Judging Evil

Many Americans will applaud Jim Wallis' rejection of President Bush's use of religion to support his foreign policy in the war against terrorism ("Dangerous Religion"). They will not reject totally, as I believe Wallis does, the general policy itself. Most Americans accept the fundamental proposition that terrorists are at war with the United States. They believe that 9-11 was an act of war that produced some 3,000 casualties. The bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the continued operations of the suicide bombers in Israel make another point we cannot overlook: The terrorist war is not directed against the United States alone. It is a war against the secular societies of the West and all freedom-loving peoples everywhere. Nowhere in Wallis' piece can I find an acknowledgement of the hard fact that we are at war. He does concede that terrorism is evil, but he argues that—according to his brand of Christian theology—"confrontation with evil is a role reserved for God, and for the people of God when they faithfully exercise moral conscience. But God has not given the responsibility for overcoming evil to a nation-state, much less to a superpower with economic wealth and particular national interests." Here Wallis seems as certain in regard to what God wants of men and nations as he says George Bush is. The irony here, no doubt, slipped past Wallis.

Wallis quotes—approvingly, I assume—a paraphrase of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's words: "The gospel, some evangelicals are quick to point out, teaches that the line separating good and evil runs not between nations, but inside every human heart." Would Wallis have us believe that judgments of relative evil must not be made by nations and governments? Would he have us never say that one nation's aims and actions are evil relative to our own—for example, Nazi Germany? Are we not obliged to make such judgments based on our perception of relative good and evil? God may be in charge of evil in the abstract, but on this earth human beings have to deal with specific and historical evil. Of course, it is never a simple case of pure good and pure evil. Wallis is correct to point this out, and in spite of his rhetoric, George Bush probably knows this. Would Wallis even argue that the ideals of Western secular society are not to be preferred to those of the Nazis and the Islamic terrorists? Or even the closed and repressive society of a nation like Saudi Arabia, which by all accounts is a nesting ground for terrorists?

One need not wrap a morally justifiable foreign policy in the language of religion, as Bush clearly does. To do so is counterproductive, in that it loses support for that policy, and, as in Wallis' case, it leads to the conclusion that both the religious language and the policy must be rejected.

Philip Johnson

Richmond, Indiana