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During the past four years a growing number of political analysts have connected the emerging "Bush Doctrine" in foreign policy to the influence of evangelical Protestants. For example, one recent review claimed that
The influence of Christian evangelicals now extends to many essential matters of foreign policy, quite apart from the Middle East. Dogmatic, unilateralist, and radically nationalistic, this influence ignores international law and is particularly hostile to international organizations.1
Indeed, it is hard to find a critique of administration foreign policy in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, or the New York Times without a similar complaint.
Such assertions arise in part because of perceptions that conservative evangelicals are involved in virtually every aspect of American politics, from campaigning for George W. Bush in the 2004 election to mounting the recent "Justice Sunday" rally backing the president's judicial nominees. What is missing, however, is any systematic evidence that evangelicals—or other religious communities for that matter—actually support or oppose the Bush Doctrine.
In fact, such assertions fly in the face of much of the existing research. Scholars have found little evidence that religion is a major factor shaping public attitudes toward foreign policy. True, a few researchers (including the authors) have shown that religion is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and once contributed to anti-communist sentiment, probably stiffening America's posture toward the former USSR.2 But that was about it. Has the situation really changed? Is religion now influencing the public's understanding of the United States' role in the world?
To answer these questions, we use the fourth quadrennial National Survey of Religion and Politics, conducted at the University of Akron in the spring and fall of 2004 and sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. This survey of a national random sample of 4,000 respondents asked a range of religious questions seldom available in other surveys and, fortunately, also had a large battery of foreign policy questions. It is just this sort of evidence that has been lacking in the debate over the role of religion in foreign policy.
To go to the core of recent arguments, we examine the backing that America's diverse religious communities provide for the Bush Doctrine, the president's stress on military strength, preference for unilateral rather than multilateral action, willingness to engage in pre-emptive war (as in Iraq), and a tilt toward Israel in the Middle East.3 To measure this support, we use five items: an approval rating for Bush administration foreign policy, an assessment on whether the Iraq war was justified, whether pre-emptive war is ever justified, whether the United States should stress unilateral or multilateral action in international affairs, and, finally, whether America should favor the Israelis over the Palestinians. Although these questions tap different aspects of foreign policy, people respond to the package in consistent ways. In the jargon of social science, the questions scale nicely, forming a single dimension.4
To simplify presentation in the accompanying table, we report the percentage of each religious group that falls in the top half of public support for the Bush Doctrine. Thus, a score above 50 percent is more favorable than average, a score below 50 percent is more opposed.
The religious groups listed represent, first of all, America's historic religious traditions. Although recent critiques of administration policy have concentrated almost exclusively on evangelicals, other traditions may also have distinctive foreign policy views. And, as every student of American religion knows, there are bitter theological divisions within the major religious traditions. We have therefore divided evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and white Catholics into traditionalists, centrists, and modernists based on adherence to classic Christian orthodoxy.
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