God and Democratic Diplomacy

It is no surprise that after a generation of political scientists was trained to ignore religion (as we argued in part I of this article), our current diplomacy takes a similarly myopic approach. On February 10^th, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a congressional committee that the Islamic Brotherhood is a "largely secular" organization. With equal glibness, other analysts have declared that the Brotherhood is a scary sect waiting to establish a violent theocracy. Others just can't think calmly or coherently when any kind of religion appears on the horizon. When the Washington Post's David Ignatius was in Tahrir Square for the February 18^th "Victory March," he found the mere sight of ordinary Egyptians staging mass prayers "unnerving." Such is the subtlety of our secularist outlooks, which regard religious people either as not really religious at all or else as necessarily irrational, violent, and frightening.

In God’s Century, we argue that if American foreign policymakers want to promote democracy and stability, they must come to realize that secularism is a poor analytical tool. The great surprise of the past generation of global politics is a resurgence of religion's political influence across the world. Despite a powerful array of secularizing regimes, ideologies, and social trends, the self-proclaimed partisans of God outlasted and politically outcompeted the self-proclaimed enemies of God....

Continue reading: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/05/3308

Part 3 of this series, "God and Terror," was published on May 20, 2011.