One of my admittedly arcane little hobbies is to discover behavior in our avowedly secular society here in 21st-century America that looks, feels and quacks not like a duck, but like what in earlier ages would have been recognized as obviously religious in character.
When I describe a behavior as religious in character I mean something quite specific but not necessarily obvious: I mean a behavior whose logical syntax differs from other modes of behavior, such as instrumental behavior of the sort necessary to, say, design and build a garage or go shopping for dinner ingredients, in that it generates questions, and at least tentative answers, concerning generally more abstract and, as best I can tell, universal concerns. Among these are the mysteries of mortality, the sources of love and other social bonds, the stunning connectedness of causality in the world, the nature of the beautiful in the context of the sacred, and above all the human capacity for moral reasoning (essentially, for the philosophically literate, cosmology, epistemology, logic, aesthetics and ethics).
Every civilization in human history has had religion, if by religion one means the focus on such abstract but cloying subjects as almost invariably accompanied by ritual for purposes of social bonding, intersubjectivity and catharsis in relation to them. Our civilization also has religion even if the actual religion in which we believe, the one that aims at and promises to answer such questions, is often something other then what we call “religion.” In the temples of much organized American religion today, ritual has been denatured into mere ceremony. For the educated and the upscale, genuine religious behavior, defined as I have done so above, goes on elsewhere, generally unawares, and it is called something else if it is called anything at all. When it comes to the nature of consciousness and what used to be called ethical behavior, for example, the educated and the upscale these days find more genuine religion in the exploits and interpretations of neuroscience than they do in any Bible. On a somewhat more pedestrian level, supposed non-believers who would never go to a clergyman for advice think nothing of going to a psychiatrist, a professional counselor of this or that description, or even to a “new age” pyramid-power svengali (eg., palm-reading for the Bvlgari set). None of the latter, of course, has anything to do with “religion”……perish the thought.
There is another domain, however, that has long been a repository for religious behavior on the part of Americans but that has for many decades, accumulating by now into centuries, been called something else: foreign policy. Before the United States had a serious foreign policy, or much of a need for one beyond the exigencies of living in North America with the remnants of the British, French and Spanish empires, there was always missionary work. “America is a nation with the soul of the church”, said G.K. Chesterton, and he among many were really onto something.
Not that it matters, but on several occasions in my writings about U.S. foreign policy over the years I have insisted that much of what we do, or would do if only we could, is missionary work in secular drag.[1] In a fairly recent essay evaluating the 9/11 decade (“Reflections on the 9/11 Decade”), for example, I wrote:
American political culture is not as secular as most Americans think it is: The contemporary American idea of democracy is an attenuated expression of aspects of Anglo-American Protestant Christian tradition. Our longing to spread it to the Muslims is the 21st-century version of what was, in the 19th-century, a much more honest and self-aware missionary movement. . . . Looking at U.S. behavior in the 9/11 decade as a manifestation of a secularized political theology actually explains far more than the standard parsing of the usual-suspects schools of thought approach. . . . Indeed, America at war after 9/11 became, in the late Michael Kelly’s words, “a secular evangelism, armed.”
All that said, by far the most impressive articulation of this thesis is that of James Kurth, professor of political science at Swarthmore College for many years—and just by the way an Episcopalian deacon—in his magisterial essay “The Protestant Deformation” (The American Interest, Winter 2005, which is an extension and update of the original in the Spring 1998 Orbis). At one point, as he traced the transformation of the original Protestant religion into what he called a secular heresy, Kurth wrote of American foreign policy in the 20th century:
Analysts have debated for decades the relative influence of different factors in the shaping of American foreign policy. . . . In the 20th century, it seemed abundantly clear that one could (and should) write the history of American foreign policy with no reference to Protestantism whatsoever. This was, and remains, a mistake. American foreign policy has been and continues to be shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States. . . . [A] characteristic pattern had developed in the conduct of American foreign policy in peacetime. When a country was strong in relation to the United States, the United States . . . acted toward that country in ways similar to those of the other great powers. In contrast, when a country was weak in relation to the United States, American foreign policy was marked by "idealism" (really secularized Protestantism)—by the drive to convert that country to free markets and liberal democracy. The United States sought to remake that country according to the tenets of the American Creed.
Let me now reveal why it occurs to me to tell you all this: Henry Kissinger.
I am a long-time admirer of Dr. Kissinger. I know him personally if glancingly, having met with him a few times and dined with him once some years ago along with the late Alexander M. Haig, Jr. I am no fan of his recent China book, but I think that even at his advanced age Kissinger has no peer when it comes to getting at the gist of things in the invariably complex convolutions of international politics. And so, given my hobby and my anchoring take on the sources of American foreign policy, you can imagine my delight upon reading what Dr. Kissinger had to say in this past Sunday’s New York Times book review section (“The Age of Kennan,” November 10, 2011) in what was billed as a review of a John Lewis Gaddis’s new book, a decade and more in the making, on George F. Kennan.
Kissinger wrote an essay of very high quality, but a book review essay it was not: John Lewis Gaddis pretty much disappears from the text. But in the course of his peroration on the age of George F. Kennan, Kissinger had this to say, almost in passing, of years 1946-47:
At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary––if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act rude gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages. . . . The issue [of dealing with the USSR] became an aspect of the perennial debate between the realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability.
Kurth also specifically invoked the metaphor of conversion (and much more—you should read the essay if you have not yet done so, for no summary can do it full justice). I, too, implied that this was the real gist of the Bush Administration’s so-called forward strategy for freedom, and that the locals were entirely correct to interpret it as an effort at religious conversion. But to now have Henry Kissinger make reference to the identical mode of explanation, I must say, is gratifying.
As far as I know (but I might have missed something), in all of Kissinger’s writings heretofore he has avoided explicit reference to the essentially religious modalities of American idealism. Now he has come out into the open on this; I don’t know why, or why now. The next time I see him I will be sure to ask him about this. I hope to be able to report back on his answer.
By the way, I know of only one other member of my hobby club: Walter Russell Mead. Doubtless there are more with similar interests. If you are one, or wish to join, you are most welcome! Let’s trade stories and observations. Aren’t hobbies such fun?!
[1]On occasion I have been explicit about this; see “Die bewaffneten Missionare”, Die Zeit, January 30, 2003 [reprinted in Michael Thumann, ed., Der Islam und der Westen (Berlin: Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003)].
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