For God's Sake: The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy

by Lee Marsden

Overview

Religious fundamentalism is a powerful force not only in American domestic politics but also in the way America acts abroad. In For God's Sake Lee Marsden investigates the way that the Christian Right have influenced US foreign policy, arguing that this influence will continue to fuel hostility against the country for many years to come.

Marsden looks at how the Religious Right have exerted pressure on America's powerful elite through campaign contributions, lobbying and policy-making, and are training a new generation of leaders to extend this influence into the future. Through the mass media, the Christian Right also help to spread American soft power abroad. For God's Sake considers the negative impact which this influence is having on the environment, democracy and human rights, and considers how it has manifested itself in US policy towards Israel, Iraq and Iran. Finally, the book examines what the future might hold for the Christian Right's political fortunes in the changing climate of contemporary America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781842778852
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lee Marsden is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of East Anglia. His research interests include US foreign policy, democratization and the increasing influence of religion in international relations. Before entering academia Marsden was an ordained minister in the Word of Faith movement. He has published several articles on human rights in the Middle East and relations between the Muslim world and the West. He is the author of Lessons from Russia: Clinton and US Democracy Promotion (2005).
Lee Marsden is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of East Anglia. His research interests include US foreign policy, democratization and the increasing influence of religion in international relations. Before entering academia Marsden was an ordained minister in the Word of Faith movement. He has published several articles on human rights in the Middle East and relations between the Muslim world and the West. He is the author of Lessons from Russia: Clinton and US Democracy Promotion (2005).

Read an Excerpt

For God's Sake

The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy

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By Lee Marsden

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Lee Marsden
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-356-3

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CHAPTER 1

Open Doors in the Corridors of Power

Over the past three decades, the Christian Right have developed into a sophisticated and relatively coherent political force with their roots firmly in Republican Party soil. Whatever the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, it is inconceivable that the Christian Right will not have played a significant role in the nomination of the Republican candidate. Such expectations are a fitting tribute to a movement that has come of age and is able to mobilize millions of voters behind a narrow range of socially conservative moral issues. The Moral Majority and, later, the Christian Coalition have proved invaluable in delivering Republican victories in three presidential and six congressional elections. The Christian Right's ability to mobilize supporters behind the Republican cause is not guaranteed, however, and there are limits to their ability to turn out the vote, particularly when concerns other than socially conservative ones dominate elections. Over the course of the George W. Bush presidency the Christian Right have increasingly sought to extend domestic success to the international arena on an equally narrow range of special interests. In this chapter, we will consider the background to the movement and examine how it seeks to influence the executive and legislature. This will enable an understanding of the religious and political motivations of the movement, and of the politics of mutual dependency between the Republican Party and the Christian Right, which will inform discussions in later chapters on specific foreign policy interventions.

Influencing the White House and Capitol Hill

The relatively recent phenomenon of organized Christian Right political involvement began in the 1970 s, but there are antecedents. Most presidents have claimed to be practising Christians and have transferred the rhetoric, at least, of civil religion and the American Creed to foreign policy. President Truman's early decision to recognize the State of Israel was due in no small part to his Christian belief (Clifford, 1992: 7–8). Richard Land would claim that Wilsonianism represented an evangelical foreign policy with its roots firmly in Woodrow Wilson's Presbyterian evangelicalism. However, the 1970 s mark a departure in this general principle of evangelical engagement with the political process. During this period, there was a shift among conservative evangelicals, particularly in the South, from the Democrats to the Republican Party. Democrat support for civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and increasing secularization threatened traditional evangelical values and caused those who held them to question their long-standing allegiance to the party. Kevin Phillips attributes this political shift to the reform legacy of four Southern Democratic presidencies: Truman, Johnson, Carter and Clinton (Phillips, 2006: 179). In a rapidly changing society, where traditional gender roles, sexual morality, marriage and traditional Christian beliefs were increasingly contested, conservative evangelicals sought security in their traditional values.

The election of born-again Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976 should have signalled a restoration in Democrat fortunes among white evangelicals in the South. Conservative churchgoers were unimpressed, however, with Carter's record in office and disappointed by increased secularization, a poor economy and weak foreign policy. Those leading evangelicals determined to construct a politically active Christian Right, committed to becoming an integral part of the Republican Party and its most significant voice, capitalized on such frustrations. From the time Carter took office in 1977 until Reagan's inauguration, no fewer than twelve evangelical organizations were formed that would help shape the course of American politics, and eventually US foreign policy, to the present day.

Christian Right Organizations

In 1977 the American Family Association (AFA), Focus on the Family (FOF), and the National Federation for Decency were established. These concentrated their attention on promoting traditional family values and a socially conservative political agenda, although Focus on the Family would emerge to become one of the main conservative evangelical actors in foreign affairs. The following year saw the formation by Robert Grant of the organization Christian Voice, which would become highly influential. Christian Voice organized evangelical Christians across denominations to become involved in the political process, introducing the innovative Congressional Report Card, which has since been taken up by other Christian Right organizations, showing supporters the voting performance of congressional representatives and senators on a range of issues highlighted by Christian Voice as relevant to its members' interests. Members and supporters mobilized behind a campaign entitled 'Christians for Reagan' and began the process of politicization of conservative evangelicals, almost exclusively within a Republican Party context. The organization was a precursor to the emergence of some of the most important Christian Right groups in this period. In 1979, Ed McAteer established the Council of 56 Religious Roundtable, which brought together leading conservative evangelical and Catholic businesspeople, preachers, financiers, military and politicians in regular meetings to help shape a conservative political agenda, which they sought to introduce into the Republican Party.

In the same year, the success of previous organizations inspired the formation of the Moral Majority and Bev LaHaye's Concerned Women for America (CWA), an organization dedicated to resisting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and upholding traditional moral values. The CWA and LaHaye's Institute have been significantly involved in foreign affairs from the time of the founder's personal support for Reagan's policy of arming the Nicaraguan Contras (Brozan, 1987). Perhaps even more significant for the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the South was infighting among the Southern Baptists, Carter's own denomination. Richard Land, an Oxford-educated Anglophile with great presence and later a confidant of President George W. Bush, succeeded in taking control and steering the formerly moderate denomination into an overtly conservative political and religious direction, enabling Reagan to take all but Carter's home state in the South in 1980 and all eleven Southern states in 1984.

In 1980 the National Affairs Briefing, the Council on Revival and Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) were formed, adding to the active political engagement by a new wave of Christian Right organizations. Most organizations concentrated exclusively on domestic policy, and moral values in particular, but where they did focus attention on foreign policy, as in the case of the Religious Roundtable, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and Christian Voice, it was to support calls for a strong defence and resolute anti-communism. The organizations often shared members and worked in the same narrow areas of interest. Although overwhelmingly white evangelical, they increasingly reached out to Catholics and other conservative groups with shared interests in opposing the secularization of American society. The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and the Family Research Council (FRC), two organizations that would come to play an important part in Christian Right advocacy in international affairs, were set up during Reagan's first administration, in 1981 and 1983, respectively.

Council for National Policy

A secretive organization known as the Council for National Policy (CNP) was set up in Reagan's first year in office, 1981. The CNP, like the Religious Roundtable, sought to bring together movers and shakers within the emerging Christian Right. Unlike McAteer's group, however, the CNP sought to include business magnates, financiers, corporate executives, media moguls, judges, conservative Republicans and politicians, as well as Christian Right leaders. The CNP today claims a membership of over 600, and is committed to the 'free enterprise system, a strong national defense, and support for traditional western values'. The CNP does not lobby government; rather, it is a group that seeks to build close personal relationships in a shared endeavour to achieve common goals. The group's secretive nature reflects an approach to the political process that seeks to achieve objectives without accountability or scrutiny by the democratic polity. The membership list is confidential but was leaked for several years during the 1990 s by the now defunct Institute for First Amendment Studies (IFAS).

The CNP's membership list and executive board read like a who's who of the Christian and conservative right. Members have included congressional representatives Dan Burton, John Doolittle, Ernest Istook, Jack Kemp and former Leaders of the House Richard Armey and Tom DeLay. Senators include D.M. 'Launch' Faircloth, former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms, Jon Kyl, Republican whip Trent Lott and Don Nickles. Other political leaders include former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, Reagan domestic policy adviser Kenneth Cribb, and former health and human services secretary Tommy Thompson. Morton Blackwell served as a special assistant to Ronald Reagan in the White House and tycoon Joseph Coors organized a kitchen cabinet with regular access to the president, in the Executive Office Building, until removed. Gary Bauer was White House adviser on policy development. Phyllis Schlafly served on Reagan's Defense Policy Advisory Group and advocated strongly in favour of Star Wars. Eagle Forum actually became an NGO with special consultative status at the United Nations with the Economic and Social Council (IFAS, 1998; Leaming and Boston, 2004).

Leaders of Christian Right organizations represented in the CNP include: Paul Weyrich; Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the voice of Christian America for much of the world; Charles 'Chuck' Colson, former member of the Nixon administration, sentenced to prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, and founder of the Prison Fellowship Ministries in 1976; James Dobson, a leading Christian commentator on child raising and the family, and the founder of FOF; Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and Patrick Henry College, a training centre for future Christian Right political leaders. Also Tim and Bev LaHaye, Ed McAteer and Christian Reconstructionist writer Gary North are members, as are Tony Perkins, one of the leading second-generation Christian Right leaders and president of the FRC, and Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition and adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000. In 2006, Reed failed in a bid to become lieutenant governor of Georgia, after being implicated in the Abramoff lobbying scandal, involving Native American gambling money (Stone, 2006). The list also includes Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America and a leading force in turning out Christian Values Voters in 2006 and 2008. Others have included the late Rousas Rushdoony, D. James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell and Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC). The thrice-yearly meetings of the CNP provide an excellent opportunity for Christian Right ministers to meet with like-minded financially wealthy backers and key opinion formers to determine strategy for influencing Republican administrations.

Key members of the CNP and benefactors of this and other organizations include Ed and Elsa Prince, who have supported the FRC, Howard Ahmanson Jr, who has supported Rushdoony's Chalcedon movement, Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation (FCF), the Rutherford Institute and the think-tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The Coors brewing magnates have generously supported FCF and conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation. The DeVos family, founders of the Amway direct-selling organization, have financed FRC and Robert Schuller Ministries. The brewing and energy company family of Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt have supported Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Campus Crusade for Christ, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Wycliffe Associates (IFAS, 1998 ; Leaming and Boston, 2004).

This secretive network equipped the Christian Right with major resources, which they were later able to supplement through the giving of organization members and supporters. Under the Reagan administration, the Christian Right enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House through the CNP and Joseph Coors's kitchen cabinet. Edwin Meese had served as Reagan's chief of staff during his governorship in California and played a pivotal role throughout Reagan's double term as president. Meese later went on to work at the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank to which he had earlier promised that 'this administration will cooperate fully with your efforts' (Leaming and Boston, 2004).

The Christian Right and Reagan foreign policy

In terms of foreign policy, the Christian Right directed their efforts towards anti-communist initiatives advocated overtly and covertly by the administration. Ever since Karl Marx called for the abolition of religion, that 'opium of the people', in his Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, communism has been viewed as the arch-enemy of Christian evangelicals. The persecution of Christians by communist authorities throughout the world served to strengthen this hostility. The Christian Right therefore enthusiastically supported Reagan's arms race and his powerful invective against the Soviet Union. A meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was an obvious setting for Reagan's 'evil empire' speech, and the Christian Right remained his most fervent supporters. Oliver North and General John Singlaub, former head of the World Anti-Communist League, both members of the CNP, were involved in the covert military operations in Central America and in the supporting of the Nicaraguan Contras that did so much to discredit the Reagan administration. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Pat Robertson's Freedom Council and the Heritage Foundation were among a number of right-wing groups involved with the Reagan administration's Outreach Working Party on Central America, devising strategy and propaganda in support of a campaign of targeted killings and other anti-communist activity (IFAS, 1998; Diamond, 1995a). Christian Right support for US oil and business interests in South America (Perkins, 2006), the Contras and fellow evangelical Rios Montt in Guatemala have all had long-term repercussions for America's relationship with countries in its self-proclaimed backyard.

Christian Voice and the Unification Church

A more surprising source of Christian Right funding came from Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which, through the Coalition for Religious Freedom and the American Freedom Coalition, supported Christian Voice and collaborations with Christian Right leaders including Tim LaHaye, Don Wildmon, Hal Lindsay, Paul Crouch (Trinity Broadcasting Network), James Robison, Jimmy Swaggart and D. James Kennedy (IFAS, 1998). In the quest for power, conservative evangelicals have been prepared to jettison long-standing theological objections to Catholicism, the Unification Church and, later, the Mormons, preferring to achieve temporal political objectives rather than seeking to maintain theological integrity (Shupe and Heinerman, 1985). They were willing to make common cause with any group that espoused conservative social values, a belief in free enterprise, and virulent anti-communism.

From Bush to Bush

Although Ronald Reagan was, and remains, the Christian Right's favourite president, his vice president was not guaranteed the succession. Pat Robertson, a Southern Baptist converted to Assembly of God minister, challenged George H.W. Bush for the presidency. Robertson's campaign resulted in caucus victories in Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Washington, with near misses in three other states. Vice-President Bush went on to win the nomination, but in order to do so was obliged to reach out to the Christian Right by publicly proclaiming his connections with conservative evangelical leaders and detailing his own faith in his book Man of Integrity. Bush Senior enlisted his son, George W., to be his liaison with the Christian Right, recognition of the increased national influence of the movement. Once elected, however, Christian Right influence on the administration diminished as the new president oversaw the end of the Cold War, sought to distance himself from the Iran–Contra scandal, and embarked on the Gulf War. Robertson, in the meantime, developed the Christian Coalition, replacing the Moral Majority, which by 1989 had run its course.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from For God's Sake by Lee Marsden. Copyright © 2008 Lee Marsden. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Acronyms and abbreviations
Preface
Introduction

Section One
Chapter 1 - Open Doors in the Corridors of Power
Chapter 2 - Spreading the Word

Section Two
Chapter 3 - Promoting Democracy or the Gospel?
Chapter 4 - Hijacking the Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance Agenda
Chapter 5 - Dominion and the Environment

Section Three
Chapter 6 - Blessing Israel
Chapter 7 - The War on Terror

Conclusion - From Here to Eternity

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Lee Marsden has produced a stimulating and informative account of the foreign policy influence of the Christian Right in the USA. Underpinned by extensive interviews with key players, the book reveals a network of right-wing Christian foreign policy activists who focus on human rights, the environment, Israel and "the war on terror". Marsden's book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the current role of religion in US foreign policy.” —Jeff Haynes, London Metropolitan University

“Marsden strips away conventional wisdoms about the Christian Right to provide a subtle and powerful account of their impact on US Foreign Policy. He is able to bring together his detailed knowledge of various Christian Right organizations, of how the US works, and importantly also of Christian theology into a book that is a real page turbaner, but also a seminal contribution to understanding the power of religion in the United States.” —Stuart Croft, Warwick University

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