New Haven, Connecticut, March 2003. Along with the rest of the world, the student body at Yale University stood riveted by the confrontation between the United States and Iraq, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. War would start any day now—that much was certain. Whatever one’s opinion on the war, supporters and opponents alike, at Yale as elsewhere, had over a year and a vast amount of information to argue their case. Through the summer and fall of 2002 and into the new year, the Bush administration and its supporters made several arguments for war, from national security to democracy promotion and much else in between.
Including faith. From his initial response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to the days before the Iraq War, Bush consistently framed the crisis in terms of religion. Not necessarily in terms of who America would be fighting: despite the occasional slip of the tongue, Bush was careful not to portray the war as a crusade against Islam. But according to news reports that fateful winter and spring of 2003, the president believed he was spiritually motivated by an obligation to God and that God directed his actions and protected America in its time of crisis. “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world,” he proclaimed in his 2003 State of the Union address, which laid out a case for war, “it is God’s gift to humanity.” In the giving of such gifts, the United States was God’s instrument on earth: “We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know—we do not claim to know all the ways of providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life and all of history. May He guide us now.” “We’re being challenged,” Bush told an audience in Nashville a month later. “We’re meeting those challenges because of our faith.” He then justified war with Iraq as a matter of self-defense against freedom-hating fundamentalists who received support and encouragement from Saddam Hussein. “They hate the thought of the fact that in this great country, we can worship the Almighty God the way we see fit. And probably what makes them even angrier is, we’re not going to change.”1
For his part, Saddam Hussein also framed the coming war in religious terms. Unlike the decadent, infidel Americans, Iraqis belonged to a “glorious faith,” he declared. “Allah does not like weaklings.” With encouragement from the presidential palace, Iraq’s clerics also tried to rally the faithful to arms. And though he was an avowed enemy of Ba’athist, secular Iraq, Osama bin Laden struck a characteristically religious note. The Americans were “crusaders” who wanted “to occupy a former capital of Islam,” the al Qaeda leader warned in an audio message shortly before the war. “This crusade war is primarily aimed at the people of Islam” to subjugate their faith and steal their oil, and so “Muslims as a whole, and in Iraq in particular, should pull up their sleeves and carry jihad against this oppressive offensive and to make sure to stock up on ammunition and arms. This is a duty for them.” It was a message bin Laden had been propounding since 9/11, indeed, since he had first begun his jihad against the United States in the 1990s.2
I was then a young lecturer in the History Department at Yale, not far removed from finishing a doctoral dissertation on McGeorge Bundy and the origins of the Vietnam War. In the fall of 2002, I taught a large lecture class on Vietnam; in the spring semester, I led a smaller seminar on U.S. foreign policy during its most tumultuous Cold War period, from John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs to Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis. It was a surreal experience, examining the Cold War while a very similar history was unfolding before us in real time. Yet despite the trauma of 9/11, the year 2003 was also very different from 1973. The United States was not vulnerable, but seemed invincible; it was not reeling from a disaster like Vietnam, but coming off a series of triumphs in the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Balkan wars, and, apparently, driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. While Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had watched Indochina consume their presidencies, here was George W. Bush, seemingly as strong a president in living memory, deciding to remake the Middle East in a democratic American image. For a specialist in U.S. diplomatic history, it was a fascinating time.
My students and I debated the War on Terror, Afghanistan, and Iraq almost as much as we pored over the record on Cuba and Chile, Vietnam and Cambodia, the Iranian hostages and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I encouraged it, so long as they avoided polemical grandstanding and grounded their arguments about the confusing present in a careful understanding of an equally complicated past. But one thing puzzled them all: the presence of religion in the normally hardheaded world of diplomacy, especially American diplomacy. Why did Bush use religious imagery and rhetoric to justify his foreign policy? Was this usual? Did other presidents of the past hundred years invoke God and Christ to explain themselves? Or was Bush a premodern aberration in a postmodern world? I told them what I knew, which was not all that much: that some presidents had deployed religion as a political tactic, that religion was often invoked as a way to explain or justify intervention, but that most of the time religion was background noise and political filler and not especially important to the study of American diplomatic history. I referred them to the usual suspects—Woodrow Wilson, John Foster Dulles, Jimmy Carter—leaders who happened to be personally religious and happened, on occasion, to use religious rhetoric. A couple of scholars had looked a little bit into the broader connections between religion and diplomacy, and I recommended their books. But otherwise, I did not give it much thought.3
I cannot say precisely when, but at some point that spring I did begin to give religion some further thought. Intrigued, I consulted bibliographic guides, library catalogues, and journal databases. To my surprise, the existing literature did not much go beyond the usual suspects I had already mentioned to my students. There were, however, some notable exceptions just then emerging. Three colleagues, Seth Jacobs, Melani McAlister, and Andrew Rotter, had recently published exciting, innovative accounts of religion’s influence on America’s Cold War diplomacy: Jacobs on Vietnam, McAlister on the Middle East, Rotter on India and Pakistan. But they seemed to be one-offs, religious exceptions to a generally secular rule. Little did I know that they were on the cutting edge of a major trend in American diplomatic history.4
I was also familiar with American religious history, and so turned there next. But when I consulted that body of literature, I discovered something very interesting: religious historians examined diplomacy just as infrequently and unsystematically as diplomatic historians examined religion. Yet their work was littered with intriguing discussions of religion in times of war and diplomatic crisis, albeit with a focus on how foreign policy affected religion rather than the other way around. And unlike diplomatic historians, historians of religion did not simply concentrate on the usual suspects.
This was an exciting but odd and unsettling discovery. It is difficult to think of two subjects that have shaped the United States more than religion and foreign affairs, and it is difficult to find two bodies of literature that are as large, diverse, or controversial; perhaps, as categories of historical analysis, only race and economics compare. The problem, at least for me, was that historians of religion were interested in religious issues; their discussions of, say, World War I did not intend to shed light on the war, but on how religion reacted to or was changed by the war. In the same way, historians of American foreign policy were not especially interested in religious issues. Sporadic references to the other abounded in each discipline, but only a rare few scholars integrated them in a sustained and meaningful fashion. Yet there were obvious historical moments when the two subjects would have had to meet in interesting and revealing ways. Armed with this insight, I set out to write a book that would answer my students’ questions—and my own.