Review: What the World Should Be by Malcolm D. Magee

What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy
by Malcolm D. Magee
Baylor University Press, 2008.

What is the impact of an individual's faith on public policy and the governance of a nation? Our modernist prejudices can cause us to underestimate the role of religion in our leaders. We tend to think that religion is at best an extra, a private motivation for pursuing or eschewing policies rooted in commonly held values; or, at worst a cynical move directed at selling these same values to a superstitious populace.

In his book, What the World Should Be, Malcolm Magee examines the religious beliefs of President Woodrow Wilson and demonstrates the pervasive affect that these beliefs had on Wilson's view of the world as it is and should be, how Wilson faced challenges in the political realm, and how these beliefs played out in history. John Maynard Keynes, the English economist and contemporary of Wilson wrote that:

"The President was like a nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian. His thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and expression" (The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920).

Taking this claim of Keynes seriously, Magee examines in detail the distinct Princeton Presbyterian tradition that Wilson inherited and Wilson's own substantial theological writings.

Magee's approach limits itself to Wilson's foreign policy, from the US's intervention in Veracruz, Mexico, through World War I, and culminating in the negotiations for the League of Nations. Wilson's policies led time and again to disappointment: like a Greek tragedy in which the protagonist never recognizes his tragic flaw. For Magee, this flaw is lack of personal humility, but to me it seems that Wilson's theology isolated him even from co-religionists and made it difficult to learn from experience and from others. Magee describes the key ideas of the theology in a clear and concise way for a non-specialist reader. He demonstrates lucidly how this theology pervades Wilson's policies. With this information, the reader is in a good place to evaluate the intersection of the political, the theological, and the personal.

The ancillary materials include "Christ's Army": A Religious Essay by Woodrow Wilson from 1876, Wilson's "Fourteen Points" Address to Congress, The Covenant of the League of Nations. and the 1876 Inaugural Address of Wilson's father, the Rev. Joseph R. Wilson, DD Delivered before the Board of Directors of the Southwestern Presbyterian University. These documents display a consistent theological point of view, well supporting Magee's thesis of the influence of Wilson's theology on his foreign policy.

Gratitude and the American Experience

From Archbishop Charles Chaput's Thanksgiving Message:

The Roman statesman Cicero once said that, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Gratitude expresses our dependence on others. By its nature, it leads to humility and wisdom, because a grateful heart understands than none of us is really independent. We have obligations to each other. We also have needs from each other. We’re designed to depend on each other as a family; and to depend as a family on God. Probably no other holiday speaks to the soul of the American experience like Thanksgiving.

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election: voting as an expression of the common will

Elections are a curious process. Through the process, the conflicting wills of individuals, partisans, and power brokers are transmuted into a single 'choice' - a mandate of 'the people.'

It's not that far from the process described in Acts, used to replace Judas:

it is necessary that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up from us, become with us a witness to his resurrection."

So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias.

Then they prayed, "You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this apostolic ministry from which Judas turned away to go to his own place."

Then they gave lots to them, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was counted with the eleven apostles. (Acts 1:21-25)

In the example above, the two candidates are equal, so the election [choice] is left to God through the mechanism of chance. In the elections of our American republic, the candidates are ideally NOT equal, but the winner becomes the common leader of all.

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Democracy is about a lot more than voting. Voting is a ritual that expresses the culmination of all of the democratic processes and makes for a smooth transition. The quality of a campaign and election depends upon a lifetime of political education, which begins with mothers and fathers and is lived every day in the workplace.

The pageant of political campaigns is like paying the check at a restaurant. The decision of how to pay is consequent upon a host of previous decisions: where one goes and what one eats and drinks. When the bill comes, it's a bit late to start thinking of how to pay it. So too with elections. If the choices at this point are too narrow, it's because the groundwork has already been laid - by others.

I realized years ago that the abortion issue goes beyond the positions of President and Supreme Court judges. When abortion became the law of the land, Democrats made a cynical decision to gain a strategic advantage over Republicans by allying themselves with this judicial fait accompli. And Republicans, almost as cynically, cast their position as one of passive regret for something that they consider just as settled.

It's true enough that Democrats tend to expand abortion access and Republicans tend to limit it. Beyond this political truth, it is folly to trust in voting alone to advance the political and civil right to live.

"An Insidious Persecutor"

But today we fight an insidious persecutor, an enemy who flatters, the AntiChrist Constantius. He does not stab us in the back but fills our stomachs, does not seize our property to lead us to life but stuffs our pockets to lead us to death, does not free us by putting us in prison but enslaves us by attendance at court, does not lash our bodies but kills the spirit with gold, does not publicly threaten us with the stake but privately kindles the fires of hell. He does not fight to avoid defeat but flatters in order to dominate. He confesses Christ to deny him, seeks uniformity to banish peace, compromises with heretics to be rid of Christians, honors priests to abolish bishops, builds churches to destroy the Faith. He honors you, O God, in words and on his lips, yet does all he can to weaken belief in you as Father of all...

I found this quote from St. Hilary of Poitiers cited by Hugo Rahner in his wonderful study Church and State in Early Christianity. It seemed germane to our whole political situation, even before I read Giuliani's promise to appoint anti-Roe v. Wade judges. Nor do I intend to mark Giuliani as the only culprit here. An election with two candidates who refuse to acknowledge life forces us to look more closely at what we are asking for from our elected officials.

It seems to me Giuliani is exploiting a kind of reduction in view that pro-life people have made. I know I've said this myself. The Republican party may not be making much progress in protecting the unborn, but at least they'll give us some sympathetic justices. This is the problem with being against something instead of being a presence, to paraphrase Msgr. Giussani.

I appreciate Deacon Scott's refusal to compromise on our vision of the human person called by God to an eternal destiny. I also appreciate the widening of scope that Fred brings in, including instead of subsuming questions of freedom, education and a method of facing reality.

more questions

Here's my response to Fr. Giussani's challenge not to be a presence and not merely react to the agenda which the political experts present us with.

Education
The right and duty of parents to educate their own children is critical for building a healthy society. Along with this duty is the duty of the church to educate people in the Christian faith. The authority of parents and the church must be fostered for society to be free.

I watched the Democratic debate Thursday on CNN and was disturbed to see presidential candidates talking about the role of the national government in education. Public education has historically been a concern of the states in this country, and I would be disappointed to see this powerful instrument become even more a tool of centralized propaganda. Subsidiarity counsels us to keep education free by keeping it local.

Life
"Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights -- for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture -- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition of all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination" (Pope John Paul II, 1988, Christifideles Laici (The Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World) , n.38).

Who is a prolife politician? Similar to Sharon, I question the uses of the prolife position by cynical politicians. How many conservative politicians have loudly proclaimed their opposition to abortion as a moral issue? Meanwhile, their campaign managers ensure that the public knows that their wives support abortion. Protecting human life at all stages is typically construed as a primarily moral issue, meaning that its supporters have already accepted its marginalization as a matter of private morality. I'll believe in those prolife politicians whose position includes not only morality but also the social justice of defending human life.

On the other side of the aisle, I'll take social justice politicians seriously when they admit that life is the basis of any other rights that they would advance, like healthcare, etc.

Realism vs. Ideology
I'm concerned about the ideological divisions in this country, in which partisans filter everything exclusively through their prejudices. In September 2007, General Petraeus testified before Congress about the progress of the Iraq war. It disturbed me to hear several politicians framing questions not to elicit information, but to push their own points. In a world of quickly changing events, a leader must have the capacity and willingness to look at what happens and to listen to those who have seen. Leaders must critically sift this information, but first they must look at it. As the burden on the chief executive increases, we must also look at those people around the candidates. Who will they be influence by? Is their network mainly realistic or ideological?

American Politics 2007

This is a re-post from Deep Furrows. I'll respond to it myself as soon as I can catch my breath.

«Father Giussani understood that simply taking a position against other positions in the public forum was self-defeating for the movement of CL [Communion and Liberation], not from a point of view of political strategizing but because it did not allow CL to accomplish the missionary dimension of the Church, that is, to be a presence.» (John Zucchi, "Luigi Giussani, the Church, and Youth in the 1950s: A Judgment Born of an Experience." Logos 10:4, Fall 2007, p 133).

As we go into this election season, I see many reactions of people I know in emails, conversations, etc. to the current political situation. Of the candidates available, who's the best? Who has the potential of getting elected? What issues are deal breakers and which are not?

What I'm not hearing is a creative response to current conditions. What are the key issues? What kind of leadership does the US need at this time?

How can we educate ourselves on these matters? How is it possible to participate in the political process creatively and not merely accepting the roles dictated to us by the halls of power? Alasdair MacIntyre's non servum is not really much of an option.