It appears that there has been a surge in religious justification, rhetoric, and references in the contemporary U.S. foreign policy debate. Echoes of increasing religious salience can be seen anecdotally around the world. Political unrest and violent flare-ups in almost any region of the globe can be attributed in part to religious conflict and grievances. Additionally, popular media programming and publications often report on and exploit religious motivations and causality in politics and international affairs.
However, academic scholarship has fallen behind in recognizing the informative role that religion plays in U.S. foreign policymaking. This is due in part to the secularization thesis to which many political scientists, especially international relations (IR) scholars, ascribe. The premise of the secularization literature is that religion is increasingly relegated to the private realm, and therefore is no longer a cause of war in the post-enlightenment era. Secondly, most scholars do not care to delve into the intricate complexities within American religion.
An important place to start in looking at how religion has influenced foreign policymaking in the United States in the modern era is to look at the rise of Arab Nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism. These two movements are not the same and should not be treated as such. The first is an ethnic movement, the second is a religious movement.
It is a relevant and critical question as to whether the mass public conflates the two, as well as whether legislators conflate the two into a common antagonistic “enemy” image. I hypothesize that neither legislators nor the mass public adequately identify the important distinctions. While the movements have some common threads, including opposition to Israel and a common ethnic and general Islamic bond, the Arab nationalist movement is a political, ethnic self-determination movement of Arabs who want to establish nation-state type control and power. The Islamic fundamentalist movement, on the other hand, is not an ethnic movement with any political tie, except that this movement wants to infuse government and the state with Islamic clerical leadership and Islamic law, imposing it on the entire population, and possibly the world.
Although there has been a religious undercurrent in American politics since the founding, as identified most distinctively by Alexis De Tocqueville in the 1800s, and flare ups of American civic religion throughout American history, religion and religious antagonism has moved toward the center of global conflict since the 1970s. Although the evil of Hitler and the anti-religious elements of the Cold War engaged scholars and policymakers in debates about the nature of good and evil, and absolute right and wrong, there has been no religious “other” like that of the Islamic fundamentalists that have taken world-stage front since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Since that time, there have been critical junctures where militant religious fundamentalists have threatened order and U.S. policy. For example, the democratic election into power of groups on the U.S. terrorist “watch” lists, like the election of Hamas to the Palestinian Authority, of oppressive Islamic clerics who impose a rule that counters what the U.S. State Department defends in their human rights watch reports. The U.S. is currently holding its breath to see what happens in Egypt—what happens if the Egyptian populace elects a fundamental Islamist group in the wake of the U.S.-backed, primarily secular populist Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak?
The world is changing in critical junctures such as this. The social scientific law of the democratic peace may have more or less governed the post WWI and WWII world and led Francis Fukuyama to declare the soon to be realized “End of History” when all regions and nations reach a mostly peacefully coexisting liberal democratic state. But the ideological conflict introduced in the Cold War just set the stage for a less power-and-capability driven international system, and ushered in a state system where states reach conflict over deeply held and incompatible religious worldviews and doctrines.
