TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Lyn Boyd-Judson

The religious values held by George W. Bush have undoubtedly informed his foreign policy decisions. This simple fact should give every American voter pause.

For the past eight years, many like-minded Americans have rejoiced in the current president's conservative Christian worldview and its foreign policy consequences, rather than recognizing that this worldview is a profoundly disturbing element of his presidency. They take comfort in the belief that their president receives God's guidance in political matters, both domestic and foreign. Their logic is that if good and evil exist in our world, the tension between the two manifests in the political realm and plays out in our foreign policy.

In contrast, those Americans - both secularists and liberal Christians - who find the current president's claims of divine guidance profoundly disturbing argue that one of the key principles on which the U.S. was founded is freedom from religion in state institutions. They argue that the founding fathers were deists who advocated a natural religion based on human reason rather than divine revelation. They understand that one's religious beliefs or worldview can never truly be divorced from decision-making, but they also hold that these religious assumptions should constantly be re-evaluated by rational and factual criteria when applied to matters of state. So when it is reported that President Bush says he receives divine guidance on matters of U.S. foreign policy - for instance, that God told him to invade Iraq? - these Americans believe that all citizens, Christian or otherwise, should be profoundly disturbed, because an unjust war can never be a divine war.

This contrast between American Christian worldviews is starkly apparent in the recent media reports of controversial comments made by religious leaders connected to the current presidential candidates. Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has made inflammatory remarks about the U.S. government, suggesting that the U.S. is racist on the home front and that its foreign policy is unjust, aggressive and foments Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens. John McCain has close ties to pastors Rod Parsley and John Hagee. Parsley has claimed that Islam is a false religion that America should destroy, and John Hagee has called for bombing Iran to hasten the Christian apocalypse.

Several political pundits describe the current politico-cultural divide in the U.S. as a rift between God-fearing Christians and "secular" (read atheist) liberal intellectuals from (pick your coast). Of course, this distinction is inaccurate and misleading. The divide in American political culture over God is not so much about whether Americans believe in God as it is about how the 90 percent of Americans who believe in God? want to define his purpose in our political world. In this sense, the divide in American political culture over a presidential God is an argument between the politically left-leaning Christian who embraces a God of peace, inclusiveness, forgiveness and social justice, and the politically right-leaning Christian who embraces a God Almighty whose main attributes are judgment, the strength to vanquish enemies, and the righteous impulse to devalue - even destroy - all things not Christian. Again, which presidential God will shape the foreign policy decisions made in the Oval Office?

As Americans, regardless of our religious beliefs or political commitments, it is our duty as voters to reflect deeply on what we value in foreign policy initiatives, why we hold these values, and how we express them in the public sphere. We need reasonable voices speaking to reconcile the factions in the religio-political divide - a divide not over whether a candidate knows God, but over how Americans want to define the role of a candidate's God in a president's foreign policy. While religious values can certainly inform our moral impulses, the distinction between an exclusive or inclusive God is where war and peace often hang in the balance.

Labels: Americans, Barack Obama, Christianity, George Bush, John McCain, Lyn Boyd-Judson, politics, religion, war