Abstract
Despite longstanding research on religion and American politics, there has been little sustained attention to the relationship between religion and American foreign policy. This state of affairs is changing and markedly so. The past few years have witnessed an ever-growing stream of books across disciplines and perspectives seeking to understand and explain why, when and how religious individuals, organizations, ideas, identities and practices matter (or ought to matter) to America’s international conduct across time and issues. Why this sudden change? This review article contextualizes and relates this literature to the wider postsecular turn in the social world and the social sciences. It argues that research on religion and American policy has much to gain from a more consistent dialogue and engagement with the broader postsecular literature in international relations, and vice versa. The article concludes by highlighting seven promising avenues for further theoretical reflection and empirical research.
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Notes
This is not to say that there has been no attention at all. For the most part, though, the current literature on religion and American foreign policy has been rather narrowly focused and driven by presentist concerns, in particular about Protestant Evangelicals, the Christian Right and their apparent connections to George W. Bush’s foreign policy, see: Bacevich and Prodromou (2004), Mead (2006), Marsden (2008). There has also been little systematic attention to religious lobbies, beyond a rather hagiographic volume edited by Elliott Abrams (2001). A growing interest is emerging on the role of religion on public opinion about foreign policy (Guth, 2009). Diplomatic historians have equally tended to neglect religion. For a rare exception focusing on the Cold War see: Kirby (2003). For a general discussion about the paucity of accounts exploring the role of religion in American diplomatic history, see: Preston (2006).
It is possible to divide this literature in two broad camps. The first calling for faith-based approaches to conflict resolution internationally along with greater diplomatic efforts to understand and engage religious communities abroad. See, for example: Seiple and Hoover (2004), Albright (2006), Chicago Council (2010). The second literature is more focused on making either the moral and/or security case for putting the international promotion of religious freedoms at the center of American foreign policy and strategic thinking. See, for example: Farr (2008), Grim and Finke (2010), Hertzke (2013).
A huge literature has grown around the continued and apparent increased political salience of religion in the social world. For early sociological accounts see: Casanova (1994), Kepel (1994), Berger (1999). For a number of key texts in IR see: Hatzopoulos and Petito (2003a), Thomas (2005), Toft et al (2011).
Some of the most cited events leading to this upsurge of interest in religion are: the multiplication of seemingly intractable conflicts along sectarian lines since the end of the Cold War; the attacks of 9/11; the emergence of political Islam as a security concern; George W. Bush’s publicly vaunted personal piety and religiously charged rhetoric in the context of the War on Terror; and Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo in 2009 and his stated philosophical interest in the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
For the standard texts on American exceptionalism see: Schlesinger (1977), Lipset (1996). For scholarship that explicitly links American exceptionalism to foreign policy, see: McDougall (1997), Mead (2002), Lieven (2005).
The deep connection between American Protestantism and liberal values, for instance, was already widely discussed in Tocqueville’s (2000) masterpiece. For more contemporary perspectives, see: Noll (2009), Wald and Calhoun-Brown (2011, Ch.3).
Eisenhower officially joined a church only once he became president, also he was the first president ever to be both baptized while in office and give his own prayer during the inauguration ceremony (Inboden, 2010, pp.257–262).
Eisenhower institutionalized the National Prayer Breakfast, adopted ‘In God we Trust’ as the country’s motto, and added ‘one nation, under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance (Inboden, 2010, p.257).
As Preston also intriguingly puts it: ‘Christian realism was not simply a doctrine practiced by Christians but an ethical worldview that nonetheless sanctioned war under certain circumstances. This was just war theory for Protestants’ (2012, p.308).
In his writings Schmitt principally traced a homology between the political sovereign and God, and the legal exception and the religious miracle.
For a critique of ‘instrumental’ approaches to religion in IR, see: Hasenclever and Rittberger (2003).
Preston tells a fascinating story about the American–Spanish wars, which is worth summarizing quickly here. At that time, once President McKinley had framed the war against Spain in Cuba (and then Philippines) as a moral and Christian imperative, religious periodicals – which then had a much wider reach than most other secular ones – had a pivotal role in building support popular by in informing readers that a war for Cuba would be both just and necessary (2012, p.213).
For important entries in this debate see for instance: Hatzopoulos and Petito (2003b), Thomas (2005), Horowitz (2009), Lynch (2009), Philpott (2009), Sheikh (2012).
In particular the work of Mohammed Ahrari (1987).
Compare this, for instance, with the excellent work by Nukhet Sandal (2011) who draws from constructivist IR theorizing on epistemic communities to conceptualize religious agency, while simultaneously showing how a focus on religious groups can expand our understanding of epistemic communities and move forward ‘secular’ constructivist IR theorizing.
See note 16. For a good and balanced overview of the role of religious transnational actors in world politics and how these often interact in complex ways with the nation state, see: Haynes (2012).
See for example, among many, the Journal of Religious History’s (2008) Special Issue on Religion and Empire.
As Preston and Inboden’s books show presidents during the Cold War did often reach out to the Catholic Roman Pope and other religious groups in order to form a faith-based coalition against the Soviet Union. Many of these efforts, which were largely carried undercover, often failed and the policy of engaging with religious groups was not really systematically institutionalized within the American foreign policy apparatus. Official diplomatic relations were established only in 1984 with Ronald Reagan, after decades-long attempts to do so. Till then political opposition to establishing a permanent ambassador to the Holy Sea was rooted very much in Protestant loathing of Catholicism rhetorically couched in terms of a breach to church-state disestablishment norms (Preston, 2012, p.414).
http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/people/william-inboden (accessed 15 February 2013).
Note I am not taking here the default secularist position, if one may call it so, that necessarily equates religion with some pre-modern and irrational violent force. I am mostly, instead, injecting a note of caution towards seeing religion as the cure to (as well as the cause of) most major problems in the world.
Bush did, for example, instinctively and metaphorically describe America’s fight against Islamist terrorism as a ‘crusade’; nevertheless, he soon abandoned the terminology recognizing its bitter historical and religiously charged connotation for Arabs and Muslims.
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Bettiza, G. Religion and American foreign policy in the context of the postsecular turn in world politics and the social sciences. Int Polit Rev 1, 11–26 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ipr.2013.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ipr.2013.1