collective American endeavor, favored by God and so confident of its exceptional role in the world.
Seen this way, the shared value of “liberty for all” becomes the power base for U.S. foreign policy. And in just the same way, the highly conservative societies of the Middle East perceive Western liberal values as an insulting infringement on their cultural and religious identity. ISIS’s volatile nature, amassing transnational allegiance, can be seen as a direct response to the external threat of exported liberty. Both sides are attempting to draw a line between “us and them,” between internal righteousness and extreme external immorality.
Can anyone deny that all this talk about “exceptionalism” has the distinct ring of “God’s people” about it? Does every president not end all his speeches with phrases like “and may God bless the United States of America”? Aren’t we always going on about how we are “The City on a Hill” and other distinctly Biblical allusions?
The US is a product of the Enlightenment, to be sure. But it was founded as a haven from European religious oppression and has always had a strong sense of spiritual fervor under-girding its paeans to liberty and free will. Even Thomas Paine, the author of “The Age of Reason” was moved to describe the idea of America in ministerial terms when he wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”
Obviously, I’m not perfectly equating the US with Islamic fundamentalist crazies. But one can see how America’s grandiose pronouncements of its special place in the world and its grandiose assertions of being “the essential nation” etc. might be interpreted around the world as being assertions that we believe we are “chosen people” and are required to spread our goodness around the world. I’d venture to say that a whole lot of us do, in fact, believe that.
It reminds me of this fascinating talk from a while back about this idea of America being God’s chosen people between Andrew Bacevich author of “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War” and Stephen Prothero, the author of s God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World. It’s well worth listening to the whole thing, particularly now that we are engaged in a discussion of whether or not Islam is inherently violent:
A Live Chat between the two, moderated by Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore, will ponder the role of religious impulses in American foreign policy. Is it a salutary role? Prothero cites two examples of presidents making policy as if Americans were God’s chosen: Woodrow Wilson, who said the United States should enter World War I to make the world “safe for democracy,” and George W. Bush, who considered Afghanistan and Iraq the vanguard of an American-led democratization of people around the world.
“Why is that up to us?” Prothero wonders, echoing Bacevich’s call in his book and other writing for a more humble foreign policy.
In interviews, both men say religious assumptions will always inform our thinking to some extent. “Religion is pervasive—part of the human experience,” says Bacevich. While disclaiming expertise in religious matters, he says that when it comes to making policy, “we should exercise great care to avoid distorting or overstating religion’s role.”
But by Prothero’s reckoning, it would be hard to overstate religion’s role in U.S. foreign policy, which “has for some time been informed by the view that Americans are God’s chosen people.” That’s not entirely a bad thing, he says, as the idea of “American exceptionalism” pushed the country at times toward justice. “But in recent times, this notion of a covenant between God and America has led us to imagine that God is on our side, no matter what we do.”
At least one deeply spiritual American, Abraham Lincoln, took a humbler tack. Amid the slaughter of the Civil War, in his second inaugural address he famously noted that while both North and South “read the same Bible and pray to the same God … the prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
Listen if you have the time. It’s gets to the center of the questions we’ve been asking about Islamic fundamentalism and violence. America is, after all, the most powerful military empire the world has ever known. Considering that, it’s important for atheists, at least, to ponder how much of our belief in our own righteousness is derived from our religiously derived belief in our Exceptionalism before we rush to condemn Islam for being uniquely violent. As that piece at Ricks’s blog explains, American exceptionalism and our drive to “spread democracy and freedom” in our own image can also look an awful lot like religious proselytizing to others. And they’re not entirely wrong.
*I should note that I think all these battles, whether they stem from Enlightenment principles, thinly disguised religion-based “manifest destiny” or full blown religious crusades are all born of the same basic human desires, good and bad, and that these are just some of the constructs we’ve created to rationalize them. I think it’s about power, not spiritualism.
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