Review: Realism Is Not Enough

Third Quarter 2002

by James W. Skillen

A Review of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan

By what standards should the United States be judged for its foreign policy in today's world? Do Christians have anything to say about this? Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Hays, and a number of other popular Christian theologians and ethicists argue that the Christian thing to say is "don't use violence." That is precisely the problem with Christianity, says Robert Kaplan in Warrior Politics. Christianity offers only a private morality not a public ethic, according to Kaplan, so it has nothing to say about the reality of political life, which always has to do with the use of force. That is why Kaplan turns to pagan authors to find wisdom about war.

Yet if the contrasting approaches of Kaplan and the pacifists offer the only available alternatives, why do so many American Christians seem not to belong to either of these camps? They confess Christ as Lord and also chant "God bless America" and "United we stand [against terrorism]," fully supporting United States military action in a dangerous world. This third approach arises from an American civil religion that is neither fully pagan nor fully Christian, and I am no more happy with it than with the first two. But is there a fourth?

Let's begin with Kaplan. Warrior Politics manifests a considerable ignorance of the long-standing, long-developing Christian understanding of government's responsibility in face of military and other forms of violent aggression. Kaplan sides with Machiavelli (and Nietszche) who believed that "because Christianity glorified the meek, it allowed the world to be dominated by the wicked." Kaplan thus believes that the only way for American leadership to defend the country is by learning from ancient and modern teachers such as Livy, Thucydides, and Hobbes, rather than from Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin. It is passing strange, however, to read Kaplan's conclusion that "if there is such a thing as progress in politics, it has been the evolution from religious virtue to secular self-interest." The oddity of this modernist comment is that most of the ancient writers he quotes were quite religious in their pagan ways and called for heroic self-sacrifice in public service, not for an ethic of "secular self-interest."

Kaplan is confused then about what is religious and what is not, just as he is ignorant of the mainstream of Christian thinking and teaching about public morality and government's duties. The Christianity that he rejects is a caricature, a straw man, as William Inboden says. What is helpful about Kaplan's book, however, is the way that his call for a pagan ethos puts the heat on sloppy, synthetic civil religions of the American kind. Many American Christians believe that our government should do whatever it takes to defend the country because inside this country many Christian virtues are still quite evident and worth preserving ("God bless America"). But they mistake their means-to-end reasoning ("it is right to use force to defend private virtue") for a Christian justification of the use of force. Kaplan shows, however, that this is a pagan not a Christian argument. And he is right. If the end justifies the means, then there will never be any principled limits to restrain the means. Civil religion becomes more and more pagan until those who want to live as authentic, consistent Christians feel they must become pacifists and oppose all use of force.

In contrast to Kaplan, Hauerwas, and American civil religionists, it is urgent that we renew a genuinely Christian public ethic. This is an ethic that includes recognition of non-subjective, non-nationalist criteria by which to assess just and unjust forms of government and governmental practices, including government's use of force. The "means" and not just the "ends" have to be justified by these criteria. God has indeed ordained government, and it does not wield the sword in vain. God also holds all governments accountable to do justice, to punish the evil doer, and to protect the innocent. Moreover, the God who upholds the criteria of justice is the one who, as Paul said to the Athenians, "has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:31). The man appointed and raised from the dead is none other than Jesus Christ, not a teacher of private morality only and not one who sits on the sidelines of global power politics. He himself, after being raised from the dead, declared that "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Matt. 28:18).

The end goal and standard of earthly governments under Christ's authority--under God's sovereignty--is not the preservation of one's own nation at all costs by any means. That kind of criterion for foreign policy decisions comes from pagan or civil-religious teachers. But the alternative to paganism and civil religion is not a pacifism that rejects the God-appointed obligation of government to do justice with properly restrained means in order to protect the innocent and punish the violent. The alternative is governmental service that accords with the firm, patient, gracious political rule of Jesus Christ, who "will judge the world with justice."