Christian Right and US Middle East Policy: Foreign Policy in The Service of God’s Will
Christian Right and US Middle East Policy: Foreign Policy in The Service of God’s Will

Author(s): Marina Eleftheriadou
Subject(s): Christian Theology and Religion, Politics and religion
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Christian Right; Middle East Policy; Foreign Policy; Christian; Middle East; Policy; Religion; political landscape;
Summary/Abstract: Religion has always been an integral feature of Unites States (US) socio-political landscape, even though the US were the first polity to ban the establishment of an official state-endorsed religion. The influence of religion in US policy-making has ebbed and flowed over time. Yet, it always lingered in what Huntington dubs as ‘American Civil Religion’, which rests on a pervasive—trans-religious and extra-religious—belief that Americans are ‘chosen’ people destined to play a unique role in the world. On top of this creeping religiosity, which manifests in the religious references, symbols and performative functions that ‘embellish’ various public rituals, actors across the religious spectrum have strived to influence policy-making on state and federal level. Their ability to do so suffered under the advent of modernity’s crushing rationality in the 19th and religiously-diverse migration in the early 20th century. Scopes trial (1925), best known as Monkey trial, was the symbolic turning point in the struggle between the forces of modernity and religion. The latter’s ridicule in the courtroom and the frontpages of national press spearheaded a period of geographical, social and political retreat. The secularisation thesis—a dominant paradigm within sociology of religion for the better part of the 20th century— theorised a deterministic drive to secularism, culminating in the eventual demise of religion as a potent socio-political force. In reality, US religious actors’ retreat lasted less than half a century.

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