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Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Points: "James Kurth: America's Christian soldiers

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03:32 PM CST on Sunday, January 29, 2006

President Bush has often spoken of freedom as God's gift to America and to mankind, and of America's calling to bring freedom to all peoples. Moreover, his strongest electoral support has come from evangelical Protestants. These are the people the liberal media call 'the religious right' (although by that logic, the media themselves should be called the 'secular left')."

As it happens, Protestantism has indeed had a major impact on U.S. foreign policy, but this is not primarily due to evangelical Protestantism. It is due to the "Protestant Deformation."It is this peculiar pseudo religion upon which both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush have drawn in their foreign policies to spread American ideas of liberal democracy, free markets, individual freedom and human rights abroad.

Analysts have debated for decades the relative influence of different factors in the shaping of American foreign policy. Although numerous scholars have stressed the importance of realism, idealism, capitalism or liberalism, until recently almost no one has thought that Protestantism itself – the dominant religion in the United States – was worthy of consideration.

In fact, American foreign policy has been and continues to be shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States, but with a twist. That Protestantism has not been the original religion, but a series of successive departures from it down the scale of what might be called the "Protestant declension.