Biblical Promise and Threat in U.S. Imperialist Rhetoric Before and After September 11, 2001

Political Discourse and Faith

It is not enough, however, to show that biblical subtexts are at work in describing and justifying U.S. imperialism in the name of protection. ¹ It is crucial to explore the way in which biblical images in political discourse are able to interact with a substantial portion of the population’s faith commitments. Not only do images of promise and threat recall familiar, historical, nation-building language, but they also gain strength by connecting with personal piety and individualized ways of reading the Bible. Biblically based national rhetoric easily becomes personalized truth. Indeed, biblically infused rhetoric is effective precisely because it can blur the lines between individuals’ identities as Christians and their identities as citizens of the United States. American civil religion is not explicitly Christian, as Bellah points out; ² the analogy, however, between the United States and Israel that serves as its rallying point was evidently born out of Christian beliefs, and continues readily to accommodate and even invite Christian interpretations. Christians are able to identify with Israel, through the equivalence that has been drawn by early Christian writers, as well as by contemporary theologians, between the “old” Deuteronomic covenant and the “new” covenant inaugurated by Christ. Like Israel under the “old covenant,” the individual member of the Church under the “new covenant” is understood to be chosen and redeemed by God. Many Christians consider themselves part of the new, spiritual Israel by virtue of accepting their part in the new covenant. Such an identity can easily be conflated with membership in a nation that is also the “new Israel,” in the slightly different sense of the inheritors of the Promised Land.

Such a conflation of spiritual and political identity takes on new gravity for any persons who also subject themselves to moral scrutiny in keeping with the demands of their faith. In conservative Protestant circles especially, redemption is thought to bring with it a personal relationship with Christ, in which all aspects of life and decision making are submitted to Christ for approval and help, through prayer and study of the scripture. In this view, individuals (members and citizens of the new Israel) must also always seek to do God’s will, in accordance with scripture. And yet, for individual Americans “to do God’s will” in the world of foreign affairs, they must necessarily rely on national leaders; they must follow, or oppose, those leaders as their conscience and reading of scripture leads them. If then, the president also prays and submits his decisions to the will of Christ, as George W. Bush claims to do, ³ the identification between Christian leader and Christian individual is made all the more easily. ⁴ Indeed, the president’s claim to an intimate relationship with Christ makes it possible and likely for the American Christian who strives to be Christ-like to go beyond simply identifying as a member of the new (spiritual/national) Israel, to identify with its leader (Christ/Bush).

The importance of moral scrutiny, both before and after the individual’s choice to accept the new, Christian covenant, is amplified by apocalyptic thinking. Thousands of American Christians avidly await the “rapture,” the sudden return of Christ and the ascension of true believers into the heavens, as is manifested by the popularity of the fictional representation of that drama in the Left Behind series. ⁵ The preponderance of Internet sites devoted to the rapture attests to the activity of the apocalyptically minded faithful in scrutinizing current events as indicators of the proximity of the end times. Because the final return of Christ is expected imminently, cutting short any time remaining before the final reckoning, apocalyptic thought is accompanied by a sense of urgency, a sense that moral decisions must be made, and lives must be staked on those decisions. Action – to root out evil and avoid destruction – must be taken. The suddenness of the rapture is, as ever, used as a leverage point for encouraging conversion or rededication to the Christian life.

Personal apocalyptic belief can, therefore, quickly become conflated with national discourses, when evils to be guarded against suddenly appear – on television and confirmed by the president – in the form of Middle Eastern dictators. Fear of moral ill quickly moves from interior shame to external threat. National moral obligation becomes of utmost importance. And as recent presidents have so aptly modeled, personal moral shame is quickly exonerated by national banishment of external fears.

1. Here my argument is informed by Moallem’s discussion in “The Textualization of Violence” of the discourses of protection. Moallem cites Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan who observe that the service of protection “tends to efface the will to power exercised by the protector” (Pathak and Rajan, “Shahbano,” in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Castelli with Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 195-215, at 200.[↑]
2. Bellah, Beyond Belief, 175.[↑]
3. Howard Fineman, “Bush and God,” Newsweek 141, no. 10 (March 10, 2003): 22-30.[↑]
4. Thanks to Tanya Erzen for this insight into the appeal of Bush’s own commitment to those of faith. Along these lines, David S. Gutterman gives an extensive analysis of the language Bush uses to describe his conversion experience in such a way as to transform his weaknesses, which might hinder political success, into “signifiers of divine strength.” Gutterman, “Presidential Testimony: Listening to the Heart of George W. Bush,” Theory and Event 5, no. 2 (2001): 31, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2gutterman.html.[↑]
5. For analyses of the Left Behind series, and of other conservative Protestant writing, see the Web site Proselytizing Media: Conservative Christian Media Encounters the World, ed. by Tanya Erzen, http://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/christianmedia (project under development). See also Melani McAlister, “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism’s New World Order,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 773-98.[↑]