Month: January 2013

“Kerry Admits It”: Setting up the Dominoes in Foreign Relations History

Last week Senator John Kerry received his nomination to replace Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State. During his confirmation hearing, Kerry turned the tables on Congress saying, “I’m particularly aware that in many ways the greatest challenge to America’s foreign policy will be in your hands, not mine.” He continued,

“I am especially cognizant of the fact that we can’t be strong in the world unless we are strong at home – and the first priority of business which will affect my credibility as a diplomat working to help other countries create order, is whether America at last puts its own fiscal house in order.”

And then, rather bluntly, he said, “foreign policy is economic policy.” (Video of his full testimony can be found here.) As Ira Chernus pointed out in his post “Kerry Admits It: Economic Policy is Foreign Policy,”  you can almost hear some historians of US foreign policy cheering. They have been waiting for this moment of intellectual affirmation. Chernus explained,

“Scholars of the “revisionist” school have been attacked, reviled, and marginalized for decades simply for saying what Kerry seemed to say: Economic motives are the main drivers of foreign policy. So when revisionists hear a top government official say it out loud, it’s like discovering gold: It’s hard evidence that their view is correct.” And now these scholars can rest assured that a person in leadership put their scholarly hunch on record in public testimony. No further inquiry needed. Follow the money trail and you’ll learn what you need to know about foreign relations history.

Chernus isn’t satisfied with this explanation and neither am I. Whereas Chernus insists that Kerry is another example of myth-making in the upper echelons of state power, I think Kerry offers an opportunity to explore a fundamental principle of historical research: the history of foreign policy cannot be boiled down definitively to a single cause. Looking for a single causation–and, at times, I would argue focusing exclusively on causation–can lose sight of the greater context from which policies develop as well as the broader implications of those policies. Tracing the relationship between economic policy and foreign policy certainly contributes to our working knowledge of what happened or why it happened the way it did, but it risks focusing too narrowly on the order of dominoes and the way they fell to produce foreign policy initiatives. Association, as we all know, does not imply causation. So, to those who find themselves cheering, we might ask: assuming economic strength, how do we explain why we spend money on this instead of that? Ideologies play in important role in determining the parameters of “good” policy  versus “bad” policy, even if the consensus is that they are not the direct cause of the choice.

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None Confusion

As the nation prepares for President Obama’s second term in office and the 113th United States Congress assembles, much attention has been drawn to the new religious milieu of Capitol Hill. Earlier this month the Pew Forum released the data on Faith on the Hill. While Protestants still dominate Congress, the Pew Forum noted that they lost seats held in the previous session, as did Jews. In contrast, Catholics gained 7 seats and Mormons stayed about the same. Here’s the interesting point made by PF:

“Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Mormons each make up a greater percentage of the members of Congress than of all U.S. adults.”

Not only are there more Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons in Congress compared to the U.S. public at large, but also there are significantly less of the religiously unaffiliated on Capitol Hill. Whereas 1 in 5 adult Americans identify as holding no religious affiliation, only 1 member of Congress–Representative Krysten Sinema, D-Arizona–identifies as unaffiliated. Since she is the only member of Congress to remain unaffiliated to a religious organization, many atheist organizations and individuals claim her as their own. Sinema, however, has distanced herself from these organizations, stating that she is and will remain religiously unaffiliated.

The continued statements by Sinema have garnered heat from many sides. Specifically, Chris Stedman took his shots at Sinema on the CNN Religion Blog in “My take: ‘Athiest isn’t a dirty word, congresswoman.” Stedman criticizes Sinema for her public statement clarifying her religious beliefs. When asked if she was a nontheist, Sinema’s campaign gave the following public statement: “(Rep. Sinema) believes the terms non-theist, atheist or non-believer are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character.” Disappointed in Sinema’s explanation and not her self-identification, Stedman admitted:

“But as a proud atheist and humanist, I’m disheartened that the only member of Congress who openly identifies as nonreligious has forcefully distanced herself from atheism in a way that puts down those of us who do not believe in God.”

Assuming Sinema’s statement to tacitly put down atheism as an acceptable affiliation, Stedman makes a conflation that I find interesting and, it seems, common. The category of “Nones,” the religious unaffiliated in America, is so large and diffuse that it is easy to confuse those 1 in 5 persons with atheism or “nonreligion.” But that is not the case with the survey question nor, it seems, with Sinema. The religiously unaffiliated as it is written in Pew Forum surveys can include theists and the “religious.” As Steven Ramey has pointed out at the Bulletin for Religious Studies, the category “None” includes people who pray and those who don’t as well as those who believe in a “higher power” and those who don’t. For Stedman to assume that Sinema is “nonreligious” misunderstands the variety of people who fall within the category of “unaffiliated.” It seems plausible in this case that Sinema considers herself to be a “none” who prefers to remain unaffiliated with a religious organization, but still considers herself “religious” in some sense. A category of self-identification that begs the question: What precisely is meant when someone claims they are “religious”?

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