St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City, December 2001. Three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor for the past eight years, delivered his farewell address. Already something of a national figure by the time of 9/11, Giuliani had become internationally renowned as the public face of his stricken city. Though term limits prevented him from running for reelection, his newfound stature gave him a political and cultural platform to interpret the terrorist attacks and America’s response to them. His choice of venue was revealing: St. Paul’s Chapel on Church Street in Lower Manhattan. An Episcopal Church only a block from City Hall, St. Paul’s is the oldest public building in New York. Built in 1766, a few years after the Seven Years’ War had redrawn the map of colonial North America and only a year after the outbreak of protest against the Stamp Act, St. Paul’s had been George Washington’s place of worship on his—and the nation’s—first presidential inauguration day in 1789. A special pew commemorating Washington’s visit has remained in the church ever since.
But more important for Giuliani was the proximity of St. Paul’s to the World Trade Center site, now ominously known as Ground Zero. The chapel stands directly across Church Street from Ground Zero, yet it suffered no damage—not even a broken stained-glass window—when the towers collapsed and other, more modern buildings were toppled or severely damaged. For many, including Giuliani, the incredible survival of St. Paul’s—“miraculous may not be too strong a word,” intoned the New York Times—symbolized the resilient power of both faith and nation. In the weeks and months after 9/11, St. Paul’s served as a refuge and recovery coordinating center, a haven for weary rescue workers and, of course, a place of worship for bewildered New Yorkers. Exhausted firefighters, police officers, and rescuers slept on the pews of St. Paul’s while others prayed beside them. All told, it was an eminently fitting location for the mayor of New York’s farewell address.1
“The reason I chose this chapel is because this chapel is thrice-hallowed ground,” Giuliani told his listeners. “This is a place of really special importance to people who have a feeling and a sense and an emotion and an understanding of patriotism.” The church was first hallowed when it was “consecrated as a house of God” in 1766. Its next sanctification came at the birth of the nation. In April 1789, Giuliani explained, “George Washington came and after he was inaugurated as the first president of our republic he prayed right here in this church, which makes it very sacred ground to people who feel what America is all about.” And it was hallowed again, this time in tragedy, on September 11, 2001. Giuliani reminded his listeners of the extraordinary perseverance of St. Paul’s under extraordinary pressures. The devastation obliterated much of the area, but the chapel, only a few hundred yards from the World Trade Center complex, was left untouched. “And,” he continued,
I think there’s some very, very special significance in that. The place where George Washington prayed when he first became president of the United States stood strong, powerful, untouched, undaunted by the attacks of these people who hate what we stand for. Because what we stand for is so much stronger than they are.
… So this chapel stands for our values. And it’s a very important place. And I hope you return here often to reflect on what it means to be an American and a New Yorker.
Giuliani took the idea of hallowed ground seriously—and literally. Ground Zero and St. Paul’s would be sacred sites of memory for all Americans for all time, for both religious and patriotic reasons. “Long after we are all gone, it’s the sacrifice of our patriots and their heroism that is going to be what this place is remembered for. This is going to be a place that is remembered 100 and 1,000 years from now, like the great battlefields of Europe and of the United States. And we really have to be able to do with it what they did with Normandy or Valley Forge or Bunker Hill or Gettysburg. We have to be able to create something here that enshrines this forever and that allows people to build on it and grow from it.”2
Rudy Giuliani’s turn to religion for reassurance and resolve was not unusual in the months following 9/11. Many Americans from all walks of life, from coast to coast, from the policymaking elite to the modest local church, sought comfort in faith. Ministers, priests, and rabbis noted a surge in attendance at their services, especially in the weeks immediately after the attacks. Neither was Giuliani’s mix of religious faith and patriotism out of the ordinary. The faith-based vision of a virtuous, tolerant, and democratic America was invoked constantly, even by those who were convinced that U.S. foreign policy was at least partly responsible for triggering the attacks. Americans, in other words, turned not simply to religion, but to civil religion. “As the horror of last week unfolded, people from every conceivable community of faith expressed an interest in doing something,” observed a county official in Maryland. “People seem to want to be together. They want to touch each other and express both faith and patriotism.” Reverend Leroy Bowman of the First Baptist Church in Annapolis, Maryland, agreed. “I think that the Lord intends for us to draw this nation closer together.”3
Reverend Lloyd John Ogilvie, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, expressed these same feelings even more forcefully. But he also cast the basic issue in Niebuhrian terms of using just force in an unjust world. People might be moral, but international politics was often too rough for moral niceties, and justice had to be done. “I preach and teach and counsel forgiveness in personal relationships,” Ogilvie told an interviewer. “There are times, however … when there must be a confrontation of force to bring justice.” World War II, Reinhold Niebuhr’s finest hour, was a case in point, because armed force was “the only way the evil of Nazism could be rooted out and defeated,” despite the claims of Christian pacifists. “Almighty God,” Ogilvie prayed at the start of Senate proceedings on September 12, “we praise You for the consistency and constancy of Your presence with us to help us confront and battle the forces of evil manifested in infamous, illusive, cowardly acts of terrorism.” Ogilvie thanked God for having “been with us in trouble and tragedies of the past” and for giving America “victory over tyranny” in previous conflicts. Above all, he prayed that God would “Bless the women and men of this Senate today as they join with President Bush in decisive action. Guide them as they seek justice against the perpetrators of yesterday’s evil destruction and seek to devise a long-range solution to the insidious problem of terrorism.” When he finished, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle thanked Reverend Ogilvie and applauded his message: “I know he speaks for us all.”4
He certainly spoke for President George W. Bush, whose use of both religion and civil religion was constant after 9/11. Perhaps this was because Bush, an evangelical Methodist, felt himself called by God at this moment in history. Shortly after the attacks, a leading cleric in the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) told him, “you are a servant of God called for such a time like this.” Bush did not disagree and simply replied: “I accept the responsibility.” In a rare quiet moment after 9/11 with his chief political aide Karl Rove, Bush confided his belief that “I’m here for a reason, and this is going to be how we’re going to be judged.”5
In deploying religion, Bush appealed to both the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith. He spoke of launching a “crusade” against Islamic terrorism, apparently unaware of the bitter historical memory of the medieval Christian Crusades that still lingered in the minds of Arabs. Yet on several occasions, he also invoked the Judeo-Christian tradition of religious tolerance to deflect Americans from seeking revenge against Muslims. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about,” he said on September 17. Islam instead represented “peace” because it was “a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world … and that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.” But most of all, Bush blended the language of faith and nation to offer benediction to America’s mission in the world—a mission that intended peace even when it resorted to war. Following the launch of the air war against Afghanistan, which continued to provide a base for al Qaeda, he explained that the Taliban was “hearing from a tolerant nation, a nation that respects Islam and values our many Muslim citizens. They are hearing from a prayerful nation, a nation that prays to an almighty God for protection and for peace. And they are hearing from a patient and determined nation, a nation that will continue this war for as long as it takes to win.”6
Bush’s words, all of them, rested comfortably within a bipartisan tradition of using religion to frame foreign policy. This was no coincidence. “Just 3 days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history,” he declared in one of his most important post-9/11 speeches, at the National Cathedral in Washington on September 14, which he had declared a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. “But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The National Cathedral address framed the morality of the terrorist attacks and America’s response to them. And to do so, Bush touched on many of the themes that had animated the religious influence on American war and diplomacy during the previous four centuries: the links between religion and democracy; the importance of religious liberty; the blessing of America’s errand to the world; the tragic necessity of using force for justice in an unjust world; the presence of evil as a test to the faithful; the responsibilities that come with power and wealth. God had given much to America; he expected much in return. But Bush’s pronouncement at the National Cathedral had a harder edge to it, too, resolute but also defiant, even aggressive. And it was clear what would come next. “War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder,” he continued. “This Nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.” This was not Bush’s will, but God’s. “As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God’s love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own, and may He always guide our country. God bless America.”7
The ecclesiastical setting was not incidental, and the address was not simply a foreign policy speech that just happened to be delivered in a place of worship. Bush intended the speech to be a statement of foreign policy, but he hoped it would also be something more profound. “I saw it as a moment to make sure that I helped comfort and helped get through the mourning process,” he recalled in an interview with the journalist Bob Woodward. “I also really looked at it from a spiritual perspective, that it was important for the nation to pray.” He confessed that the speech “really was a prayer …. I believed that the nation needed to be in prayer.”8
Bush’s speech—some called it a sermon—was widely hailed, but it did not sit well with everyone. Some worried about the appearance of a secular official, one charged with upholding the laws of the land that included the separation of church and state, using a religious setting to make a statement of government policy. Some objected to the use of a church to justify war, no matter how worthy or necessary it might be. Some objected to the impending war itself. And some objected to Bush’s appropriation of the moral high ground by appealing to a religious faith they did not necessarily share. As one Christian commentator argued in the Washington Post, “A War President Shouldn’t Ask What Jesus Would Do.” The journalist E. J. Dionne, a close observer of American religion and its political role, was more subtle in issuing a similar rebuttal to those who would claim God’s favor. “Faith is more credible when it stands as a challenge, when it insists on aspirations beyond those of our own political movements, communities or nations,” Dionne wrote in response to Bush’s National Cathedral speech. He concluded with an allusion to Lincoln: “The prayers of this faith do not express certainty that God is on our side, only the hope that this might prove to be true.”9
At the time, many Americans, supporters and critics alike, thought of Bush’s rhetoric as exceptional and that his use of religion to frame and justify foreign policy was a radical break with the American diplomatic tradition. Many also criticized his close political relationship with Christian conservatives as unusual. Bush’s use of religion was certainly more pervasive than some of his predecessors’. But as we have seen, the religious influence on foreign relations has been a constant throughout American history. After all, only three years earlier, on September 11, 1998, President Bill Clinton delivered a strikingly similar speech from the very same spot—the pulpit of the National Cathedral—following the al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton called for a “common commitment to carry on the cause of peace and freedom,” but he also promised “to find those responsible and bring them to justice” and “not to rest as long as terrorists plot to take more innocent lives.” For America’s “larger struggle, for hope over hatred and unity over division,” he explained, “is a just one. And with God’s help, it will prevail.” Religion has not always been a determining or formative influence in the history of American foreign relations, but it has been consistent. Whether one supported or opposed Bush’s particular foreign policies, his use of religion was entirely in keeping with American tradition.10
For better or worse, the last twenty-five years have followed in this tradition. The religious influence has sometimes stemmed from the personal beliefs of individual policymakers. But just as often, it has emerged as a result of political pressures emanating from below, as religious Americans—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and those of many other faiths—have organized, mobilized, and brought their views to bear on politicians and policymakers. Unlike intelligence data, weapons expertise, diplomatic experience, or fluency in a foreign language, anyone can possess a religious faith if they want to; and because religion can belong to everyone, it has provided a common denominator for dialogue between policymaking elites and the wider public. It has provided a shared language with which all Americans can negotiate the terms of their engagement with the rest of the world. If Bush had indeed launched the United States on a crusade, it was certainly not for the first time. Nor would it be the last.
IN THE 1988 ELECTION, Vice President George H. W. Bush campaigned like Ronald Reagan. He claimed born-again status, promised to support constitutional amendments on school prayer and abortion, and assiduously courted the Religious Right. But once in office, Bush governed like Richard Nixon, especially on foreign policy. “I and a lot of other evangelicals are getting fed up too soon with President Bush. I didn’t expect much; we’re getting less,” one pastor complained to a White House aide. “I would suggest to you: don’t unpack everything. Four years will pass all too soon.” Evangelicals, who comprised much of Bush’s electoral base, wanted him to launch a post–Cold War crusade for religious liberty and human rights, especially in the Balkans, China, Africa, and the Soviet Union. Instead, the arch-realist Bush administration prioritized order over justice, stability over human rights. The people of Ukraine, Tibet, and China got little support from Washington as they confronted war and oppression. When asked if Washington would intervene to halt genocide in Bosnia, Secretary of State James A. Baker summed up the Bush administration’s attitude: “We have no dog in that fight.”11
While evangelicals wanted a more activist foreign policy, many Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants wanted a more modest one. Bush’s signature foreign policy achievement, victory over Iraq in the Gulf War, was at the time intensely controversial, especially among religious groups. Their criticism of his use of force followed from earlier misgivings about other episodes in the Bush foreign policy, especially the 1989 invasion of Panama and the reluctance to engage in wider-ranging nuclear reduction talks with the Soviet Union. The Catholic hierarchy reacted to operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm cautiously. While the National Conference of Catholic Bishops told Bush they “strongly support and commend your efforts to build global solidarity,” as the NCCB’s head, Daniel Cardinal Pilarczyk, wrote, they also implored him to find “a peaceful solution that seeks to bring justice to the region without resort to war.” The National Council of Churches expressed similar reservations, while the Most Reverend Edmond L. Browning, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church—the president’s own denomination—met with Bush at the White House and bluntly told him, “In no way is the war option going to serve our national interest.” It was, Bush recalled, “a very emotional meeting, at least for me.”12
In the end, the Bush foreign policy pleased very few religious Americans. For most liberals, it was too robust; for most conservatives, too amoral; for others still, too vacillating and accommodating. Other problems abounded. Prophetic Christians and fundamentalists recoiled in horror from Bush’s promise that America would build a “new world order,” and from his deference to the United Nations, which all seemed suspiciously similar to the Antichrist’s plans for world government. Christian Zionists refused to support Bush and Baker’s attempts to use victory over Iraq to begin a peace process in the Middle East that would severely curtail Israeli ambitions. Overall, then, George H. W. Bush pleased nobody, and he paid for it at the ballot box in 1992. Even the evangelicals and fundamentalists of the Religious Right, who had closely allied with the Republican Party since 1980, deserted him. While 70 percent of white evangelicals had voted for Bush in 1988 (and 80 percent for Reagan in 1984), only a small majority—55 percent—voted for him in 1992 and many more stayed home; moreover, only 46 percent of Catholics voted for him, the lowest total for a Republican candidate in nearly two decades. Bush’s realist foreign policy, which blended a willingness to use military force with an aversion to moral crusades, turned off religious liberals and religious conservatives almost in equal measure.13
CLINTON FACED SIMILAR problems throughout the 1990s, a decade in which public religiosity may not have reached the levels seen in the 1950s and 1970s but that did witness unusually high levels of faith-based political activism. It was also the scene of some of the most polarized, politicized religion since the Protestant-Catholic feuds of the interwar era, for the 1990s saw the revival of the culture wars between liberals and conservatives over school prayer, abortion, gender, race, and gay rights that had begun in the Sixties. On many issues, Christian conservatives gained predominance. A watershed year in conservatism, in 1992 the Religious Right was able to use the Republican defeat to its advantage. Christian conservatives’ defection from Bush illustrated their cohesive bloc voting power that future Republican candidates could not afford to ignore. Afterward, the Religious Right stood as one of the strongest groups in conservative politics.
On foreign policy, Christian conservatives pushed three big ideas particularly hard, though not always in sync. The first was unilateralism—not necessarily isolationism, but the safeguarding of American sovereignty while the nation involved itself in the world. The second, both cause and consequence of the first, was the zealous promotion of America as exceptional: different, virtuous, and strong, God’s chosen nation. These two ideas, unilateralism and nationalism, found a wide audience through conservative commentators such as Pat Buchanan (Roman Catholic) and Pat Robertson (Pentecostal), whose 1991 bestseller The New World Order painted a dark picture of America subservient to the secular humanists, communists, and heathens of the United Nations.14
The third big conservative idea was the promotion of human rights, which mostly meant individual rights—especially religious liberty—but not group rights that would guarantee socioeconomic equality. As the editors of Christianity Today reminded their mostly evangelical readers, “Despite communism’s decline, torture and persecution continue.” And it was America’s duty to do something about it.15
Enacted mostly by a Republican-dominated Congress whose leadership was sympathetic toward the Religious Right, many of these ideas became policy. Most important was the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which created an Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department and the Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent federal agency. Both would monitor global infringements upon religious liberty, with violators potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. Moreover, mission boards and faith-based aid organizations began receiving vastly larger amounts of public funding to dispense to poor countries and development projects around the world. Finally, Christian Zionists, including many members of Congress, helped renew and expand America’s unwavering support for Israel.16
GEORGE H. W. BUSH’S SON would not commit the political sins of his father. Indeed, as George W. Bush told Bob Woodward, Bush Sr. “is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” Instead of ignoring the Religious Right, as his own father did, George W. Bush formed a tight bond with Christian conservatives. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the leading SBC spokesman on foreign policy, observed that Bush the son not only listened to the views of evangelicals, he actively solicited them.17
As president, moreover, Bush surrounded himself with fellow devout Christians, including those who had a major hand in foreign policymaking. Michael Gerson, Bush’s chief speechwriter, was a fellow evangelical who framed Bush’s key speeches on world affairs around highly moralistic Christian themes of mission, charity, redemption, and crusade. Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser in Bush’s first term and secretary of state in his second, was a devoted Presbyterian. Thanks to her father, Reverend John Wesley Rice, she had been literally raised in a church—a small, four-room apartment attached to the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama—and absorbed its teachings, particularly its Calvinist ideas of sacrifice, chosenness, responsibility, and destiny. “The peace and love of God is real,” she told an interviewer. “In fact, there’s so much confirmation of Christ in my life that faith and reason don’t conflict in very important ways. I have been religious all my life. I cannot remember when I did not believe.” Colleagues observed that in moments of crisis, she prayed.18
Bush himself spoke of his own faith in similar terms—openly and unabashedly—perhaps more than any president before him. Just as he relied on religion to shape America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, he used it to frame other aspects of policy, both foreign and domestic. At home, in the controversial “faith-based initiatives,” he significantly increased the amount of public funding for charitable purposes received by churches and other religious organizations. Abroad, he discussed his own faith and the importance of religious liberty with world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Jiang Zemin. Partly at the behest of Gerson, who was close to evangelical missionaries, Bush devoted more attention and funding to Africa, especially for AIDS treatment and prevention. He also was receptive to the Republican Congress’ desire to rein in or deny foreign aid that would contribute to birth control and abortion programs. And of course, he turned to the language of faith to help launch the war against Iraq in 2003.19
Yet the United States did not have a monopoly on faith-based geopolitics. Beginning in the 1970s, most of the world had experienced a boom in religion, especially in countries—Russia, China, India, and Turkey—that had spent much of the previous century trying to restrain faith or even eradicate it altogether. In particular, Islam surged in popularity and replaced its secular rivals, such as pan-Arabism, Ba’athism, nationalism, and socialism, as the dominant ideology throughout the Middle East. Christianity soared as its center of gravity shifted from Europe and North America to the developing world, where the largest churches—Protestant and Catholic—could now be found in Africa. Evangelical Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism, won millions of converts in East Asia and Latin America. What was striking was not simply the growth of faith, but the growth of conservative and fundamentalist faith—particularly in Islam and Christianity, but also in Judaism and Hinduism—and its intimate role in politics, governance, and international relations. The world had become defined not only by George W. Bush, but also Osama bin Laden.20
Nor did Bush have a monopoly on faith at home, where his pious vision and sense of global mission were challenged by a wide array of religious Americans. The resurgence of Christian conservatism in the 1970s, the culture wars of the 1990s, and the crusading faith-based policies of Bush after 2001 triggered a reaction from the left. Progressive religious activists—Rabbi Michael Lerner; Catholic intellectuals E. J. Dionne and Garry Wills; and evangelical Protestant Jim Wallis, founder of the organization Sojourners—mounted countercrusades to reclaim faith from what they condemned as conservative extremes. Rather than war, they and others said, a penitent America should use its strength and wealth to bring food to the hungry, clean water to the thirsty, and peace to a war-torn world. Bush had not implemented the will of God, but subverted it. And if Bush enjoyed the support of Christian conservatives, he also often disappointed them when he was unable, or unwilling, to implement everything they wanted. Meanwhile, the nation’s fastest-growing religious group, Muslims, were largely repelled by the Bush administration’s foreign policy, especially its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its unbending support for Israel.21
Nor, finally, was Bush an aberration in the American diplomatic tradition. His strain of evangelicalism was not especially radical, and his application of religious principles and rhetoric to public policy, including foreign policy, was not unusual. No matter what their ideology or party affiliation, to some extent almost all presidents framed and justified their foreign policies in religious terms.22
THOUGH HIS POLITICS and policies differ sharply, the presidency of Barack Obama is showing every sign of continuing these religious traditions in U.S. foreign relations. Raised with the input of various intellectual, social, and cultural traditions on two continents, Obama’s faith did not really coalesce until he moved to Chicago, in the 1980s, and joined Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity’s minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was heavily influenced by Christian Black Power and liberation theology, especially the writings of James H. Cone, and these ideas formed the basis of Trinity’s mission on Chicago’s impoverished South Side. But as important as this milieu was, Obama’s intellectual and spiritual curiosity led him to other theological influences, especially the Social Gospel ministry of Martin Luther King and the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter had found such combinations politically lethal, but Obama was not a born-again Christian and was thus unbound by normal conventions. He was, simply by virtue of who he was, free to be as ecumenical, syncretic, and experimental as he wished.23
With Obama, two things became clear. The first was the intellectual depth of his faith. The second, not unrelated, was the political relevance of his religion. He bridled at suggestions from conservatives that religion was no place for the progressive politics of liberalism. When Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, a staunch Christian conservative, introduced Obama during a joint appearance at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California with the words “Welcome to my house,” Obama was not slow to respond: “There is one thing I’ve gotta say, Sam, though: This is my house, too. This is God’s house.” But he was equally dismayed by his fellow liberal Democrats who felt there was no place for religion in politics at all. In the summer of 2006, he bluntly warned that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.” On this point, Obama would not be misunderstood. “So to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”24
Like his heroes, Obama has used religious language to argue for his causes too, including those in the wider world. But, characteristically, he has put his own spin on longstanding traditions. Niebuhr’s Christian realism is one, and perhaps the most important. In a play on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor policy” toward Latin America, one commentator has even dubbed Obama’s foreign policy the “Good Niebuhr Policy.” Niebuhr may have been a realist, but he was unlike a Nixon or a Kissinger: he was instead a Christian realist for whom faith must provide the moral core of American foreign policy. Without religion, Niebuhr argued, realism would invariably lead the nation astray because it would lack a moral compass and thus lack moral purpose, but without realism, religion could also be damaging because of its tendency to veer off into destructive idealistic crusades. Niebuhr advised American leaders to be righteous without indulging in self-righteousness; he wanted them to be moral without being moralistic. This was a delicate balance to maintain, but it suited Obama perfectly. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” Obama told New York Times columnist David Brooks when asked about Niebuhr, because of his “compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”25
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama invoked Niebuhrian realism and the timeless “notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.” And while he recognized the heroic Christian pacifism of Martin Luther King, he also firmly rejected it:
We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
… I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
“The spirit of Niebuhr presided over the Nobel address,” observed George Packer.26
On a visit to China, Obama referred to a different concept from the canon on religion and foreign relations: the importance of religious liberty. In the American tradition, this was an even older concept than realism or the just war. In a November 2009 town hall meeting with “future Chinese leaders,” Obama lectured his hosts on the principles of good governance. The United States was by no means perfect: Americans had tolerated the sin of slavery for far too long, and it took a civil war to eradicate it; it then took a civil rights movement to make good on the original promise of emancipation. But freedom prevailed nonetheless, and it ensured America’s role as the guarantor of world freedom. “And that is why,” Obama continued in a reiteration of the first two of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms,
America will always speak out for these core principles around the world. We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don’t believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression and worship—of access to information and political participation—we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities—whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation. Indeed, it is that respect for universal rights that guides America’s openness to other countries; our respect for different cultures; our commitment to international law; and our faith in the future.
Religious liberty, Obama told the Chinese, was one of the preconditions for political liberty. And with political liberty would come peace, at home and abroad.27
Obama has also stressed the importance of religious pluralism to harmonious international relations. In perhaps his most famous foreign speech, in Cairo in June 2009, Obama conceded that the United States had made mistakes in the region but maintained that America’s Judeo-Christian civil religion, and especially its grounding in religious tolerance, provided a path to peace. Echoing two centuries of American political thought, he told his Egyptian and largely Muslim audience that “freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion.” The universality of religious liberty and its centrality to the democratic peace meant that all faiths required accommodation. “People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive,” while freedom of religion “is central to the ability of people to live together.” The Golden Rule, Obama concluded in another nod to FDR, was common to every religion, not just Christianity. “It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization,” he preached, “and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today.” The importance of pluralism and tolerance have been common refrains in Obama’s speeches since, particularly at moments, such as the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy and the anniversary of 9/11, when religious prejudice has flared in the United States.28
Thus continues the religious influence on American foreign relations. There will be American crusades in the future just as there have been in the past. Whether from the top down in the form of the personal piety of American leaders, or the bottom up in the form of pressure from religious groups and individuals, whether for peace or for war, religion remains, and will continue to remain, an integral part of foreign relations. It may not always determine the direction of policy, but it will be an ever-present factor. Those who conduct U.S. foreign policy ignore it at their peril.