Ideology and faith are stirring new calls to arms among influential political factions in the United States
By Tom Barry for IRC
Ideology and faith are stirring new calls to arms among influential political factions in the United States. At a time when the U.S. public is questioning the interventionism and unilateralism of the Bush administration, leading social conservatives and neoconservatives insist that the United States needs to militarily confront the purported threats facing the Judeo-Christian world order.
Leading far-right social conservative Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, is heading up a new initiative, called the “America’s Enemies” program at the neoconservative-aligned Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), to awaken the slumbering public to what he sees as a “gathering storm” of adversaries. At the same time, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), a devout Jew who co-chairs the Committee on the Present Danger, is calling for a global political and military alliance to defeat the threat of “Islamic extremism.” Ironically, while the ideology and faith-based politics of “America’s enemies” routinely come under attack by U.S. social conservatives and neoconservatives as dangerous manifestations of radicalism, the ideology and faith-based politics of America’s would-be defenders are presented as redemptive forces in world affairs.
Perhaps nowhere does this merger of ideology and faith come together so clearly than at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Santorum is a program director. A strong supporter of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s war on terror, the EPPC has since the mid-1990s sought to mix religion and politics—or more specifically, to conjoin the Religious Right with a hawkish foreign policy. In its own words, the center aims to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition” and the public policy debate. [more]