American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion by Wilsey John D.; Fea John;

Author:Wilsey, John D.; Fea, John; [Wilsey, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899296
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Dulles’s Legacy

Dulles’s vision of a God-given national mission for America was not original to him, nor did it die with him in the spring of 1959. It animated American foreign policy, in various degrees of similarity, for the rest of the Cold War. And it also found expression after the 9/11 attacks and resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The American experience in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s invited serious questions concerning the legitimacy of the concept of mission, especially as Dulles had defined it in the 1950s. President Jimmy Carter, for example, sought to make humility a hallmark of his foreign policy, and the global pursuit of human rights the American mission in the world. Raymond Haberski wrote that “Carter sought to reaffirm the promise of America while paying heed to the perils that had recently befallen the nation.”40 But President Ronald Reagan managed to recover much of Dulles’s Manichaean vision and faith in the ultimate triumph of America’s mission of triumphing over communism. He famously called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world” in his March 8, 1983, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. And in pure Dullesian form, he went on to stress that spiritual weapons were more potent than material ones. He said, “While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.”41

But even Reagan softened his Manichaean rhetoric, if not his faith in ultimate American success in its mission. When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, Reagan found someone with whom he could work constructively on reducing nuclear armaments and reducing the tensions that had existed between the United States and the USSR for decades. Reagan’s actions are in stark contrast with those of Dulles after the death of Stalin. He saw any Soviet overture toward negotiation as a ruse designed to catch America in weakness and exploit any possible advantage exposed by that weakness.

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War came to an end, thankfully with more of a whimper than a bang. The great Manichaean struggle between good and evil, truth and falsehood—the United States and the Soviet Union—was finished. With no common enemy to confront on the global stage, Americans looked within for a national mission. Thus, the culture wars of the 1990s pitting social conservatives against social liberals over issues such as universal health care, gays in the military and the rise of single motherhood, to name a few, filled the civil religious void left in the wake of the Cold War.

But this situation proved to be only temporary. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, restored certainty in American exceptionalism and

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