God and Empire
By David E. Anderson
God and Empire
by David E. Anderson
I chant the new empire grander than any before, as in a vision it comes to me
I chant America the mistress, I chant a greater supremacy
–Walt Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant”
Reading the foreign policy positions of the top Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in a series of articles published in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, one found many descriptions of the United States. But not one of them used the “E” word — empire.
Similarly, the estimable Review of Faith & International Affairs, an evangelical quarterly, while exploring a host of issues such as globalization, foreign aid, religious freedom, and faith-based diplomacy, offers no indication its analysts recognize the possibility of American empire and its ethical and theological implications.
Yet as Gary Dorrien wrote four years ago in “Imperial Designs,” an article in the journal CrossCurrents (he has also published a book by the same title), “most of the world has no doubt that the U.S. is an empire, but now it has plenty of doubt about the kind of empire that the U.S. wants to be.”