How not to do Geopolitics

Every time I read that someone is trying to use the Bible as a basis for foreign policy decisions, I cringe. This has to be, on some level, a great exercise in laziness. Let's not investigate the history of colonialism, let's not bother with the whole Sunni-Shi'a thing, let's overlook the economic interests in the region (read: oil), and finally, let's avoid any attempt to understand things from several points of view. No. Instead let's just read one chapter in the Bible and assume that it is not talking about the time in which it was written but rather that it is talking about this particular moment in history.

Whatever insights might be gleaned from studying the Bible, I can almost guarantee you that foreign policy guidelines are not among them. Dobson should actually go out and, you know, read some modern history, or Middle Eastern cultural studies, or, well, you get my point.

Monopolizing Jesus

This morning I came across this post on the word "Christian" and how it is used. The problem is that the media has tended to pretty much go along with the evangelical protestant vision in which evangelicals get to own the word "Christian" and therefore exclude mainline protestants, Roman Catholics, et cetera.

Rome has always claimed that it's the one true church, but it hasn't got the sort of uncritical press support that the evangelicals have gotten:

"It made news when James Dobson said of Fred Thompson, a baptized member of the Church of Christ, that 'I don't think he's a Christian.' But his spokesman explains Dobson's point: “We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.” So it's not just Catholics and Mormons: now all of mainstream Protestantism is "non-Christian" in the view of the Republican ayatollahs. It would be nice if political reporters made that clear to their readers."

There is a real danger here that evangelicals with their politcal clout and their media savvy could make a new protestant orthodoxy that would become increasingly unrecognizable in mainline churches. All this would be aided by press whose ambivalence about understanding (not necessarily endorsing, just understanding) religion allows it to take everything that Dobson says at face value.