Deforming Foreign Policy

"The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy" by James Kurth, in Orbis (Spring 1998), Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1528 Walnut St., Ste. 610, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102–3684.

Though scholars often have completely ignored its influence, Protestantism has long shaped U.S. foreign policy. But today, argues Kurth, a political scientist at Swarthmore College, a heresy of the original religion holds sway—and under its spell, U.S. foreign policy is provoking "intense resistance and even international conflict."

In the three centuries after the Reformation began in 1517, the Protestant rejection of hierarchy and community with regard to salvation spread—particularly in the United States—to the economic realm (the free market) and the political realm (liberal democracy), Kurth says. A written contract and a written constitution, each "a version of the written covenant among individual Protestant believers," provided order in the respective secular domains.

Driving this expansion, Kurth contends, was a dynamic within Protestantism itself, as the original idea of salvation through grace gradually gave way to increasingly secular beliefs. By the early 20th century, even the genteel abstraction of Divine Providence (itself a substitute for Christ and the Holy Spirit) disappeared, and "the various Protestant creeds were replaced by the American Creed," a secular vision of "free markets and equal opportunity, free elections and liberal democracy, and constitutionalism and the rule of the law."

Overseas, Kurth says, this translated after World War I into a peacetime foreign policy of "realism" (or "isolationism") toward strong powers, and "idealism" toward weak ones, whom the United States "sought to remake...in the image of the American Creed."

In the 1970s, maintains Kurth, Protestantism’s inner decline reached its final stage, with the transformation of the American Creed into a creed of universal human rights. American political and intellectual leaders promoted this notion as a fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy. In the decades since, America has become "a new kind of political society," with "expressive individualism" as its ideology. "The Holy Trinity of original Protestantism, the Supreme Being of Unitarianism, and finally the United States of the American Creed have all been dethroned and replaced by the imperial self," Kurth declares. He calls this the "Protestant Deformation."

Today, freed by the end of the Cold War from the need "to show some respect for and make some concessions to the particularities of hierarchy, community, traditions, and customs in the countries that it needed as allies," the United States is pursuing a foreign policy of emphasizing universal human rights. That policy has created conflicts with other nations, notably those with Islamic or Confucian traditions. But Kurth points to another danger: "The Protestant Deformation, because of its universalist and individualist creed, seeks the end of all nation states and to replace loyalty to America with gratification of oneself." As the United States zealously promotes the world, it may be simultaneously promoting Protestant Deformation throughout the its own self-destruction.