Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. In this study, beliefs and convictions are delineated by the extent to which the belief is also operationalized in policy; that is, a conviction is a belief that has been applied in a substantive manner. For example, as we will see in chapter 6 that deals with Reagan’s cognetic narrative, he had a belief that abortion was abhorrent and immoral, but he had a competing conviction that it was not a government’s role to impose limits on freedom of choice. In effect, his conviction about limited government overrode his belief about abortion from becoming a conviction. For members of the Religious Right, for whom prohibiting abortion was clearly a conviction, Reagan managed to assuage them with rhetoric, but the record shows that he did not act in a substantive manner. 2. Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007). 3. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xi. 4. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 2007), p. xiv. 5. Ibid., p. 13. 6. Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 1. 7. An example of this is James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). An exception to this dilemma is John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008). 8. James William Anderson, “The Methodology of Psychological Biography,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11:3 (Winter 1981): p. 455. 165 166 Notes 9. James Renshon, “When Public Statements Reveal Private Beliefs: Assessing Operational Codes at a Distance,” Political Psychology 30, no. 4 (2009): pp. 649, 652. See also, Robert M. Axelrod, Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Stephen G. Walker and Mark Schafer, “The Political Universe of Lyndon B. Johnson and His Advisors: Diagnostic and Strategic Propensities in Their Operational Codes,” Political Psychology 21, no. 3 (2000): 529–543; and Roger Immerman, “Psychology,” and Alan Henrickson, “Mental Maps,” in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G, Paterson, eds. Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 156, 177. 10. See Carolyn M. Warner, and Stephen G. Walker, “Thinking about the Role of Religion in Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis,” Foreign Policy Analysis 7 (2011): pp. 113–135. 11. See Robert Jervis, “Understanding Beliefs,” Political Psychology 27, no. 5 (October 2006): pp. 641–663; and Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 12. An example of this is found in Fred I. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 129–131. Here Greenstein speaks of the “centrality of religious principles to [Jimmy Carter’s] political leadership” that became a “driving force” of his leadership style, but does not delineate what those principles were or how they manifested in policy making. 13. An example of this is James D. Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (New York: Pearson Longman, 2008), 14. There are numerous references and discussions regarding Jimmy Carter’s status as a born-again Christian in his biographies and press interviews; perhaps none more controversial than Robert Scheer’s interview of Carter in Playboy (November 1976). Ronald Reagan referred to Armageddon during his campaigns and while in office. See the Reagan chapters herein, and also Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 36, 206. George W. Bush refers to the “Maker of heaven and Earth” and foreign policy in his second inaugural address, available at The American Presidency Project, Inaugural Addresses, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 1 Religion in the American Political Sphere 1. The scope of this analysis is limited to Christianity inasmuch as it dominates discourse in America and has been the exclusive faith of American presidents. 2. Denis Lacorne, Religion in America: A Political History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Lacorne identifies two meta-narratives: a secular narrative derived from the Enlightenment and a second from a uniquely American religious-based pursuit of freedom. 3. A documentary history of the Reformation can be found in Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968). Notes 167 4. Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today (New York: HarperOne, 2004), p. 292. 5. As literary scholar Sacvan Bercovitch points out, “The distinction is a crucial one. Both humanism and Protestantism shift the grounds of private identity from the institution to the individual; and . makes every man his own church.” Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 11. Alexis de Tocqueville also wrote extensively about the “individualism” of Americans—a unique and peculiar condition compared to Europeans at the time. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: The Library of America, 2004), Volume II, Part II, Chapter 2. 6. These theological reinterpretations of millennialism and, in particular, the Revelation of St. John are detailed in Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1980). See in particular Chapter 1, “Apocalyptic and History.” 7. Gaustad and Schmidt, Religious History of America, p. 305. Also, historian Walter McDougal has argued in Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Mariner Books, 1997), pp. 204–205, that this notion of perfectibility—that “man can prepare a place for the messiah . and so create heaven on earth” is evidence that “the twig of American Christianity was bent from the start” constituting an “appalling conceit” that has endured since 1776. Historian William Appleman Williams also suggests the Puritans had a “kink in their theology” that allowed them to “place evil outside their system” and “inclined them toward a solution which involved the extension of their own system over others” in Contours of American History (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1961), pp. 95–96. Historian Timothy L. Smith argues that by the middle nineteenth century it was widely accepted that perfectibility, which Smith calls “Christian perfectionism” or “millennial expectation” was to be secured by the United States for “all mankind” and that “the Christian millennium would come about through the exercise of human efforts sustained by the grace of God.” See Timothy L. Smith, “Righteousness and Hope: Christian Holiness and the Millennial Vision in America, 1800–1900,” American Quarterly 31 (Spring 1979): pp. 21, 39. 8. David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 3. 9. The term “American exceptionalism,” or simply “exceptionalism,” is generally first credited to Max Lerner in hisAmerica as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957). The notion encompasses what Winthrop first prescribed in his speech aboard the Arbella that gave Americans a sense of differentiation from the rest of the world; a chosen people in a chosen land whose responsibility it was to prosper and proliferate while setting a new standard for the civilized world. A number of contemporary historians have examined its significance, manifestations, and durability, including H. W. Brands, Seymour Martin Lipset, Trevor B. McCrisken, Andrew L. Bacevich, and Walter McDougal. 168 Notes 10. Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charity is available in his papers, volume II, at The Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/books/winthrop.cfm. 11. Winthrop in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 40. 12. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), p. ix. 13. Ibid., p. 5. 14. Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1989), p. 34. 15. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, p. 75. More readings on Winthrop and the settlement of Puritans can be found in Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 46–55; Gaustad and Schmidt, Religious History of America, pp. 53–54; Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers, pp. 147–150; and Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, pp. 91–98. 16. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, p. 109. 17. Ibid., p. 110. 18. Gaustad and Schmidt, Religious History of America, p. 70. 19. Ibid. 20. The doctrine of original sin is thoroughly discussed with Biblical references in Robert Wharton Landis, The Doctrine of Original Sin: As Received and Taught by the Churches of the Reformation (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1884), pp. 9–165. For a review of the doctrine of predestination see Peter Johannes Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 14–43. See also, Lacorne, Religion in America, p. 43. 21. For the Catholic conception of absolution and penance, see Donald W. Wuerl, The Catholic Way: Faith for Living Today (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 246. 22. Disindividuation here refers to the separateness of the condition or circumstances from the individual, which is a significant departure from the Calvinist view of the inherent sinfulness of every person. In effect, failures exist for reasons that may not be under the immediate control of the person, or are the result of unrecognized self-deception.