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Our concern is that Americans might actually become blind to the full truth of the matter. Ask (if one could) 43 million aborted babies, or residents of the inner city—where sexual trafficking, gang warfare, and drug addiction destroy countless victims—if we "value every life." Or see how long American "goodness and idealism and faith" last without a constitutional system of checks and balances that assumes that power corrupts (or without one of the world's best-armed police forces).

Such naïve speech can also blind us to the ironies that are unavoidable in all historical action. In this instance, we seek to secure liberty worldwide while, justifiably (and, we hope, temporarily) curtailing liberties in the U.S. so that we will be safe from terror. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we fought on behalf of "the supreme value of the individual" while having to incur "collateral damage" to hundreds of civilians.

"It will make a difference whether the culture in which the policies of nations are formed is only as deep and as high as the nation's highest ideals," wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "or whether there is a dimension in the culture from the standpoint of which the element of vanity in all human ambitions and achievements is discerned."

The answer to the naïveté of Islamist rhetoric is not American naïveté, but acknowledging that as much as the American heart is partly motivated by the highest ideals, it is also, like every heart, "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jer. 17:9).

We can transcend this sometimes needful rhetoric only when we trust the biblical irony that spiritual and political salvation is given to those who live as if they are too selfish and powerless to achieve it.

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Reflections: Walk Humbly | Quotations to stir the heart and mind.

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6