As a Christian, this article made me quite angry but I am
thankful that Walter Russell Mead and Mary Habeck are clear in what they
advocate. Though couched in deceitful terms and reliant upon a perversion of
Christian doctrine, their transparent idealism accommodates an attempt to
expose their error and indeed the evil they advocate. And it is just that. Their
form and framing of it and their ideals that govern them are especially
pernicious in that their agenda is promoted in the name of Christ.
Pretending to be realists they are instead deeply idealistic.
Visionary principles govern their thinking and yet though they attempt to mask
these principles to some degree, they are nevertheless revealed. Despite the
sundry claims, their views are based not on some kind of pragmatic response to
the state of the world, nor are they the fruit of empirical investigation and
historical reflection. Their ethics flow not from the New Testament but from
paganism and the ideologies of power. They are essentially advocating the views
of a Neo-Conservative like Robert Kaplan. The only difference is they've
dressed up their ideas with Christian verbiage and diction. Just because
someone borrows from the Western (and supposedly Christian) lexicon neither
means that one is right nor are the concepts valid to begin with.
And just what is the idealism they advocate? It can be
expressed in various ways but at its core it comes to this – the West is good
and moral and therefore what the West wants is good and moral and whatever must
be done to accomplish this is good and moral. This is an imperative for war,
conquest and violent opposition to anyone who opposes this concept and its
necessary objectives, to anyone who even questions it. It is a profound
idolatry, the deification of a culture and one that at best has a form of
godliness but denies the power thereof.
Again from the perspective of New Testament Christianity what
is perhaps most disturbing is that Mead and Habeck attempt to use Christian
ideology and ethics to make their case. Anyone deeply rooted in the teaching of
the Apostles (which frames how we read the whole of Scripture) won't be fooled
for a moment, but let's be honest, the majority of Evangelicals don't know the
Scriptures, let alone history and so they are easily influenced by the likes of
Mead. As an advocate of American nationalism and imperialism he tickles the
ears of the Evangelical heartland and advocates and defends the supposed
morality of the United States as a global power. Teaching worldliness and
affirming fallen man's desire for power and the glory that the world offers,
the largely apostate and compromised Evangelical world is happy to drink deep
and imbibe his message.
And who can doubt his zeal. He's quite aggressive, attacking
anyone who opposes his views as idolatrous, blasphemous and arrogant. That's
language sure to grab the attention of professing Christians.
But apparently it's not blasphemous or arrogant for Christian
leaders to invoke God to promote ideologies of militarism, nationalism and
imperialism in the name of 'engagement' or on supposed 'humanitarian' grounds?
The Christian Realism he advocates is little more than
consequentialism. Let us kill to make men free but that too is a lie. It ends
up being let us kill to benefit our nation's interests. Let us kill to get what
we want. Let us steal and kill to support our overarching ideal and as long as
it supports the said ideal, it is permissible and right.
Just War Theory is indeed ancient but post-Constantinian in
its essence. The concept is both absent and easily repudiated by both the New
Testament and the testimony of the Early Church. So what we have here is a
conversation rooted in deceit or at least in the assumption that the
Christianity that emerged in the 4th and 5th centuries is
not only legitimate but the only
legitimate form of the Gospel and the only foundational basis for
discussion and predication.
Faith we're told by Mead is the only cure for the ailments of
the human race. Amen and yet that's not what Mead is advocating. He's using
this as a cloak to then say that war must thus be used to right the wrongs of
the world. Or to put it another way, since faith is the only thing that 'fixes'
things, then we needn't worry about the theft, murder and maiming we do. If the
killing helps us to get what we want, and if it makes a mess of things in the
process, that's alright. Since the world is a mess anyway, we don't have to
feel guilty about what we do. Faith is the only thing that will fix with the
world, and thus since men won't embrace it, we just might have to kill them
from time to time... for the greater good of course.
It's fine worldly wisdom to be sure, but is it even remotely
Christian?
He thinks that the field of foreign affairs needs more
Christians involved. Actually what the Church needs is to purge people like
Mead, to call them to repentance and excommunicate them when they won't turn
away from their bloodthirsty ideologies which promote avarice and murder even
while seeking to cloak them with a veneer of moral integrity. Mead is a heretic
and needs to be publically identified as such.
The world is indeed dangerous and full of evil. So let's do
some more evil in order to grab up the limited resources and make sure other
people don't get them. This is the boiled down version of what he's saying.
Additionally he represents the worst kind of confusion of Western culture and
its political order with the collective identity of the Church. For Mead (and
many like him) they're all intertwined and even indistinguishable. He would
probably deny this but like all of his ilk, the Wall Street banker and the
pilot dropping the bomb are all doing 'Kingdom' work.
He (like all serious Dominionists) has profoundly
misunderstood what the Kingdom is and on an even larger scale we could safely
say, he has not grasped the teachings of the New Testament. He has (at a
fundamental level) completely misread the Scriptures, and has missed out on
what Christ and the Apostles taught. Just what is a Christian? What is Christianity?
I think it unfortunate but safe to say, Mead doesn't know.
And what a sick and bent person, to turn everything on its
head and if you criticise him... this advocate and apologist for war and
murder... you're the one with blood on your hands. You're killing people in
your unwillingness to support the militarism. Indeed black is white and white
is black. We've heard this song before. So did the Israelite prophets. Mead is
among those who essentially say... all is
well, we're the moral ones. God is with us. You have no need to be pricked in
your conscience. Peace, peace. Let us look to our strength and as long as we're
strong and mighty, peace will be ours to claim.
How oft are these 'peace,
peace' passages turned on their head and applied to those who would oppose
Christian militarism? Like so many other passages, they are not read carefully.
They are not condemnations of non-resistance but rather indictments of those
who promote sin, power and pride and yet say... all is well. We're not doing
anything wrong.
These are those (like the adulteress in Proverbs) that wipe
their mouth and say they've done nothing wrong.
The world will kill and be killed. There will be wars and
rumours of wars. Christ said not to be troubled by these things but to be
vigilant. Mead says we should be troubled and
thus become actors in these events. When the Roman armies come, we
shouldn't flee to the mountains. No, Mead and those like him are with the
Zealots. They're the ones taking up the sword and will perish by it. And in
reality they're not the ones preventing the wars through their militarist
vigilance. They're the ones making the wars.
He can feign wisdom in criticising the 2011 Libyan conquest
which was indeed a profoundly immoral project. But Mead is a deceiver. His
concerns here are political and he wishes to attack the legacy of Obama and
Hillary Clinton. They too are murderers. But would Mead criticise the chaos
that followed? He's right to do so but he shows that he's really just a
trickster and deceiver because he won't invoke Bush's 2003 Iraq invasion to
make the same point. Indeed he supported it. Bush's War led to hundreds of
thousands of deaths and has helped to unravel the whole of the Middle East,
creating the very events that led up to what happened in Libya in 2011. Mead
can't have it both ways. He's either a poor student of history and a rather
inept analyst or he's a deceiver... or both.
But in terms of a historian he's wrong. In terms of Christian
doctrine, perilously so.
His reasoning is also lacking as he falls into the same kind
of political trickery in his assertions that attempts to stop war only help the
enemy. Every attempt to lobby for or argue for peace only helped Hitler and
Stalin in the 1930's we're told. I guess he's counting on an ignorant audience
and he's sure to find one in Christian Right circles. He's an ear tickler and
will find many allies.
But anyone who knows the history of the 1930's will know that
his narrative falls flat and does not even remotely reveal what was happening
during the period nor reflect what both policymakers and the business community
were up to vis-à-vis the Third Reich. As far as Stalin, is Mead ignorant of the
US-Soviet relationship in the 1920's and 1930's? Years before Roosevelt
recognised the USSR in 1933, the US had already established economic ties with
the Soviets and proved itself more than willing to 'cash in' on the murderous
dictatorship. Mead (it would seem) represents the conservative-fantasy view of
history and then has the arrogance to sit in judgment and make proclamations
about those who reject his romanticism. For in the end that's what he is. No
realist, his analysis, foreign policy and militarism are rooted in and governed
by a violent and triumphant idealism... which is why he's dangerous, both to
the world at large but especially to the members of the Church who are (it
would seem) in his sights.
Is the testimony of Christianity harmed by those who labour
for peace? Well, I'm hardly one to celebrate the political activism of some
Christians and yet it is Mead and the legacy he represents that has brought
shame to the Christian Church and has turned the legacy and ethics of the
Prince of Peace into one of blood and lies. God help us from the likes of Mead
who in his speech spews demonic filth attacking and impugning anyone who dares
to challenge his bloodlust.
He is the one who promotes idolatry (and viciously at that)
and yet accuses anyone who opposes him of the same. Don't just lie, tell big
lies. Tell outrageous lies. Turn everything on its head and whatever it is you
do, accuse your enemies of doing it. We've seen this before too. It's an old
game and there are many dark figures in history that have played it. Mead is
their servant, their progeny, their advocate.
Mary Habeck, seemingly a defender of the Spanish fascist
Francisco Franco, advocates the same evil. We don't just need war, we need more
war. When things don't go the way the American imperialists would have it, we
need not less war... but more. More is always the solution. Their calculus of
murder cannot stop. It's a shark that can't stop swimming. The killing must
continue and must continue to escalate. Habeck is either ignorant regarding the
Syria narrative or given that she was involved with the National Security
Council, she's simply lying and has no conscience about it.
God help us from such evil and God help those who would
listen to these voices born of Tartarus, these whorish utterances which teach
the Church to worship the beast and seduce God's people into sin.
And make no mistake, their voices are being heard and echoes
by many a Church leader. I hear their words coming out of the mouths of many
respected Evangelical and Confessional leaders... all in the name of
interpreting news and events from a Christian worldview.
