Religion and foreign policyReligion and foreign policyby Julie A. Wortman
Roland Homet is the author of a new book from Forward Movement Publications called The Wisdom of Serpents: Reflections on Religion and Foreign Policy, which draws on the work of a Forum on Religion and Foreign Policy (for copies contact Forward Movement at www.forwardmovement.org or call 513-721-6659). Meeting 10 times a year from the winter of 1999 through 2001, the Forum had a multidisciplinary membership that included international lawyers and business people, senior retired diplomats, scholars, nonprofit leaders and clergy from the Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian faiths. Presenters from a wide range of backgrounds – among them a commandant of West Point, the senior diplomatic hostage taken in Iran and a president of Common Cause – addressed the group and also participated with Forum members in press breakfasts with leading U.S. reporters who cover international affairs for print and broadcast media. The participants questioned the presenters and debated the issues among themselves. Written summaries of these discussions, along with other readings, appear on the Forum’s website, <www.relpol.org> (click on "papers"). Homet, who serves on the Peace Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, is a lawyer and author who has been engaged abroad in matters that involved NATO integrity, arms control and the reconciliation of competing cultures. He organized and directed a foundation-sponsored project called "American Specialists on the Soviet Union" that resulted in his book The New Realism (1990), which proposed a path to post-Cold War diplomacy.
Julie Wortman: You speak in your book about what a foreign policy would look like that is based on "the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves." And I note that when the Forum on Religion was organized it aimed to look for ways of "recovering spiritual direction." What kind of a process did you and your colleagues imagine for that?
Roland Homet: To put it simply, we talked about attitudes and how they are typically shaped by religion, which may be well-founded religion or ill-considered religion. That is, any public policy, whether domestic or foreign, is going to reflect a view of ourselves in relation to the world, to others and to a higher power. We found a great deal of evidence that the American attitude in these days is not what it once was – it is not consistent with the mainstream of religion and it is not effective. So in the first instance, the task is to change the attitude and go back to the idea of humility and modesty. There’s plenty of support for that in the Bible and in our religious histories and traditions.
Then that will reorient the direction of foreign policy. Of course, right attitudes alone are not enough. You have to apply intelligence and you have to apply experience. Then you’ll come up with some answers that are consistent with proper religion and effective in upholding the national interest.
Julie Wortman: How do we change attitudes?
Roland Homet: I’ve written a fair number of things in my life that come up against the question, "Do we have to encounter some sort of destructive cataclysm in order to go back to the right orientation?" I hope that’s not true. But supposing this book is on to something, supposing it gets into the hands of thoughtful and spiritually oriented people, supposing they engage in discussion groups – this could move in the direction that is needed. In addition to this, if we could get the book into the hands of the many Episcopalians in positions of power and authority in our government and in society we could start to move things both at the top and at the bottom.
Julie Wortman: So often we encounter church people who feel that it is not the role of the church to be involved in politics. But are you arguing that it is very much the role of the church to be involved in politics?
Roland Homet: Well, I think the role of the church is to keep people true to religiously oriented attitudes. It is not the role of the church, in the main, to say what we should do on North Korea, for example. The church has no particular expertise there. I wrote a pamphlet about this some years ago, The Role of the Church in Public Policy (Forward Movement). As with so much in our faith, it reflects a balance between engagement and detachment. Roughly speaking, I would say church leaders should engage on framing right attitudes and detach on devising the specific policies to embody those attitudes.
Julie Wortman: How does that view match up with your praise of the Jubilee 2000 campaign in which the faith communities played a very prominent and effective role in changing public policies about debt relief?
Roland Homet: That may be the exception that proves the rule. It was an alliance between the church and committed lay people who brought their respective strengths to the fray. The church said, look, this is a very simple issue of indebtedness and being perpetually imprisoned in that state. The Bible speaks to that very clearly. But there were a lot of particulars to be worked out between the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Treasury, other countries and so forth and that was largely carried out by lay people with the needed expertise. What helped was that this movement was biblically grounded and very simple at its core.
Julie Wortman: What about today’s growing peace movement, which includes many people of faith who are urging a peaceful resolution to the foreign policy challenges this country faces? Is that an arena where you would see the church having an important role?
Roland Homet: These are almost exclusively lay people who are drawing on their religious values to express the view they have, which I think has a great deal behind it, namely to say that we’ve had an almost casual politics involved in this determination to go to war and that sounds like bad government – but it is also contrary to the whole idea of the religious tradition, which is that the taking of life is not a casual affair. Now the church itself can hold prayer services like the one which occurred last January at the National Cathedral, after which many of those in attendance, of their own volition, marched to the White House. That seems to me to be a good relationship of clergy and laity.
Julie Wortman: What about resolutions on foreign policy passed by diocesan conventions and by the Episcopal Church’s General Convention? The General Convention resolutions that are passed provide the church’s Washington office with a basis for lobbying legislators and others in government around a particular policy. Is that a useful way for the church to be engaged?
Roland Homet: The tendency is to push these resolutions through without considering sufficiently how their objectives could actually be realized. I think that diminishes and demeans the office of the church. So I’d like to see fewer resolutions and greater attention to the realization of the dreams and hopes that are voiced in those resolutions. That would make the church more effective. Right now, the church is dismissable too readily and that bothers me.
Julie Wortman: I found your evaluation of a number of foreign policy issues very helpful – especially, your assessment of the effectiveness of economic sanctions and U.S. policies toward North Korea and Iraq. The questions you raised in the book, which was written before September 11, 2001, and before the North Korea and Iraq crises, were very good questions and predictive of what has happened since. Do we need to hold forums of the sort you participated in throughout the church to help church people better understand foreign policy?
Roland Homet: After the Forum disbanded, I spent a good few months trying to interest seminaries and other institutions of higher religious learning around the country to continue this work and produce periodic papers or other materials to report on the issues discussed and any conclusions that were drawn. But I couldn’t find anybody who was prepared to do that, which is quite a disappointment. There were individuals who expressed interest, but after looking into it they came back to me saying they couldn’t find any support in their institutions for doing this. Whether they thought it would be too controversial, I don’t know. That was unfortunate because I do think this is the kind of issue that lends itself to and really calls for continuing attention by the combination of clergy and laity that we had in our group.
Julie Wortman: You end the book with a call for a return to the allegiances that shaped this country at the beginning. What are those allegiances?
Roland Homet: Our political and spiritual heritage in this country has to do with modesty, clarity and submission to God. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer is well known: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." But the last line of that prayer, which is seldom used, includes this: "Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is and not as I would have it." It takes true humility to leave error uncorrected.
Results achieved by force don’t hold nearly as well as those arrived at by mutual interest. That is something that we used to know, but now we have the tendency to think we can impose our will on anything or anyone and produce a result. Sad to say, what we are producing right now is more terrorists. When we speak of our nation’s interests, I want us to be speaking about our enlightened self-interest. We should be interested in how things work out – not just our declarations of high purpose – always leading in a direction that will promote and sustain peace. We need to find the proper combination of idealism and self-interest and then we will be on the right track.
Julie Wortman: You speak a great deal in the book about detachment. I appreciate detachment as a spiritual practice. But how do you practice detachment and deal with the terrible pain and suffering there is in the world? Is that where you would see people of faith acting in a more independent or NGOish sort of way – outside the political sphere, but like the Jubilee 2000 campaign?
Roland Homet: That’s right, or like Doctors Without Borders, which I think has been a great success. And when it’s the church that’s directly involved, its good works should not be confused with conversion. (When Jesus was healing the woman at the well, he did not condition his help on her conversion.) The key word for us is "example." As a nation or as individuals or as groups, if we set a good example, that will have a conversion effect.
Julie Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.