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'An Angel Directs the Storm': The Religious Politics of American Neoconservatism
Abstract
In his inaugural speech, President George W. Bush suggested that the mission of
America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored
mission. The intention first announced in Bush’s inaugural to globalize an American
Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism,
reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration.
In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neoconservative
political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream
Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then
subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology
associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman
Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North
American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.
America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored
mission. The intention first announced in Bush’s inaugural to globalize an American
Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism,
reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration.
In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neoconservative
political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream
Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then
subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology
associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman
Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North
American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.