Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 15

Providence: Moral Courage, Obama-Style

This article was originally posted at Providence.

One of Barack Obama’s proudest moments as president, by his own description, was his 2013 decision to repudiate his “red line” warning to Syria’s Bashar al Assad: the threat of U.S. military force to punish the regime for using chemical weapons against its own people. Instead, Mr. Assad, after killing thousands, agreed to surrender his chemical stockpile to international inspectors. “I’m very proud of this moment,” Mr. Obama recently told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. “The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake.”

Why is the president certain that this perception was wrong, and that his failure to enforce a U.S. threat of military action is a reason to boast?

Because, according to Mr. Obama, his decision went against the “playbook in Washington” that presidents typically adopt. “It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment,” he told Mr. Goldberg. “And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.” As the Obama White House sees it, much of the D.C. foreign policy “establishment” is “doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders.”

Translation: foreign policy experts who disagree with the president do not have the best interests of the United States in mind. This week some members of the so-called foreign policy establishment fired back.

At a gathering hosted by the Hudson Institute, senior fellow Michael Doran moderated a panel discussion with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Armed Services Committee; Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Michele Dunne, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Ambassador Eric Edelman, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. All of the panelists criticized the president’s reversal on the use of force against Assad as a dangerous misjudgment that has invited greater instability and international aggression.

Senator Graham said the “big winners” are “those dictators of the world who think they can do anything they want without reprisal.” Ms. Dunne called the president’s approach to Syria “a policy defined by the absence of a strategy.” Mr. Satloff sees a perverse ethical reasoning at work in the White House: “It is not moral courage to take on those who used chemical weapons against the innocent,” he said, “but it’s moral courage to take on the Washington establishment.”

Ambassador Edelman discerns a breathtaking hubris: the president’s belief that his words alone, joined to his personal biography, can change the nature of international politics. “He sees foreign affairs in need of a transformation, which can be accomplished by the force of his personality.”

No need to take the advice of his defense secretaries, three of whom opposed his Syria policy. No reason to heed the collective counsel of his other top military advisors about Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Islamic State. No reason to believe—as every modern president has believed—that breaking a promise to punish international aggression would only invite greater aggression. Such thinking, according to Mr. Obama, is merely the product of an outdated “playbook.”

In all this, says Ambassador Edelman, Barack Obama looks and sounds very much like the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump. “I think what you see on display…is the president’s narcissism.” Whatever we make of that judgment, some of the catastrophic results of the president’s decision-making are on display: Mr. Assad’s continued butchery of Syrian civilians; the rise of the Islamic State and its genocidal violence against Christians and other religious minorities; the profound destabilization of Arab states, such as Jordan and Lebanon, trying to cope with the Syrian refugee crisis; and on it goes.

The long-term consequences of Mr. Obama’s “liberation” from the foreign policy “playbook” could be even more dire. Secretary of State John Kerry, in a rare flash of moral clarity, warned recently about the threat of ISIS—a threat, he neglected to mention, created and sustained by Mr. Obama’s policies in Syria: “You could have allies and friends of ours fail. You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out.”

Will this be the ultimate legacy of the Obama doctrine—the collapse of Europe and the rise of new strains of fascist violence around the world?

Mr. Obama’s evident contempt for the foreign policy “establishment” has blinded him to a geo-political reality: The failure to act always carries consequences in the modern world. When the United States fails to act decisively at a moment of international crisis, there can be far more devastating results—more violence, more human suffering—than when America intervenes.

The ongoing effects of the president’s narcissism, if that’s what it is, await the next president.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Reaping the Whirlwind of Apostasy Laws

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Reports of murderous assaults on Christians in Pakistan—like the Easter massacre last Sunday in Lahore—have focused on the Pakistani government’s double-dealing with the Taliban, or its intelligence failures, or the supposed blowback effects of U.S. drone attacks on terrorist cells in Pakistan. Most of this analysis evades the deepest threat confronting the government: a culture of religious extremism supported by Muslim leaders and underwritten by the Pakistani state.

To make matters worse, whatever influence the United States might have in fostering a more tolerant society in Pakistan is being squandered through ignorance or indifference to the problem.

The latest attack by the Taliban killed 75 people, including 29 children, all of them civilians. It follows an attack in January at Bacha Khan University, which killed 22 and injured 19. Last year the Taliban targeted a school in Peshawar, killing 145, most of them children. Although Muslims were among the slain in the Lahore assault, Christians were clearly the target. “It was our people who attacked the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter,” said a Taliban spokesman. “It’s our message to the government that we will carry out such attacks again until sharia [Islamic law] is imposed in the country.”

Why do the Taliban believe they can impose their radical, Islamic ideology upon a nation of 182 million people? Because Pakistan, like other Muslim-majority states, enforces a legal regime that criminalizes apostasy: Anyone accused not only of renouncing Islam but questioning or criticizing the Prophet Muhammed or the Quran faces arrest, imprisonment, torture, and possible execution. Apostasy laws are perfectly consistent with the Taliban’s totalitarian vision—an ideology based on fear and loathing of “the other,” meaning anyone who dissents from established Islamist orthodoxy.

There is only one conceivable result of this policy. “Religious minorities in Pakistan face pervasive societal and institutional discrimination and the threat of violence,” explains Mervyn Thomas, chief executive at the London-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide. “This situation is exacerbated by a culture of impunity and the unchecked influence of extremist groups.” Imams, political leaders, federal ministers—all have incited mob violence against religious minorities.

Pakistan receives about a billion dollars a year in U.S. military assistance, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid. What are the conditions for this support? The Obama administration’s posture is a loathsome mix of silence, confusion, and paralysis.

While condemning “in the strongest terms” the terrorist attack in Lahore, the State Department once again made no reference to Islamic extremism. Once again, State Department spokesman John Kirby failed even to mention the fact that Christians were overwhelmingly the victims of the attack. After being criticized, Mr. Kirby “clarified” his comments the next day: “We have no indications that their [the Taliban’s] claims of responsibility are false,” he said. “Therefore, I have no indications that the motivation that they claim was the reason is also false.”

This is what qualifies in the Obama White House as condemnation “in the strongest terms.” Neither President Obama, nor his secular-minded diplomats, dare to remind the Pakistanis of their obligations to protect the basic human rights of all their citizens—regardless of religious belief. It does not occur to most U.S. diplomats to praise the cultural importance of Christians and other religious minorities to Muslim-majority countries. Yet even the liberal Washington Post, in reporting the Easter massacre, made this observation:

The Christian minority has also contributed greatly to Pakistani society. Many of the best schools and colleges in Pakistan were established by Christians and attended by the country’s Muslim elite, and Christians have been among the most decorated and celebrated members of Pakistan’s military since independence.

Why is it so difficult for President Obama—or anyone else in his administration—to unapologetically proclaim America’s democratic values and to utter these words? There are ideological reasons for this silence, which will have to be unpacked another time. But there is also a widespread blindness to the importance of religious freedom in building stable and just societies.

Take one recent example: In a State Department briefing last November, spokesman John Kirby was asked about pending executions in Saudi Arabia for individuals accused of renouncing or insulting Islam, specifically the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh. Mr. Kirby read from a prepared text explaining that “the United States strongly opposes laws, including—” He stopped and stammered, obviously uncertain about how to pronounce the next word of his text.

A reporter lent a helpful hand: “apostasy.” Mr. Kirby continued: “Apostasy laws, thank you,” and then stoically read from the remainder of his text about U.S. support for the exercise of “freedom of expression and religion.”

Think about that unscripted revelation of ignorance. We are nearly eight years into the Obama administration—eight years of Islamic extremism, sectarian civil wars, ruthless assaults against religious minorities, beheadings, crucifixions, terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe and on American soil—and a top State Department official does not know the meaning of the word apostasy.

We cannot “win hearts and minds” in the war against the ideology of Islamism if our own minds are not engaged in the battle. We cannot defeat militant religion with a strategy crippled by an uneducated secularism. We need national leaders who are “as wise as serpents and innocent as doves”—not the other way around.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

National Review: The Easter Story: Gateway to Religious Freedom

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In the many sermons preached from church pulpits this Sunday, expect lots of talk about the “true meaning” of Easter. One theme, however — perhaps the most urgently needed message of our time — will almost certainly be neglected. Whether the Easter story of death and resurrection is treated as allegory, fable, or historical fact, it represents a compelling argument for religious toleration.

Just consider the haunting tale of an encounter between two disciples and Jesus, shortly after his execution, as they made their way to Emmaus, a village outside Jerusalem. As described in the gospel of Luke, the pair began their journey in a state of grief and disillusionment. Other Jewish revolutionaries had suffered at the hands of Rome, but Jesus — so they believed — was the final prophet, the Messiah who would liberate Israel, destroy her enemies, and usher in the kingdom of heaven. His crucifixion, like that of a common criminal, meant that every hope they had placed in Jesus was either a lie or a wretched mistake.

As Luke tells it, the teacher suddenly appeared to them on the road to Emmaus and engaged them in conversation. Yet they were “kept from recognizing him,” perhaps because they had no mental category for a murdered Messiah, fresh from the grave. What transpired — a luminous exchange about God’s promises to the Jews and to the entire human race — transformed their doubt into deep conviction.

In simple yet lucid prose, we get a glimpse of the nature of religious conversion. Here there is no place for compulsion or threats of violence; authentic belief depends on free will as well as divine grace. “Were not our hearts burning within us,” the disciples told each other, “while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” The Emmaus story, like the other accounts of spiritual awakenings in the New Testament, set the pattern for how the Christian message would spread — through an appeal to the heart, mind, and conscience.

What went wrong? There is no greater stain on the Christian church than its eventual rejection of reason and persuasion in the face of opposition. The church of the martyrs transformed itself into the church of the inquisitors — all under the cloak of defending the Gospel. “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully,” wrote French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “as when they do it from religious conviction.”

If the medieval church were to abandon its policies of persecution — justified by minds as creative as those of Augustine and, to a lesser extent, even Thomas Aquinas — a fresh interpretation of the life of Jesus would be required. Thus the argument over religious freedom that began with the Protestant Reformation looked back to Him, to His death and resurrection, for moral authority. Every important Christian reformer — including Martin Luther, William Tyndale, William Penn, Roger Williams — appealed to the example of Jesus to defend the rights of conscience. “The doctrine of persecution,” wrote Roger Williams in 1644, “denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.”

In the seminal debates over religious liberty, even early Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Pierre Bayle invoked the sacrificial death of Jesus as the trump card. We know from Locke’s private journals that he searched the Bible carefully for passages defending toleration — and found ample evidence in the story of Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection. Thus, in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke challenged the custodians of European Christianity with biblical idioms that proved difficult to evade: “If, like the Captain of our salvation, they sincerely desired the good of souls, they would tread in the steps and follow the perfect example of the Prince of Peace.” Church authorities must adopt the methods of Jesus, Locke wrote, and replace their instruments of force with “the exemplary holiness of their conversation.”

The popular view of the rise of toleration in the West, that it was propelled by the secularizing forces of the Enlightenment, doesn’t do justice to the history of the church. The arguments of the reformers prevailed: Church leaders found a solution to the problem of religious intolerance — but not by rejecting the essential doctrines of the faith. Instead, they retrieved those doctrines and reinterpreted them to overcome the sectarian hatreds tearing their societies apart.

In doing so, Protestant Christianity contributed to one of the great achievements of liberal democracies: the capacity for citizens to live together with their deepest differences. For at its heart, the Easter story is an account of God’s relentless love for sinners — including the doubters and the disillusioned among us. In our own era of religious intolerance, saints and cynics alike can be grateful for its retelling.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Journalism as Propaganda: Jeffrey Goldberg on the Obama Doctrine

This article was originally posted at Providence.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg begins his roughly 19,000-word examination of Barack Obama’s foreign policy by recounting the moment, on August 30, 2013, when the president reversed himself on his pledge to punish Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people. Mr. Goldberg posits two contrasting judgments of that fateful hour: “the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower” or “the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void.”

Mr. Goldberg’s much-discussed article leans lopsidedly toward the latter judgment. He arrives at this unlikely destination by allowing Mr. Obama (and his advisors) to offer a specious, self-serving version of events unencumbered by unpleasant realities. Throughout the essay the reader is treated to a peculiar brand of journalism: an investigation that avoids asking hard questions, omits contradictory evidence, and either ignores or distorts seminal moments in American diplomatic history.

In Mr. Obama’s telling of his disastrous policy in Libya—now a failed state and safe haven for the Islamic State—the fault lies everywhere except at the White House. “When I go and ask myself what went wrong,” he said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

Here is the vintage Obama evasion: blame his failure of leadership on others, in this case the British, the French, or the previous administration. Mr. Goldberg is silent about the bitter irony that Mr. Obama, like his predecessor in Iraq, did not anticipate the chaotic aftermath of a post-Kaddafi regime in Libya. Nor is there any mention of the deadly assault on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, or of the White House’s dishonest attempts to cover up their misdeeds in an election year.

In his treatment of the rise of the Islamic State, Mr. Goldberg simply parrots the administration’s risible claim that it was given bad intelligence about the organization’s potency: “By the late spring of 2014, after ISIS took the northern-Iraq city of Mosul, he came to believe that U.S. intelligence had failed to appreciate the severity of the threat and the inadequacies of the Iraqi army, and his view shifted.”

Nonsense. We know from congressional testimony that intelligence officials were warning the administration about the threat of the Islamic State long before the seizure of Mosul. We know that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq made possible its lightening success in seizing large swaths of territory and strategic resources. Yet Mr. Goldberg does not allow these facts to intrude upon his narrative.

The omissions continue apace. There is no scrutiny of the fact that Mr. Obama, during his agonized decision-making over U.S. troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, ignored the counsel of his top military advisors. His inept mishandling of Russia’s seizure of Crimea is brushed aside with glib fatalism. Mr. Obama is not asked about the Russian intrusion into Syria and its assault on Syrian rebels; or about Mr. Assad’s indiscriminate bombing campaigns on civilian targets, including hospitals; or about a refugee crisis not seen since the end of the Second World War. The president’s bluff over Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is ultimately portrayed as an act of political courage. In all this, the reader never learns that three of Mr. Obama’s former defense secretaries have severely criticized him for his blindness to the threats to America’s national security.

President Obama defends his emphasis on diplomacy by denouncing what he calls “mythologies” about Ronald Reagan’s tough-minded foreign policy. President Reagan’s success in dealing with the Soviet Union, according to Mr. Obama, “was to recognize the opportunity that Gorbachev presented and to engage in extensive diplomacy.”

Here is liberalism’s fantastical version of the end of the Cold War. It had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy, but rather was an inevitable and predictable outcome that coincidentally occurred on Mr. Reagan’s watch—except for the fact that not a single liberal predicted its collapse in the 1980s. We know—from Soviet dissidents, internal communist party communique, former Soviet officials, and even from Mr. Gorbachev—that it was the Reagan military build-up and the projection of U.S. military power that greatly accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet instead of challenging Mr. Obama’s ignorance of these facts, his chummy interlocutor remains mute.

The president’s revisionist history grows from the soil of his ideological commitments. One is about power and its relationship to peace and security.

Mr. Obama denies, with an air of absurd self-assurance, that Russia has become more powerful following its adventures in Ukraine and Syria. To believe so, he says, “is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs…Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.” Here is the pacifist delusion: a vision of a world in which the forces of barbarism are domesticated through the sweet reasonableness of the “international community.”

Behind this view lies another ideological commitment—the enlightenment belief in human progress and unlimited human potential. “Look, I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil,” Mr. Obama said. “I believe there is more good than bad in humanity. And if you look at the trajectory of history, I am optimistic. I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant…more able to manage difference.”

Many of the greatest figures in the Western tradition—its statesmen, political philosophers, and religious leaders—have held the opposite view. They took the fallen nature of man, the tragedy of the human soul alienated from its Creator, as the starting point for their politics. “What is government itself but one of the greatest reflections of human nature?” asked James Madison. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

If Mr. Goldberg is familiar with this tradition, he is too timid to mention it. But can he really be as unreflective as Mr. Obama about the terrible lessons of the last century? I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent. For it was in the twentieth century when the most politically, technologically, and culturally advanced nations of the earth engaged in two horrific global conflicts. It was in this most recent century when political and social revolutions were unleased that enslaved and murdered hundreds of millions of human beings. It was in the century closest to our own that the word “genocide” had to be invented. Thus Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn called the twentieth century “the caveman century.”

Mr. Goldberg’s conclusions about the “evolution” of the Obama doctrine, he informs us, are based on his exclusive conversations with Mr. Obama during his presidency. Perhaps his many omissions are best explained by his own frankly stated agenda: “My goal…was to see the world through Obama’s eyes, and to understand what he believes America’s role in the world should be.”

It is a curious mission for a journalist, since nearly all the major media outlets—not to mention most of the academy and the entertainment industry—trumpet Mr. Obama’s progressive vision of the world, and have done so every day of his administration. We already know what he believes about America’s role in the world. We now know what kinds of evils can be set loose when those beliefs direct American foreign policy.

In the end, Mr. Goldberg’s essay reveals practically nothing about the president’s thinking on foreign affairs. It merely reinforces the deeply impoverished mental outlook of modern liberalism.

Despite a posture of inquiry, the author’s journalistic empathy dissolves into rank advocacy: journalism as echo chamber. Here is what access to ultimate political power can breed: something that rings false from beginning to end, something much closer to propaganda than truth-seeking. Edward R. Murrow, who raised a new standard for honest and critically-minded journalism in the 1950s, warned about this trend. “A nation of sheep,” he said, “will beget a government of wolves.”

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Syria Peace Plan and Diplomatic Delusions

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Testifying before Congress last week, Secretary of State John Kerry defended his role in brokering a cease fire in the Syrian civil war—a temporary “cessation of hostilities” that no one expects to produce a just outcome for the Syrian people. “If it doesn’t work, the potential is there that Syria will be utterly destroyed,” Mr. Kerry warned. “The fact is that we need to make certain that we are exploring and exhausting every option of diplomatic resolution.”

Exactly when, in the long annals of international diplomacy, has the determination to “exhaust” all the alternatives to the use of military force ever brought a genocidal regime to its knees? That fact is, never.

This is why the French ambassador to the United Nations called the cease fire “a smoke screen” that would allow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “to crush the Syrian civilians and the opposition.” Yes, the French, under the socialist leadership of Francois Hollande—the French!—are more clear-eyed about the moral dynamic of the Syrian conflict than the United States under President Barack Obama.

Mr. Kerry and the White House pretend that Mr. Assad has even the slightest incentive to compromise with the Syrian rebels. Their entire diplomatic strategy—their discredited demand that “Assad must go”—is based on a fantasy. After six months of relentless Russian air strikes on U.S.-backed rebel forces, the Syrian regime has regained the military advantage. This will likely include control over the city of Aleppo, considered the rebel capital of the revolution. More militarily secure than he has been in months, Mr. Assad can dictate the terms of any agreement.

“Regardless of whether a ceasefire takes hold, any political settlement would reflect the current balance of power, which favors Mr. Assad,” Fawas A Gerges, professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, told the BBC; “Far from the beginning of the end, the Syrian conflict has entered a new phase in which the Assad regime has momentum on the battlefield and the negotiating table.”

Mr. Assad can thank America’s complicity with Mr. Putin’s strategic intervention on behalf of the Syrian government: For months the administration downplayed or ignored Russia’s infusion of fighter jets, advanced weapons, and military advisors. Russia’s rising influence in the region, along with that of the Iranians—whose terrorist activities supporting Mr. Assad earned them a seat at the negotiating table—represent yet another foreign policy debacle for Mr. Obama and the United States.

Expect more to come. According to the United Nations, the Syrian military and the forces of the Islamic State have put at grave risk the lives of over 487,000 people caught in the crossfire and cut off from humanitarian assistance.  Mr. Kerry reportedly planned to have a “serious conversation” with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, about allowing humanitarian aid to reach them. But, like a muffin facing a machete, Mr. Kerry has been repeatedly outflanked by his Russian counterpart.

This brings us back to the Kerry principle of “exhausting every option of diplomatic resolution,” regardless of the human consequences. Where does this risible idea come from?

Among other places, it can be traced to an anti-nuclear weapons document produced by the U.S. Catholic bishops in the 1980s. Called “the Challenge of Peace,” their pastoral letter redefined the just war tradition to address the threat of nuclear war. Not only must military action be a last resort, they argued, but “all peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted.”

No one with lived memories of Cold War tensions can fault the bishops for wanting to avoid a nuclear holocaust. But their pacifist distortion of just war doctrine—which never included an exhaustive search for non-military means to check lawless aggression—has unwittingly aided the agents of barbarism. By prioritizing peace over justice, the Doctrine of Exhaustive Diplomacy has helped to dull the conscience toward the victims of violence. It has empowered the purveyors of genocide.

“None of us are under any illusions,” Mr. Obama claimed last week about the Syrian cease-fire agreement. “But history would judge us harshly if we did not do our part in at least trying to end this terrible conflict with diplomacy.”

In truth, U.S. policy has been rooted in a string of illusions—fallacies about America’s role in the world, about the nature of radical Islam, about the resilience of the forces of evil. Meanwhile, history’s judgment of Mr. Obama’s role in perpetuating these falsehoods, and deepening the human tragedy of this conflict, is already being written.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Washington Post: Before Donald Trump, the Sad History of When Christians Anointed Another Political Bully

This article was originally posted at The Washington Post.

Evangelical Christians have just delivered Donald Trump — the Republican presidential candidate most out of sync with their biblical values — a resounding victory in South Carolina. Of the 65 percent of Republican voters who identify as evangelicals, a third of them cast their ballot for Trump, more than any other candidate. Why?

For roughly the same reason that a medieval pope, Leo III, anointed another political bully, Charles the Great, better known as Charlemagne. Put simply, they want a “protector in chief.” Facing a political culture increasingly hostile to their beliefs — and a government riding roughshod over their religious freedoms — evangelicals believe Mr. Trump will be the best guardian of their liberties.

“Trump is a fighter,” Mark Burns, pastor of the Greenville, S.C.-based Christian Television Network, told Fox News. “He is the one to fight for Christianity and for our conservative values we hold dear.”

That’s what Pope Leo believed about Charles, king of the Franks, when he personally crowned him king of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day, 800 AD. Leo had become so unpopular in Rome that in 799 a band of assassins attacked him during a sacred procession and tried to cut out his eyes and tongue. Leo managed to escape and fled immediately to Charles, known as a defender of the church, and asked him to drive his enemies out of the city.

The king was happy to comply: On December 24, 800, he sent the pope back to Rome with an armed bodyguard, with himself marching “in full martial array” into the city. As Charles promised: “My task, assisted by divine piety, is everywhere to defend the Church of Christ.”

Thus occurred the spectacle of the leader of the Christian church, on Christmas Day, in the great Basilica of St. Peter, placing a crown on the head of the king — and prostrating himself in a Roman ritual resembling an act of emperor worship.

It didn’t matter that Charles had multiple wives and mistresses. Nor did it trouble the pontiff that he had a reputation for ruthlessness, earned during his wars against the Saxons, a Germanic tribe of pagan worshipers. In 782, in the Massacre of Verden, Charles ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners, apparently for their refusal to convert to Christianity.

Here was a political leader who knew how to get things done, who could get tough with the church’s enemies, who could protect the empire from barbarian invaders. With the church on his side, he would restore Rome to its ancient glory. Sound familiar?

Thus evangelical voters joined other South Carolina Republicans in choosing Trump, by an 11 percent margin over his closest competitor, to “make America great again.” According to a recent Bloomberg Poll, they believe Trump is the candidate most likely to “keep their family safe” and “would be most feared by America’s enemies.”

Their own fears are causing them to abandon their principles. In America’s historic struggle to protect religious liberty, evangelicals fought hardest for a Bill of Rights that guaranteed equal justice — not only for themselves, but for unpopular religious minorities. They have been the loudest critics of discrimination based on religious identity.

Yet three-quarters of GOP primary voters in South Carolina — dominated by evangelicals — support Trump’s plan to block all Muslims from entering the United States.

One of the saddest chapters in the history of Christianity is how the courageous church of the martyrs became — with the help of the state — a fearful and persecuting church. Under Charlemagne, the punishment for refusing to be baptized into the Catholic faith was death. Conversion at the point of the sword became a cultural norm. In a letter to the pope, the new emperor explained his expectations of church and state:

“Our task is externally, with God’s help, to defend with our arms the holy Church of Christ against attacks by the heathen from any side and against devastation by the infidels and, internally, to strengthen the Church by the recognition of the Catholic faith. Your share, Most Holy Father, is to support our army with hands upraised to God, as did Moses in ancient days.”

Many evangelical voters seem ready to support Trump’s militancy, whatever form it takes, with hands upraised to heaven. They say they’re willing to endure their candidate’s “idiosyncrasies” because of his “authenticity.”

Never mind that he is an authentic egoist, or that he is unabashedly crude, proudly manipulative, and emotionally undisciplined. What has happened to the evangelical insistence that presidents be people of prayer, humility and integrity?

Like the medieval church, many American evangelicals expect to benefit from their anointing of Trump. Pope Leo’s constituency was granted access to political power and a privileged social status. They were given the opportunity to put their stamp on the empire’s laws and institutions.

But there was a cost for these privileges. Charlemagne wielded as much influence in church affairs as the pope himself. He appointed and deposed bishops, changed the church liturgy, wrote new rules for monastic life and dispatched agents to dismiss priests who seemed to lack education or piety.

A government that can shut down a mosque can shut down a church. A president who insults entire categories of human beings with impunity will not hesitate to attack any religious community that dares to criticize him.

After his coronation, Charlemagne declared himself “crowned by God, great and pacific emperor, governing the Roman Empire.” By consecrating a brutal political authority, the Catholic Church eventually gambled away its reputation — its spiritual vitality — for the thin gruel of a richer and more secure earthly kingdom.

In their embrace of Donald Trump, many evangelicals seem ready to do the same.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: The Decline of Freedom and the Obama Doctrine

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Although the leading Republican presidential candidates offer a sometimes vague and muddled mélange of views about American foreign policy, doubts about the Democratic Party’s ability to navigate the nation in a complex and dangerous world are legion. Skepticism is in order: think of Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter and the Iranian Revolution and U.S. hostage crisis, or Bill Clinton and the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansings in Bosnia and Serbia.

Now consider—with fear and trembling—the foreign policy legacy of Barack Obama. In a mere seven years, Mr. Obama has presided over a flawed nuclear treaty with Iran, the meteoric rise of the Islamic State, the collapse of Libya and Yemen, the near-collapse of Iraq, Russian aggression in Ukraine, an increasingly belligerent North Korea, a genocidal civil war in Syria, and a refugee crisis on a scale not seen since the Second World War.

Now add one more metric of failure: in every year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, without exception, the cause of freedom has been in retreat around the world.

That is the conclusion of a Freedom House report, “Freedom in the World, 2016,” released last month. Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the report measures political and civil liberties in 195 countries and 15 territories. Argentina, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, the Middle East, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey—virtually every region of the world saw a decline in personal and political freedoms. “The world in 2015 was battered by overlapping crises,” the report concluded, “that contributed to the tenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom.”

Left-wing journals such as Slate, in summarizing the report, tried to muddy its findings with headlines like this: “America became a little less free last year.” The report’s methodology also has been criticized, but it’s hard to quibble with the overall conclusions: more people are experiencing serious human rights violations—from terrorist activities, repressive governments, and failing states—than ever before. Testifying last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, described a “litany of doom” across the world stage: failing nation-states, the migration crisis in Europe, and so on.

What is striking is how many of these problems can be traced to the lack of strong American leadership. Though non-partisan in tone, the Freedom House report makes clear that the Obama administration has been complicit in the failures of the Western democracies to confront the human rights abuses and humanitarian crises enveloping much of the world. “Front and center was the democratic world’s inability to present a unified and credible strategy to end the murderous war in Syria and deal with the refugee crisis triggered by the conflict,” write Freedom House’s Arch Puddington and Tyler Roylance. “Whatever the underlying strength of their institutions, leading democracies betrayed a worrying lack of self-confidence and conviction during 2015.”

Here, in the end, is the epic tragedy of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, a policy conceived and nurtured by his political progressivism. Mistaking self-confidence for arrogance, the president has telegraphed American weakness and withdrawal from strategic parts of the world. He has abandoned any conviction about America’s indispensable role in upholding international peace and security. As the Freedom House report suggests, the result is the weakening of civilizational confidence in the face of human rights atrocities. In regions such as the Middle East, the consequence is a humanitarian catastrophe, “a crisis of global proportions.”

In his first year in office Mr. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—not for any of his policies, but for his promises to make the world a more peaceful and humane place. Promises more facile and futile could hardly be imagined.

“Democracy, which must take account of the fears and apprehensions of the common people as dictatorships need not, cannot act in time,” observed Reinhold Niebuhr in Christianity and Power Politics. “It can act in time only if it has leaders who are willing and able to anticipate perils which the common man cannot see.” America and the civilized world, with a mix of hope and foreboding, wait for such leaders to emerge.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: The Troubled Conscience of Islam

This article was originally posted at Providence.

The butchery and barbarism committed under the banner of Islam—by groups such as the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab—is finally generating a little soul-searching in the Muslim world. What faithful Muslims will ultimately discover from a spiritual inventory, though, remains to be seen.

Last month, for example, about 300 muftis, theologians, and scholars held a conference in Marrakesh, Morocco to address the problem of violence in Islamic states. The result is the Marrakesh Declaration, a 750-word document calling on Muslim countries to guarantee “full protection for the rights and liberties to all religious groups” and “confront all forms of religious bigotry.”

Participants cited as their inspiration the “Charter of Medina,” believed to have been established by the Prophet Muhammad after he fled Mecca for Medina (current day Saudi Arabia) to escape an assassination plot. Muhammad immediately faced a religiously diverse society, including a significant Jewish population, and designed a kind of social contract to accommodate them. The document promises, among other things, that “Jews who follow the Believers will be helped and will be treated with equality.”

Abdallah bin Bayyah, the 80-year-old United Arab Emirates sheik who led the “call to action” at the conference, views the Medina charter as the basis for citizenship in a modern, pluralistic state. “This document is the foundation for an inclusive multicultural, multi-religious society,” he said, “in which all individuals enjoy the same rights and shoulder the same responsibilities.”

That’s a contestable claim, of course, since Jews would soon be expelled from Medina and non-Muslims would never achieve equal rights and protections under the law. Although the Charter of Medina introduced the idea of the dhimmi, a compact guaranteeing security for non-Muslims, the Qur’an applies the term to groups subjugated by Islamic conquerors. “The price of their preservation,” writes C.E. Bosworth in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, “is to be reduction to a humiliating status in society as second-class citizens.”

This has been the historical pattern of Islam, not only in its confrontation with the West, but in its expansion throughout the world—a fact ignored in the declaration and denied outright by its framers. “The accusation that Islam oppresses minorities,” Bin Bayyah told the conferees, “has no basis in sacred law or in history.”

The statement would be laughable if the record of human misery in the name of Islam—ancient and modern—were not so voluminous. Just take the latest example: The Islamic State openly justifies the kidnapping, rape, and enslavement of young girls as a custom sanctioned under Sharia law. At least 5,000 Yazidis from Syria and Iraq have reportedly fallen into the hands of the jihadists—with a noticeable lack of outrage among leading imams.

Defenders of Islamic history, including President Barack Obama, are quick to recall the bigotry and violence carried out under the guise of Christianity. It is, in many respects, a dark and tortured history. But this misses the crucial point: Christians in the West did not whitewash the sins of the Christian church, but grieved over the church’s failure to uphold its deepest religious ideals. They engaged in an intensive, centuries-long debate about the nature of the Christian faith and its relationship to political authority.

Only then were religious thinkers ready to envision a pluralistic state that guaranteed equal justice to people of all faiths. Only then could they imagine a society that enshrined, in law and custom, the principle of religious freedom for all its citizens. As John Locke put in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689): “The sum of all we drive at, is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.”

The crisis in modern Islam is that its leaders steadfastly refuse to confront their violent past. Thus there has been no serious and prolonged debate about why so much of the Islamic world remains hostile to democratic values and universal human rights.

Thanks to political correctness, Muslims are helped in their evasion by well-meaning Westerners, including the American president. In his speech this week to Muslims at a Baltimore mosque, Mr. Obama tried to counter the anti-Islamic venom that has degraded the presidential campaign, and to reassure Muslims that they are a vital part of the American story, a worthy enough goal. “This is a struggle between the peace-loving, overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world and a radical, tiny minority,” the president said. “We can’t suggest that Islam itself is at the root of the problem. That betrays our values.”

The real betrayal—a betrayal of reason and conscience—is the suggestion that Islam has nothing to do with the culture of oppression and rage that is enveloping the Muslim world. Some of those who gathered at Marrakesh know better. As their declaration put it: “It is unconscionable to employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.”

As the history of religious freedom in the West makes clear, the awakened conscience is a prerequisite to a reformation.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

CapX: Trump, Sanders, and the Ghost of Mussolini

This article was originally posted at CapX.

For those still trying understand the political rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, consider an insight from Eric Fromm’s 1941 book, Escape from Freedom that a sense of powerlessness created a willingness among ordinary people to surrender personal responsibility in order to regain a sense of control over their lives. Published when totalitarian ideologies were enveloping Europe and Asia, the book offers a psychological study into the malaise of the modern era.

“The first mechanism of escape from freedom,” Fromm wrote, “is the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking.” Welcome to the Sanders and Trump presidential campaigns. Their success thus far suggests that Fromm’s thesis is painfully relevant to our political moment.

On the far left we have Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who promises an expansion of Medicare, universal child care and pre-K, free college tuition, paid sick leave, and family leave benefits for all workers—and that’s just for starters. The cost would be in the trillions of dollars. As Sanders confessed to reporters in Iowa: “I think there are a lot people, when they hear the word ‘socialist,’ get very nervous.”

The history of socialist schemes, in fact, should make any rational person extremely nervous. Wherever it has been tried, socialism has dissolved the meaning of democratic self-government. Socialist regimes transform citizens—the lifeblood of civil society—into wards of the state. A government intrusive enough to provide for every social need guarantees the decline of personal responsibility and individual freedom. Just ask the East Europeans who lived through the Cold War.

On the far right we have Trump, the supposed defender of American capitalism, who nonetheless has built his real-estate and casino empires by engaging in crony capitalism and trampling the private property rights of anyone who gets in his way. Trump promises to solve America’s illegal immigration crisis by building a massive wall and getting Mexico to pay for it. He will keep America safe from terrorist attack by temporarily banning any Muslim from entering the country. He will end the U.S. trade deficit with China by making businesses do his bidding. “We’re going to bring back the American dream,” he promises. “After all, wealth funds our freedom.”

Here are simple and reassuring answers to immensely complex problems. Yet the Trump agenda amounts to a new version of protectionism, nativism, and isolationism. All of these policies have been tried before—and have failed to produce prosperity or to safeguard liberty.

An angry and disillusioned electorate is propelling the Sanders and Trump campaigns, just as anger and disillusionment produced demagogues in the aftermath of World War I. It was no accident that fascism began in Italy, a society that seemed to be in tatters—economically, socially, and spiritually. The Great War left the Italians politically divided and mistrustful. The parliamentary government was corrupt and ineffective, the monarchy unpopular.

Enter Benito Mussolini, who after seizing power in 1922, became the first European leader to dispense with multi-party democracy. “The century of democracy is over,” he proclaimed. Mussolini vowed to close the gap between rich and poor, restore Italian greatness, and replace democratic weakness with totalitarian strength. “The Fascist State…has limited useless or harmful liberties and has preserved those that are essential,” he wrote. “It cannot be the individual who decides in this matter, but only the State.”

Whether from the political left or political right, Mussolini’s ghost seems to be haunting the American electorate. Demagogues cannot thrive without disillusionment, and disillusionment has become the watchword for our troubled times. Our escape from freedom is well underway.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Neutrality in the Face of Terror

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Whatever the actual “State of the Union,” as proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt in his January 3, 1936 address to Congress, the president’s state of mind was a perplexing mix of admission, obfuscation, and denial. If President Obama’s speechwriters are casting about for models of statecraft in the age of terror, they should look elsewhere.

With the Depression in full swing—despite three years of unprecedented government intervention in the economy—FDR hoped to focus his speech on domestic concerns. But the real world, the world of terror and totalitarianism, had intervened.

Casting an eye on all of East Asia, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, and then withdrew from the League of Nations two years later. The same year, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party swept into power promising to tear up the Treaty of Versailles. In 1934 Japan renounced the London Naval Treaty, which had limited the size of its fleet. In March 1935, Hitler announced the establishment of a new German air force, the Luftwaffe, and reinstituted conscription into the Armed Forces, an open violation of the Versailles Treaty. In September 1935, Germany imposed the first raft of Nuremberg Laws, revoking the civil rights of all Jews and prohibiting them from marrying non-Jews. In October of the same year, Italy’s Benito Mussolini sent 100,000 troops into Ethiopia, converting the African nation into an Italian colony.

Thus FDR was forced to admit that the world, especially Europe and Asia, had changed since his arrival in office in 1933:

Not only have peace and good-will among men grown more remote in those areas of the earth during this period, but a point has been reached where the people of the Americas must take cognizance of growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of increasing armaments, of shortening tempers—a situation which has in it many of the elements that lead to the tragedy of general war.

Slippery phrases like “trends toward aggression” and “shortening tempers” were typical of Mr. Roosevelt during this period. So it’s significant that he went on to warn about the possibility of war, and to criticize the “fantastic conception” that the aggressor nations hoped to make the rest of the world subject to their rule:

I realize that I have emphasized to you the gravity of the situation which confronts the people of the world. This emphasis is justified because of its importance to civilization and therefore to the United States. Peace is jeopardized by the few and not by the many. Peace is threatened by those who seek selfish power.

Mr. Roosevelt said nothing about the fascist doctrines of these aggressor states, their totalitarian vision, or their racist ideology. There was no mention of the fierce anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. The American people were told only that the dictators “seek selfish power.” Nevertheless, the president warned that global peace was threatened by their actions, and that this represented a threat to civilization itself.

What, then, would be America’s response to these renegade powers confronting the democratic West?

The United States, the president said, would continue to exert “our moral influence against repression, against intolerance, against autocracy,” while promoting freedom of expression, equality before the law, and religious tolerance. Moral influence—meaning diplomacy and perhaps economic pressure—was the proper instrument of persuasion.

But what, exactly, would be America’s political and military posture toward international lawlessness and aggression?

We hope that we are not again at the threshold of such an era. But if face it we must, then the United States and the rest of the Americas can play but one role: through a well-ordered neutrality to do naught to encourage the contest, through adequate defense to save ourselves from embroilment and attack, and through example and all legitimate encouragement and assistance to persuade other Nations to return to the ways of peace and good-will.

By “well-ordered neutrality” Mr. Roosevelt had in mind the 1935 U.S. Neutrality Act, legislation that he enthusiastically signed (and would expand upon in 1936). The law authorized the president to deny American businesses the right to sell arms or munitions to “belligerent nations.” For the first time in American foreign policy, all sides in a conflict—no matter what the cause—were to be treated as “belligerents,” that is, potential adversaries of the United States.

How did this amoral reversal of U.S. policy come about? Mr. Roosevelt, slavishly in step with American public opinion, was in an isolationist mood. In 1935 he was also busy rallying support for his “Second New Deal,” and he needed the votes of isolationists in Congress to get it. Historian Paul Johnson calls the Neutrality Acts “a complete departure from previous American policy, which had always permitted the U.S. government to make moral distinctions between participants in foreign wars.”

Hence the staggering conceptual muddle of Mr. Roosevelt’s foreign policy: whatever occurs outside of America’s hemisphere does not concern Americans—even if civilization itself is hanging in the balance. Nevertheless, FDR boasted of “a clear policy,” in which Washington adopted a “twofold neutrality” toward “any and all Nations which engage in wars” that are not of “immediate concern” to the United States.

The policy was quite clear—especially to America’s enemies.

Britain’s ambassador to Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, reported back to London the Nazi response to Mr. Roosevelt’s State of the Union speech.  The president’s criticism of the dictators “carried no weight with Hitler.” What caught the Fuhrer’s attention, he said, was “Roosevelt’s renewed declaration that America would in future remain aloof and observe neutrality in European affairs.” As Adolf Hitler reportedly remarked: “There has been no development during recent years more welcome than this.”

The United States promises to remain on the sidelines as a totalitarian juggernaut advances against the West—yes, no development could have been more welcome in Berlin than this.

What, then, is the State of the Union eighty years hence? Whatever President Obama and his swooning entourage may claim, now would be a good time to reckon with the consequences of America’s self-imposed neutrality as the forces of barbarism renew their ancient quest.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.