Evangelicals and American Exceptionalism
James Skillen Friday, 1 December 2006
In his essay on evangelicals and American foreign policy ("God's Country?" Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006), Walter Russell Mead says at the outset, "Religion explains both Americans' sense of themselves as a chosen people and their belief that they have a duty to spread their values throughout the world." Yet Mead leaves the weighty implications of this sentence largely unpacked in the essay that follows.
Mead makes the mistake of most commentators on religion and politics: he spends most of his time discussing theological and ecclesiastical characteristics of evangelicals compared with other Christians, which have relatively little to do with government and foreign policy. Consequently, he does not sufficiently illuminate the religiosity of Americans as Americans when they think of "themselves as a chosen people." That is the point at which the particular connection between Americanism and evangelicals, or Americanism and any other religious group, becomes truly significant for foreign policy.
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