September 26, 2006, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, God's Country? Evangelicals and U.S. Foreign Policy,

September 26, 2006, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, God's Country? Evangelicals and U.S. Foreign Policy, Event Transcript,

Pew Research Center Washington, D.C.

In his recent article in Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead argues that as U.S. evangelicals exert increasing political influence, they are becoming a powerful force in foreign affairs. In recent years, evangelicals have voted overwhelmingly Republican, helping to put conservatives at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, while focusing their energies on a handful of specific issues, including support for Israel, the promotion of religious freedom abroad and the alleviation of hunger in Africa. But as evangelicals mature politically, they are showing interest in a broader array of foreign policy issues, including some, such as global warming, traditionally seen as liberal.

The Pew Forum invited a group of distinguished journalists to hear Mead discuss his article and asked Leon Fuerth, of George Washington University, and Richard Land, of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, to respond to it.

Speaker:
Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

Respondents:
Leon Fuerth, Research Professor of International Affairs, Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University

Richard Land, President, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

Moderator:
Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

LUIS LUGO: I'm Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. We are a project of the Pew Research Center. The center is a research organization and does not take positions on policy debates. This luncheon is part of an ongoing series that brings together journalists and government officials, policy leaders, et cetera, to discuss timely topics at the intersection of religion and public affairs.

I am pleased to welcome you today to a discussion on evangelicals and U.S. foreign policy, a discussion that is prompted by an article on the subject in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled, "God's Country?" The author, Walter Russell Mead, is our special guest today.

Evangelical Protestants, as most of you know, constitute about a quarter of the American electorate. In the last presidential election, they voted 78 percent for George W. Bush, and that constituted about 40 percent of his total vote. Evangelicals have made a name for themselves, primarily through their involvement in domestic culture-war issues. But in recent years, they have also been building up a head of steam on foreign policy issues.

Everyone knows that evangelicals are stalwart supporters of Israel, and that has been the lodestar of evangelical foreign policy. But of late, they have also been branching out in significant ways, in areas such as human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and international religious freedom.

Just how are evangelicals influencing the priorities of American foreign policy? What is the extent of their agenda on these humanitarian issues? How do they view Islam and the war against Muslim radicalism? What are the main fault lines on foreign policy issues within the evangelical community?

To help us explore these and other questions, and the implications for the future direction of U.S. foreign policy, we are pleased to have with us three very distinguished experts.

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Walter will be discussing his Foreign
Affairs article on evangelicals and U.S. foreign policy.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that we have been in partnership with Walter and the council for the last couple of years on an ongoing study group led by Walter and Timothy Shah, a senior fellow here at the Pew Forum, that looks specifically at religion's role in U.S. foreign policy.

Responding to Walter will be two very active participants of that study group. Leon Fuerth is research fellow at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and former national security advisor to Vice President Al Gore. Richard Land is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a very important player in evangelical advocacy efforts on foreign policy issues.

As you know, we always structure this as an informal conversation, and we have asked the presenters to keep their remarks brief so we have plenty of time for your questions and comments.

Walter, let's hear from you first.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: I have a number of good reasons to be brief today. One is that most of what I have to say on this subject is available in my article. But as I reflect on the article, there are a couple of extra things that might be worth saying.

Probably the most important point is that most of us have tended to look at the rise of a more conservative form of Protestantism in the United States and divide American Protestants into two camps: a liberal or mainline Protestant camp of churches including Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and then a fundamentalist camp in which we put the Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and many other groups.

A more helpful and useful way of thinking about this is to divide American Protestantism into three groups, that is, the liberal or mainline group and then, within the world of conservative Protestantism, a fundamentalist and an evangelical camp. Both fundamentalists and evangelicals have grown somewhat both in influence and in numbers because in the United States, as almost everywhere in the world other than Europe, religion is becoming more salient as a factor in identity and politics. In general what I call "hot religion" is becoming more prominent and "cool religion" is fading.

Both forms of conservative Protestantism have been gaining. But the evangelicals are where the real political action is in the United States. This is partly driven by the fact that fundamentalists in the U.S. are somewhat divided in their political vision. If you're looking for people in America who would like to see a Christian or biblicist theocracy, say, on the model of Oliver Cromwell's England, or Massachusetts of the 17th century, or Scotland in the 17th century, you would find people with those views among fundamentalists, though not all fundamentalists share them.

But the fundamentalists are so small in number as a percentage of the overall population and so isolated politically that this is a very unrealistic aspiration. The other alternative is withdrawal from an impure world, or concentrating on a very small number of causes. So fundamentalists are not as much of a factor in American politics and in the future of this country. Evangelicals who share some features with fundamentalists and some features with mainline Protestants are probably where the real action is, and that is where I have concentrated.

To step back a little bit, American Protestants still constitute about 52 percent of the American population as a whole. The next largest group is Roman Catholic, which includes about 24 percent of the population, and then you get rapidly into much smaller groups. Luis can probably give you the demographics better than I can.

MR. LUGO: That is why I have John Green in the crowd. For any numbers question, we are going to turn to him for a definitive and authoritative answer.

MR. MEAD: Right. American Protestants remain the majority religion. But the big news is evangelicals have become the majority of the majority in the last couple of decades. If you look at polling that is two or three decades old, you'll find the mainline Protestants were the majority of the majority, and if you look more recent polling, you'll see evangelicals have become the majority of the majority.

We can talk about the theological differences between mainline Protestants and evangelicals. I'm not sure that that would get us very far today. I have concentrated, in the article and in my work, mostly on evangelicals' impact on foreign policy.

One thing I didn't say in the article, but is very important to understand, is that their biggest impact on foreign policy is not necessarily a direct result of their own views. The fact that evangelicals, for largely domestic reasons, tend to vote Republican means that when people have made foreign policy in the United States, particularly in the last six years, they have been Republicans and not Democrats.

Nevertheless, evangelicals do have some rather specific foreign policy views that are politically relevant. In my article, I looked at two: one was their concern over poverty in Africa, and the other was a concern over Israel and Israel's place in American foreign policy.

Mead: "A few years ago, you would not have seen many evangelical leaders engaged in something like global warming."

I didn't say much about religious freedom in my article, but evangelicals have definitely been the major force in making religious freedom a much more salient feature in American foreign policy. When, for example, President Bush receives Chinese dissidents, they are now more likely to be members of house churches or groups like that than some of the more traditional dissident figures who might have visited past administrations. It doesn't mean that there is no concern for these other issues, but the secular human rights movement had more or less marginalized the cause of religious freedom and viewed it as one of many issues. For evangelicals, it is a central freedom, if not the central issue.

What we are seeing, then, is the emergence of a powerful force in American foreign policy. I believe the evangelical moment in American politics is not over and that the impact of evangelicals on American politics generally and on foreign policy in particular is likely to become greater. It is also likely to become less focused. As the group grows and matures intellectually and politically, you will see more diversity in the way leading evangelicals define their political agenda. For example, a few years ago, you would not have seen many evangelical leaders engaged in something like global warning; today you will find significant religious leaders in the evangelical community speaking out on global warning and saying the church ought to be involved with climate change.

You will see some learning through experience. Any group that hasn't been involved in a hands-on way with foreign policy tends to learn, once it has its fingers burned a few times, that foreign policy is complex, difficult, and sometimes requires counterintuitive steps - two steps backward in order to take a step forward a later date. But you will also see that American politicians must be increasingly able to relate the goals of American foreign to the religious and political concerns of evangelicals.

Why is this religious revival or this evangelical revival likely to continue in the U.S.? It is partly because liberal Protestantism is in serious decline. Liberal Protestants are the chief rivals of evangelicals for power and influence in the religious world, and the liberal Protestant crisis is a deep one. It's a demographic crisis; membership in the churches is shrinking.

It's also becoming a financial crisis. These denominations have historically exerted their influence on policy less through grassroots networks, like, say, the Christian Coalition, and more through Washington-based lobbying offices. As denominational financial bases shrink, and more resources have to be devoted to keeping up shrinking congregations and aging buildings, there is less and less money available for the forms of national outreach that have characterized these churches.

Seminaries and some others of the very elaborate and expensive institutional infrastructure that liberal Protestantism developed, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, are likely to come under increasing strain. It won't just be doctrinal and political struggles over things like ordination of gay and lesbian clergy that divide the liberal denominations, but also the struggle for survival and how to handle a dwindling pool of resources.

We will also see, I think, a theological shift toward a more conservative stance by some of these denominations in keeping with changes generally in American culture and religion. When brand X is working pretty well, brand Y starts trying to look more like brand X in order to be more successful.

Liberal Protestants are also less capable than they used to be of exercising the role of the convening body in American religion. Again, if you go back 25 years, it would be the liberal Protestant leadership that would convene the Catholics, the Jews, and an ecumenical group of Protestants to deal, at a local or national level, with various kinds of political or social problems.

Because of quarrels over abortion and other social issues with Catholics, and because of increased sympathy for Palestinians rather than Israel in the Middle East, liberal Protestants today are less able to perform that role of the neutral convener. Meanwhile, evangelical relations with both Jews and Catholics are far, far stronger than they were 30 years ago. Again, this is as much to do with domestic issues as it is with international issues.

We are in the midst of a change in the balance of power in American religion, one that is not likely to end soon. That, I suppose, more than anything is what I was trying to call attention to in this article. Thank you.

MR. LUGO: Very good summary. Leon, you're first up in responding.

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