The Religious Language In U.S. Foreign Policy

Historian Andrew Preston first became interested in the overlap between religion and America’s foreign policy decisions while teaching an undergraduate class on American foreign policy in the days leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“My students took it for granted that [Osama] bin Laden would use extremist rhetoric, [but] they were more surprised by [President George W.] Bush’s use of religious imagery and religious rhetoric to explain American foreign policy,” Preston tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And they asked me if this was unusual in American history, if presidents turned to religion very often. … I told them that I’d find out some more. I said that in general, I thought that religion didn’t play much of a role in U.S. foreign policy.”

But Preston says he wasn’t convinced of his own answer. He decided to research the topic further, only to find that historians had largely overlooked the relationship between religion and foreign policy throughout American history.

“And once I started looking at the documents, once I started looking for religion, it was everywhere,” he says. “And I thought, ‘This would be something I’d like to work on.’ “

The result is his book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, which traces how religious language has been invoked to support U.S. foreign policy decisions throughout the country’s history and up to the present day.
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