Christians in the American Empire

--from Vincent D. Rougeau's book, Christians in the American Empire, Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. [Vincent Rougeau is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. His father is a shareholder in the law firm where I am employed.]

American culture has a particular propensity for celebrating notions of freedom that are rooted in extreme versions of individual autonomy. Increasingly, this has driven American law and politics away from understandings of the human person that are situated in communal values like solidarity and sharing. Hurricane Katrina and the near destruction of New Orleans exposed an American governing elite that was shockingly cavalier in its disregard for meaningful emergency preparedness and virtually incapable of demonstrating the kind of community-bonding leadership and compassion one would expect in a crisis of such magnitude. American politics has continued to descend to shocking new lows, with corruption scandals enveloping prominent members of Congress from both parties, as well as some of President Bush's closest advisors. Nevertheless, American power elits continue to nurture a culture of self-promotion and greed in order to maintain their social and economic dominance, to justify current structural inequalities in American society, and to promote the creation of economic and political structures around the world sympathetic to their interest. p. 3-4

In this book I argue that the social, economic, and political life of the United States has reached a crisis point that will require many Christians to make some difficult choices about the nature of their participation in American democracy and society. p. 6

I argue in particular that it is somewhat disingenuous for Christians who align themselves with the Republican Party to claim their political choice is demanded by a meaninful understanding of the intellectual traditions of Christianity. The Republican political program is driven not only by neoconservatives but also by ideologues who embrace libertarianism, nativism, free-market capitalism, militarism, and moral absolutism in ways that are completely at odds with modern understandings of orthodox Christian theology. p. 7

Despite its being cast as a "crusade" by President Bush and neoconservative intellectuals, the Iraq War has little to do with Christianity, properly understood. It is simply one step in a broader process of bolstering America's world power and creating a civil religion sympathetic to the social, political, and economic objectives of key elites in the United States.

Thoughtful American Christians must recognize that, regardless of who occupies the White House, the United States has not been selected to be a special recipient of divine favor, nor has God chosen the United States to play a unique role among the world's nations. Attempts to justify U.S. economic and military hegemony by likening the nation's foreign policy to a divinely inspired moral role in world affairs should be dismissed out of hand as irresponsible political pandering by people anxious to preserve their grip on power. Why is the United States more deserving of God's favor than any other nation on earth? Are our wealth and military power proof of our favored position? Orthodox Christian theology rejects any attempt to link wealth and temporal power to God's favor. Indeed, if any group can lay claim to a special relationship with God, it is the poor. In the final analysis, no U.S. political party or presidential administration has any right to claim a Christian mandate for a quest to maintain world dominance.

By exposing some of the powerful imperatives that drive legal and political choices in the United States, I hope to explain why key priorities of America's governing and social elites part with the ethos that should underlie Christian citizenship in a democratic society. I also argue that religious influences on political choices in pluralist democracies have certain pragmatic limits and that it is absurd and dangerous for Christians to see American politics as a means for creating a coherent Christian culture in the United States. Diverse societies filled with people of varying beliefs represent the current reality for most liberal democracies worldwide. It is a political and cultural environment that Christians committed to human dignity and respect for individual conscience should embrace, and it is one in which a Christian can both survive and thrive. Working from an active and respectful Christian participation in pluralist, secular democracies, I propose an approach to political engagement and civic life for Christians that nurtures human dignity through the enhancement of community life and social solidarity and rejects the heavy-handed power of military violence, the social emptiness of radical personal autonomy, and the winner-take-all mentality of loosely regulated free-market capitalism.

A Christian's public life must be rooted in charity and love. In a deomcracy, Christian citizens should look closely at the assumptions and values that shape law and public policy and then determine whether, on balance, the apparatus of state strives to promote the dignity and participation of citizens in the nation's common life.... The Christian's role is to assess the overall direction of the society and ask hard questions about what type of community the nation's political and legal actors are attempting to create. How do our leaders understand what supports a decent and dignified human existence, and how does this vision affect our nation's relationships to other human communities around the world? pp. 7-8

Christians in the United States could exhort their fellow citizens to be less materialistic, nationalistic, and self-centered and challenge them to become more charitable, more cosmopolitan, and more open to the transformative power of engagement with others, both home and abroad. p. 9