THE HEDGEHOG

The Bush Doctrine: The moral vision that launched the Iraq war has been quietly growing in the President's inner circle. (Tony Carnes, 04/25/2003, Christianity Today)

On March 19, as Bush added the words "God bless our troops" to the order launching Operation Iraqi Freedom to disarm Saddam Hussein, he was not just dressing up policy with pious language-he was summing up more than a year's intensive thinking about the relation of his Christian faith and American foreign affairs. And for some influential conservative Catholics, Jews, and evangelicals, the President's faith-based foreign policy brings to fruition a decade-long effort to link their vision for international human rights, religious freedom, democracy, free trade, and public health directly with the executive branch of the federal government.

Bush's new approach has roots in the 1980s, when a handful of President Ronald Reagan's supporters began to focus on international religious persecution. The movement did not spread far beyond Washington think tanks until 1995. Then Michael Horowitz, former general counsel in Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal titled "New Intolerance Between the Crescent and the Cross." Horowitz was a catalyst for alliances of Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), and conservative Jews. In January 1996, another key link formed when the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Freedom House, a religious-freedom advocacy group, hosted a "Global Persecution of Christians" conference in Washington.

In the meantime, then-Governor Bush was testing the waters with his domestically oriented compassionate conservatism. Bush has never been a globetrotter-before he became President, he had traveled abroad three times in his adult life. As governor, Bush's foreign policy amounted mostly to advocating freer trade with Mexico.

At his inauguration, Bush laid down themes that would blossom later. America, Bush said, is "the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess." He also reached back to the Declaration of Independence to talk about "our democratic faith" that "is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not own."

It's interesting to see that this last idea was present from the beginning, needing only adversity and challenge to bring it forth, as in this year's State of the Union:

Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the world and to ourselves. America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.

It is often thought that ideology makes people inflexible, unable to face new situations they've not thought about before. In fact, given how seldom a situation truly is new, a well thought through set of ideas will serve in any circumstance that arises and so may give such folk--Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush are the paramount recent examples--a suppleness that those whose minds function in a more ad hoc way will lack. The latter--men like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton--may be paralyzed into inaction, because they have to analyze things afresh and then worry over whether they've come up with the right decision. It is the difference that Isaiah Berlin wrote about in his famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2003 7:01 AM