Left Behind Foreign Policy?
When I was in high school I started reading the Left Behind Series and I have to say I enjoyed the books. Jerry Jenkins was very good at creating an action packed and entertaining dialogue of characters. These books depicted a small band of Christians, who are living in a post-resurrection world, that are fighting against the evils of the Anti-Christ’s one world government.
These books were, for me, entertaining and that is how I viewed them. However, over time I realized that the bigger story these books were showing started to impress in my mind. I actually started to think that these books might be the blueprint to how the world will end. In Robert Jewett’s book Mission and Menace, starts to explain how American pop culture started to surface in these books.
“As Bruce Forbes observes, four typical features of American popular culture surface here: ‘Evil comes from the outside… People are either good or evil, or both… The solution is the destruction of the evil-doers… and Good wins.’”
The book shows how this pre-millennialist belief expresses is that there is evil in the world and it is our jobs as Evangelical Christians to stamp out that evil (either by conversion or force). This idea has grown ever since 9/11 because for the first time the righteous country was attacked by an unseen evil TERROISM. This word and its implications have become the battle cry of Evangelical Americans since that day. This was a sign of the evil that is in the world that needs to be done away with.
The greatest flaw with pre-millennialism is the theme of “us vs. them” and through this theme comes distrust in global organizations such as the UN, IMF, World Bank and such. In their minds these organizations are going to be either the prequel or the catalyst in forming the “one world government” that brings about the anti-Christ and the destruction of the world. Due to this attitude many pre-millennialsts do not care to strive for a better world; instead they hope that in due time all the prophecies will align and the rapture will come to take them to Heaven. This pushes the agenda of evangelizing as many as possible and forgets about the world because it’s going to end anyway.
This growing mistrust with world organizations influences American policies that do not help these organizations. When Bush went into Iraq without the support of the UN this influence was a part of that. America became the “us” and anyone that was not our ally became the “other”. For our country to start to push peace in the world and to fight against poverty, genocide, and disease it is important that this pre-millennialist theme to lose its hold on American politics. Our foreign policy needs to be one that builds relationships with others instead of polarizing America and the rest of the world.
Tags: 9/11, America, Foriegn Policy, IMF, Left Behind Series, Mission and Menace, pre-milliennialism, Robert Jewett, terrorism, UN, World Bank
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November 26, 2008 at 11:29 am
This is good stuff.
The example of 9/11 impresses upon me the strong irony that the small percentage of Islam that extremism represents really is the perfect image of us vs. them, good vs. evil, in short “categorization” of people which you’re describing. The irony of course, is that to the extent we call that act evil, we should be totally against the kind of ethos it represents. It seems, though, not that we are convinced of the fault of categorization itself, but rather of the perceived mis-categorization. Let me explain: rather than looking at the attack and saying this was the result of a group of people who have categorized themselves as righteous and us as evil slime, and this is wrong because all categorization of this kind is wrong, we said, and this is wrong because, in fact, we’re the good ones and “their” the slime.
This categorizing goes on in our culture everyday in some fairly devastating ways. Think of the ways we categorize, for example: gays, democrats, criminals, fundamentalists, extremists, etc., etc. etc…
I think your idea of foreign policy is essentially correct, given this. When we exclude, when we don’t ask for advice, or help, when we aren’t accountable, we polarize. We’re right, and those who join us are right, and the others are wrong, and that wrongness means that its okay for us to invade or attack them, in order to force them to join us and become right again. This is not relational. It’s not even smart. And it’s this brand of thinking that engenders acts like 9/11.
November 26, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Discussions of “us vs. them” cause me to remember Martin Buber’s book, “I, Thou.” In it he describes two ways of dealing with the world. In “I, Thou” is a dialogue where communication happens and there is acknowledgement of the other’s humanity. “I, It” is merely a monologue and everything encountered is treated as an object. I try to keep this thinking in the back of my mind when I’m dealing with a difficult situation or person. Am I truly treating this person I’m encountering as a “Thou” or an “It”? I’m disappointed often at how easily I slip into “It” mode. If I am able to self-correct and see the difficult person as a “Thou” they now have a face, name, life situation. It is harder to call them an enemy when I see them this way. (Well, most of the time.)
All this to say, maybe what we (the US) are describing in “us vs. them” is more correctly an “us vs. it.” We think the other is evil (the “it”) but if we were to treat them as “Thous”, to understand the individuals rather than control and keep in line, how might things change?