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The United States, according to all accounts, is now the world's sole superpower. It does not take a cynical critic from a Third World country to read this global situation in imperial terms. Political scientist Ronald Dworkin has said:

America is Rome, now and for the foreseeable future. It is the unwobbling pivot around which other nations move, the country that brings order to the world through a system that spans the globe. … In military terms, America's empire is far greater than any empire preceding it. … No country can attack the United States without risking complete annihilation.

In his New Year's Day 2000 address, President Clinton combined religious and political language to articulate America's international messianic vocation. Prefer ring terms like "global village" instead of "empire," the president claimed that the United States is "well poised" to function as the world's "guiding light" in the new millennium. In more explicitly missionary language, he said that in order to "advance our interests and protect our values in this newly interconnected world, America clearly must remain engaged. We must help to shape events, and not be shaped by them."At one level the president's statement sounds like an anti-isolationist international political agenda. But we must ask: Has this vision of America not usurped the role of Jesus Christ and the Christian church? As Christians we confess Some one else as the light of the world and another set of values as the gospel that needs to advance throughout the world.The military exists to protect, defend, and extend a state's national interests, both at home and, for an international power, abroad. In the context of an American empire, the U.S. military functions as one of the principal champions of the American "gospel" and America's "missionary endeavors."Here is where the essential question of vocation becomes so important. The vocation of the church is to extend the gospel and "empire" of Jesus as the world's true light and Lord, while the vocation of any international power and its military is to extend its own gospel—with violence when necessary. Are these two vocations compatible?Christianity without the Military?

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3