Gaining perspective through observations of yesteryear

Joe Lehman
Senior Criminal Justice Seminar
Professor Levine
1 March 2006

Faith: The Tie that Binds…and Threatens


The most sensible way of defining the rapidly setting trends of the post 9/11 era is that what the entire world is experiencing is a resurgence of faith. Faith has moved to the forefront of national movements and the ways established nation-states are communicating with one another, shedding generations of secular tradition. In the United States, Evangelical Christianity has gained influence in many of the nation’s institutions, social and political. Faith is now especially the dominant factor in United States Foreign policy. The old practice of realism has taken a back seat to strong ideological conviction. The new foreign policy has as a result, forged alliances between two groups of different faith-based ideologies in its dictation. These groups are the predominantly Jewish "neoconservatives" and Protestant Evangelical Christians. These are both groups that would traditionally be at conflict with one another. This begs the question, how could such opposing groups find such common cause that they would be able to forge such a smooth alliance in dictating American foreign policy? The most probable argument is that it is not an alliance of common cause, but an alliance based strictly on individual interests. Though the alliance between the two implies the appearance of cooperation, in fact the faith of Jewish neoconservatives has driven them into a tribal isolation that blinds them from beyond the immediate milieu, and can possibly lead to much conflict down the road that can affect the entire country.

The underlying element of the neoconservative-Evangelical alliance is the future of the state of Israel. Every aspect of their jointly dictated foreign policy resolves around Israel in some way. The principle tenet of neoconservative ideology is the idea of exerting American global hegemony through unilateral action and the cancellation of international alliances and treaties (Lind, 134). The neoconservative base has also convinced the Bush Administration to adopt a policy of total support to the hard-line Zionist policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Right-wing Likud Party in occupying Palestinian territories. Constructive engagement with the Palestinian Authority has all but been abandoned (137). Regime change in Iraq, the pillar of the grand designs of the neoconservatives was based substantially on consideration for Israel. Leading neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz has stated, "The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad" (qtd. in Buruma, 30). In other words, invading Iraq will somehow affect the outcome of the peace process in Israel’s favor. As Ian Buruma elucidates, the Evangelical-neonconservative alliance has arisen from the pro-Israeli stance of lobbies of "Christian Zionists." The basic reason behind this "support" is the fact that Jewish possession of the Holy Land fits in with the Evangelicals’ apocalyptic vision of the Second Coming of Christ resulting in the conversion or obliteration of all Jews (30). John Donohue states the obvious best: "Israel and the Church remain distinct and God follows two distinct purposes: with the Jews the purpose is earthly, with the Christians, heavenly" (439). The idea of one side’s support motivated by a desire for the other sides’ inevitable destruction begs the question, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Faith is the main answer to the question of what prevents neoconservatives from breaking their alliance over the issue of the Evangelicals’ genocidal ambition. The alliance is too aligned to their connections in faith to be separated. President Bush is with respect, the product of these connections in faith. The religious theme of his politics attests to this. He defines American foreign policy through a manicheian lens of "good versus evil." He conveys the image of being messianic in his leadership. He, the God-appointed savior of liberty and democracy will brave the holy war against America’s evil enemies (Stam, 27). These traits directly correspond to both the Evangelical and neoconservative world-view. As several political scientists note, "these new religious forces have revived the Wilsonian notion that democratic values should infuse foreign policy so as to transform the world" (Guth et al., 3). This refers to President Wilson’s imperialistic doctrine following the First World War. . A poll of religious voters in the 2004 election taken by The Review of Faith & International Affairs shows the highest support for Bush and his policies among traditionalists and evangelicals, while the least support was found among religious minorities and seculars. While only a minority of voters in general wishes to unconditionally back Israel’s side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a large majority of those that do are Jews (6). This is not to say that the neoconservative platform represents the interests of all Jews. On the contrary, a majority of Jewish voters still back the Democrats (Buruma, 30). So it is a mistake to define "neoconservative" as a synonym of "Jew." Neoconservatives are merely members of a certain political ideology coined by a number of intellectuals that happen to be Jewish.

It is ironic that both Israel and the Zionist movement have become so intertwined with faith. Actually, the Zionist movement was originally founded by Jews of the secular progressive persuasion (Donohue, 434). Both the Six-Day War in 1967 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 were armed conflicts conducted by Israel under the pretext of preemptive strikes (Buruma, 30). Neoconservatives are of course, ardent advocates of preemptive warfare. These invasions corresponded with the Evangelical Second Coming vision (Donohue, 439). Donohue argues that the Six-Day War was the point where Orthodox Judaism took over Zionism (436). Jacobo Timmerman argues that Israel’s democratic institutions were encroached upon and thus severely damaged by the religious shakeup during the Lebanon War: "The society will become more closed, more intolerant, more fundamentalist" (86). This sounds eerily similar to the shakeup of the American government by the Bush Administration. Secular institutions are being dominated by religious ideologues rendering them less democratic. Timmerman’s critique of Israel in Lebanon is eerily similar to later critiques of America in Iraq. Benjamin Barber argues that the neoconservatives with the advent of the invasion of Iraq call for a Pax Americana (35). Timmerman defines Israel’s actions in Lebanon as Pax Hebraica (31). These cases exemplify the damage that can be wrought to a government by an overuse of faith.
Evangelicals and neoconservatives are connected in culture as well as issues. According to Michael Lind, "the unilaterial imperialism of the neoconservatives, like their pro-Israel and anti-Iraq policies, was reinforced in national politics by the centuries-old political culture of conservative white voters in the American South" (142). The American South of course, being the most concentrated area of Evangelicals. The concepts of internationalism and multilateralism, both anathema to neoconservatives traditionally fall against Evangelical doctrine (Guth et al., 3). Culturally, the two are connected in even the most superficial ways. Michael Lind points out the glaring similarities in the cultural icons of both Zionism and Evangelical Christianity:

"The gun-toting, Bible-thumping Anglo-Celtic Texan in former Mexican and Indian territories, with his admiration for the Hebrew patriarchs and professed devotion to the Ten Commandments, is remarkably similar to the gun-toting, Torah-thumping Israeli settler in the occupied Arab territories. The "sabra" ideal of a certain strain of Zionism—macho, militaristic, pious—is a cousin of the Southern/Western "redneck" or "cowboy," down to the contempt for the disposable "Canaanites"—Blacks and Mexican-Americans in Texas and Arabs in Israel." (155)

In Lind’s thesis are the implications of a widely controversial equation between Zionism and racism. Despite the controversy, the parallels suggested here are undeniable. In a world that is facing the revival of Fundamentalism in all three of the monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all three all three become more tribal, yet only two of them form an alliance with the third as a shared enemy. A suggestion is that Judaism and Christianity are culturally connected whereas Islam is more fundamentally opposed to both of them. Ergo, Jewish neoconservatives and Evangelical Christians may be forced into a position of declaring that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

It is a mistake to believe that neoconservatives are oblivious to the opportunistic aims of the Evangelicals. There are signs that the relationship between the two is more divergent than mutual. It must be remembered that there has always been a clannish mentality among Jews that is generally distrustful of the goyim. This is for the obvious reason that Jews are wary from having been persecuted for so many thousands of years, particularly to the maximum extent during the Holocaust. Reporter Robert Fisk made this observation during a symposium regarding the Lebanon War:

"Throughout the evening, a middle-aged lady sat beside me. Two of her fingers were missing. They were amputated after she suffered frostbite in Dachau concentration camp. From her family, only she and her husband had survived. She was now totally committed to Israel and obviously saw dark and sinister objectives in any criticism of the state or its actions." (416)

From this mentality it makes sense that Jews with such undying support for Israel as are the neoconservatives would through their faith, suspend traditional hostilities between them and anti-Semitic but pro-Israel Christians if it means their support, as questionable as it may be. But with such cautious faith they are unlikely to let their guard down toward the Evangelicals either. Ian Buruma observes the reaction among many Jews regarding support by Europeans for the initial creation of the state of Israel: "Philo-Semitism is better than pogroms, to be sure, but there was something unreal, and even a little unsettling, about this dutiful sense of collective guilt. It was as if Jews, including Israeli Jews, once again were not treated the same way as other human beings…" (31). It is clearly much more preferable to be treated the same instead. Elevation to a special status only separates a people further. Bearing this tribal mentality in mind, it is therefore reasonable to believe that neoconservatives maintain the alliance with Evangelicals because doing so represents their most immediate interests. It is doubtful that they would expect to gain any fruitful exchange beyond that.

It is not only that the domination of faith-based ideology over America’s political institutions is flimsy, it is dangerous to the country’s security. Devotion to flimsy ideals deludes leaders from the more complex realities. For instance, as Juan Stam astutely remarks, if terrorists have targeted America as the prime candidate for destruction simply because they hate our freedoms, why have they not targeted Canada, which is arguably more free? (27) Theoretical reasoning aside, how this government views the nature of morality bears greatly in how it conducts itself diplomatically. As Benjamin Barber writes, "the trouble is, the language of moral absolutism makes negotiated solutions to international conflict nearly impossible" (59). President Bush’s moral absolutist policies are an extension of both neoconservative unilateral imperialism and Evangelical apocalyptic determinism. Writing in the New Republic J. Peter Scoblic challenges the realism of many of the administration’s absolutist convictions. The administration is convinced of the idea that democratization in other nations is the solution to terror. It was this type of thinking that prompted the administration to focus its energies on regime change in Iraq, consequently ignoring the substantial nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea (18). Iraq was selected as the target for invasion because it was the coveted test case for the neoconservative democratization policy. Security did not play in to this and as a result the U.S. faces a greater threat from Iran and North Korea. More notably moral absolutism threatens the progress of constructive engagement. This comes back to Barber’s line about "negotiated solutions." As recounted by Scoblic, the administration has curtailed many chances at addressing the North Korean situation in its refusal to engage in bilateral talks. This is because Bush will not address their leader in any terms more civil than "tyrant" (20). It has always been common for the neoconservatives to make the analogy to Neville Chamberlain’s selling out of Czechoslovakia in 1938 (Buruma, 33). Constructive engagement is, in their minds tantamount to appeasement. More dangerously, absolutist conviction nearly derailed negotiations over Libya’s disarmament of weapons of mass destruction when neoconservative diplomat John Bolton submitted a demand for regime change as part of the deal (Sclobic, 21). Had Bolton not been restrained, the entire deal would have soured.

Faith is the fundamental element every point raised here boils down to. It is faith that has led the neoconservatives to enter this alliance with anti-Semitic evangelicals. It is faith that has led them to suspend their judgement about the practicality of such a deal. Faith has surpassed reason in the minds of the policy makers of the Bush administration as talented career veterans are increasingly moved to the margins in favor of ideologues and policy hacks. It is evidenced by the administration’s missteps regarding Israel, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea that ideologues do not mind true national security over the fallibility of the own ideologies. Thinking in terms of black and white is detrimental to America’s security and that is the danger of the neoconservative-evangelical doctrine. The Bush administration has demonstrated sheer willingness to overlook these security threats. What matters to them is for nothing to threaten the dogma of their ideology. But unfortunately, there is no way to open an ideologue’s closed mind. It was blind faith in the absolutism of an ideology that drove the Soviet Union to ruin. This mistake must not be repeated in America. Reason must triumph over faith.

Works Cited

Barber, Benjamin. Fear’s Empire: War; Terrorism, and Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Buruma, Ian. "How to Talk About Israel." New York Times Magazine 31 Aug. 2003: 28-33.

Donohue, John. "Mistranslations of God: Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century." Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations 15.4 (2004): 427-442.

Fisk, Robert. Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1990.

Guth, James L, et al. "Faith and Foreign Policy: A View From the Pews." The Review of Faith & International Affairs 3.2 (2005): 3-10.

Lind, Michael. Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Scoblic, J. Peter. "Moral Hazard." New Republic 8 August 2005: 17-23.

Stam, Juan. "Bush’s Religious Language." Nation 22 December 2003: 27-27.

Timmerman, Jacobo. The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon. Trans. Miguel Acoca. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.