The International Protestant Cabal

Samuel Huntington is still unpopular due to his proposals in “The Clash of Civilizations”; “Who Are We?” certainly didn’t help anything. And yet there is something fascinating about his suggestions. The fertility of Huntington’s ideas aroused me as I read George Marsden’s “Jonathan Edwards” last summer. Marsden commented on the peculiarity and ubiquity of international Protestantism in the 18th century: Protestants in both Europe and North America were keen observers and active participants in a trans-Atlantic effort that incorporated religious and political aspects into an ostensibly unified strategy to promote Calvinistic polity and politics across the West. Jonathan Edwards was a typical example of a prominent Protestant who did his part to track and assist the international Protestant agenda. What struck me was the similarity of the efforts of Edwards and his cohorts to Huntington’s proposal: there was an informed attempt to unite nations, based on their religious and political stances, in international action.

Of course, the West is now post-Christian, and we have long since watched the Protestant vs. Catholic dispute lose its urgency. But I think that, in light of the fervent Christian profession still extant in the United States and its confrontation with the newly-discovered (!) enthusiasm of the Islamic East, we may have an opportunity to consider Huntington’s proposal. I say this in light of the emergence of the Religious New Right (as Richard John Neuhaus would have us term it) in the United States. The Christian Right tends to have its foreign policy dictated to it by the Republican party, with all of the corporate and Zionist commitments that that entails. But what if the Christian Right were to re-think its policy based on Huntington’s vision and the previous commitments of their Protestant forbears? If it were conceivably advantageous to all concerned parties to ally themselves based upon shared civilizational (previously religious) heritage, could that provide a coherent foreign policy?

It is far beyond my competence to answer that question, but it fascinates me. What if Israel were no longer a foreign policy priority due to its lack of a common heritage with the United States? What if there an intentional cultivation of international relationships with those countries most congenial to Christianity?

But if there is to be anything distinctly Protestant about this vision, what could it be? The Christian affiliation of most countries so inclined is generally Roman Catholic. The importance of Roman Catholic nations to an international Christian vision is no less real than the pragmatic necessity of the co-belligerency alliance that has developed between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the U.S. I do not see any way to escape the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that has developed in the American Culture Wars. But I do think that Protestants would be wise to adopt a similar position to the one propounded by such Catholic thinkers as Richard John Neuhaus: we plan to both work with you in the present and assimilate you in the future. We’re a long, long, way from even being able to consider dumping the Papists, domestically or internationally; but that must be our ultimate goal if we are to remain recognizably Protestant.