Providence Magazine celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. We launched in 2015 to “to uplift the best of historic Christian political theology, to foster wider conversation about spirituality in politics, and to create a community of serious Christian public thinkers serving America and the world.” Taking inspiration from Reinhold Niebuhr’s magazine Christianity and Crisis, our specific endeavor was to bring a Christian viewpoint to American foreign policy and America’s role in the world.
Candidly, most start-ups fail. New publications routinely die. Nonprofits go bankrupt. And something as niche as “Christianity and US foreign policy” would not appear to have the biggest selling point.
And yet: Providence has defied the odds. We are still here, publishing daily commentary from scores of new and established Christian thinkers. We host an annual conference on Christianity and National Security. We sponsor the Elshtain Fellowship in Christian Realism. And we launched our first Maymester on Christian Realism last year.
The credit belongs to many hands, but special mention must go to our editor-in-chief, Mark Tooley; founding managing editor Marc LiVecche; founding and longtime deputy editor Mark Melton; and our longest-serving managing editor, James Diddams, who recently concluded his four-year stint at the helm, curating conversations among readers and writers. James will continue to be involved with Providence in a part-time capacity, assisting me in the role of Associate Editor for the foreseeable future. If you know James, drop him a line of thanks as he prepares his graduate school applications for further studies in Augustinian thought, the seed for which was planted during his time managing Providence.
NEXT STEPS
As I take the baton from James, what can you expect from Providence as we write its next chapters together?
First, our central mission is unchanged. We will continue to be a unique Christian voice with a specialty in foreign policy and world affairs. That is what separates us from many other Christian journals, magazines, and periodicals. We love and respect Christianity Today, Mere Orthodoxy, and outlets like Comment or Plough. We don’t need to replicate their mission, while our distinctive expertise in international affairs fills a gap otherwise left unaddressed.
But second, we are increasingly aware that foreign policy is downstream of national identity. The vision of America’s role in the world that Providence writers have spent a decade arguing for is premised on a certain understanding of what America stands for. We cannot write coherently about American foreign policy without also writing about the American experiment more broadly.
To that extent, we’ve come to recognize the need to broaden the scope of the conversation hosted in our pages. While foreign policy and world affairs will always remain central to our DNA, we do not intend it to be our exclusive focus.
Our intent is to make Providence a magazine of Christian Realism, public affairs, and the American experiment. We want to apply historic Christian political theology to the full range of public issues, starting with foreign policy and national security, but including any area in which we see the intersection of religion and politics, faith and justice, at home and abroad.
A VIBRANT DEBATE
I also want to be up front about one thing. I’ve been prolific and outspoken on wide range of issues in politics and religion over my career. You may be familiar with one or more of the books I’ve written, or heard me on a podcast, or watched one of my lectures. I’m a proud and vocal participant in public dialogue.
But you should not expect Providence to an echo-chamber of writers lining up to agree with me. If my editorship of Providence becomes a prolonged exercise in finding authors to agree with my views, I will have failed our readership miserably. Magazines that rotely repeat the editorial line day after day are worse than predictable: they are boring.
We grow in wisdom through discussion and debate. For us to grow—as readers, writers, and editors—we need to approach one another in the same spirit with which God approached Isaiah: “Come now, let us reason together,” (1:18). Reasoning together requires enough commonality to make conversation intelligible and enough difference to make it interesting. Surrounding ourselves with either yes-men or strawmen would be equally foolish.
You can expect a community of writers who share some basic and broad commonalities. With few exceptions, we are Christians from a variety of traditions writing from within the broad orthodox mainstream of the church. If we have a common theological background, it is broadly Augustinian. If we use the language of “Christian Realism,” it is because we believe it is our Christian duty to work for justice in an always-imperfect world.
We welcome the occasional contribution from other faith traditions who share our concern for justice and the public square and who can bring a unique outsider’s insight into our intramural discussion. While Christianity will be the predominant voice in our pages, we hope it is not the exclusive one.
We are mostly Americans, but here the boundaries are even more permeable. We welcome—we invite!—perspectives from around the world. Heaven knows Americans need a multitude of counselors to help us see ourselves more clearly, and we need constant reminders that the public square extends (thankfully) beyond the confines of the American interest.
Speaking of the United States, we are collectively dedicated to the principles of the American experiment, as best summarized in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Naturally, that does not preclude disagreement. You should expect a vibrant debate about what those principles mean and how best to interpret and enact them today. But you will not find our authors arguing against human equality, natural rights, or the authority of “Nature and Nature’s God,” nor against the principles of republican government reflected in the US Constitution.
And that’s it. We have no other unifying commitments or commonalities. As a group, we have no partisan loyalty (though many individual writers no doubt do). We do not all hail from the same tribe, tongue, or nation. We are not beholden to a specific cause or interest. We are united by our Christian faith, a love of justice, and a desire to see America be the best version of itself within a just and lasting peace among nations.
Above all, it is our hope and prayer that those two things—the American interest, and international justice and peace—go together. As Paul Ramsey once wrote, “the responsibility of the statesman is…[to] strive always to envision and if possible to establish a larger area of incidence between his nation’s good and the international common good.” More simply: it is the highest calling of statesmanship to align the national interest with the international common good, insofar as possible in a fallen world. The pursuit of that goal is the inquiry of these pages. We welcome you to the conversation. And so: come now, let us reason together.