Recently Tucker Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, a historian of a sort, who proposed that Winston Churchill, the British Empire, and by proxy the American republic had spent too much time congratulating themselves for being the good guys in WWII. Churchill, said Cooper, was even the real villain of the Second World War, in his own way. The controversy made its way on to the internet, and Christian ministers—particularly those associated with so-called Christian nationalism—praised Cooper for showing that America, and the post-war liberal consensus, was not all it’s cracked up to be.
There’s nothing wrong about having an honest conversation about the United States, empire, and the failures of the post-war West. Their failings aren’t ambiguous, or even necessarily few. The United States has protected a liberal empire that has undoubtedly become more socially progressive, and has increasingly strayed from Christian conceptions of the common good and self-government.
If perfect governments were for the having, then the failures of America’s post-war international order (empire) might be enough to justify the socio-political iconoclasm some Christians are engaging in. The fact that WWII revision has been in the ether for decades, but that only now a certain type of Christian minister is engaging in the discourse, is telling. But the essential problem with Christians tearing down the post-war liberal order is that it is a mirror image of the sort of socio-political iconoclasm that the excesses of the Black Lives Matter engage in. For both Black Lives Matter and the dissident Christian right, the post-war United States, if not the United States throughout its entire history, has failed to live up to its ideals and therefore revolution is necessary.
BLM wants a progressive world revolution that overturns nature, borders, hierarchies, and traditions in the name of equality. The dissident Christian right wants a neo-establishmentarian order wherein a specific type of Christian wields political power to reorder the American republic towards an Erastian, or near-Erastian, Christian order. (Erastianism entailing that the state should be the ultimate arbiter and enforcer of theological disputes in the church and society). The propositions of the far-left and dissident Christian right’s are not now and never been a historical, political, philosophical, or religious possibility. Ours is now, and has always been, a world where imperfect but nonetheless God-ordained empires vie for power and control. Some empires are more just than others. Some empires are wicked, some are good, and none are perfect or a reflection of the kingdom of God.
Evangelical Protestants might flinch at the idea of supporting empire. Conservative Anglican priest and retired Oxford professor Nigel Biggar notes that Americans have a history of telling themselves that their continentally-scaled republic isn’t an empire. Because of American self-identification as anti-imperialist, notes Biggar, “many American Christians took to interpreting the Bible as anti-empire. This initiative was especially alluring during the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the world’s sole superpower.” In the late 1990s Evangelical scholars made it fashionable to denounce empire. “Books,” said Biggar, “poured forth instructing the faithful to reject all things imperial.” Biggar argues that the anti-imperial biblical interpretations, and moral-political conclusions are “very largely mistaken.” The New Testament “does not convey the judgment that empire as a political form is essentially evil,” and Rome is no more wicked in the biblical narrative than Jewish authorities or even sometimes self-identified members of the Christian church. Biggar posits that empires don’t need to be perfect or even Christian to potentially be forces for good. “Empire need not live down to its “imperialist” stereotype as an oppressive, exploitative, tyrannical power. Indeed, sometimes its power has been positively emancipatory.”
Biggar’s analysis of empire is valuable because it calls Americans Christians to think seriously about the intrinsically imperialistic but not necessarily malevolent role America plays internationally rather than engage in frivolous wish-casting about alternate political settlements that never happened and never could have happened. The world’s choices in 1939 were not the Allies, the Axis, or a perfectly just Christian commonwealth; it was just the Allies or the Axis. In 2024 the world’s choices are not the American-sponsored liberal empire, godless Stalinist ethno-fascist China, or a perfect Christian commonwealth that acts perfectly at all times and in all places. Our choices are American hegemony or Communist China’s hegemony. Biggar reminds American Christians they should “resist the simplistic moralisms of today’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and endless chatter about the evils of ‘empire.’” Global realities make it necessary for American Christians “to reckon with the reality that the United States in fact possesses imperial power—and they should argue in the public square that America has a duty to retain that power and to wield it well rather than badly.”