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The Bush administration hasn't used a distinctive shorthand phrase to signal its foreign policy goals. The Weekly Standard has described it as "morality-based," and Newsweek's Howard Fineman has called it "faith-based" foreign policy. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Bush's closest friend, told CT, "It's love your neighbor like yourself. The neighbors happen to be everyone on the planet."

Whatever one calls it, it represents a distinctive change. In the past three years, President Bush has traveled a long way from the cautious foreign policies he spoke about as a presidential candidate. During the October 2000 debate, Bush said the United States was attempting too much abroad. "If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us," he said. "If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us."

On March 19, as Bush added the words "God bless our troops" to the order launching Operation Iraqi Freedom to disarm Saddam Hussein, he was not just dressing up policy with pious language—he was summing up more than a year's intensive thinking about the relation of his Christian faith and American foreign affairs. And for some influential conservative Catholics, Jews, and evangelicals, the President's faith-based foreign policy brings to fruition a decade-long effort to link their vision for international human rights, religious freedom, democracy, free trade, and public health directly with the executive branch of the federal government.

Bush's new approach has roots in the 1980s, when a handful of President Ronald Reagan's supporters began to focus on international religious persecution. The movement did not spread far beyond Washington think tanks until 1995. Then Michael Horowitz, former general counsel in Reagan's Office of Management and Budget, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal titled "New Intolerance Between the Crescent and the Cross." Horowitz was a catalyst for alliances of Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), and conservative Jews. In January 1996, another key link formed when the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and Freedom House, a religious-freedom advocacy group, hosted a "Global Persecution of Christians" conference in Washington.

In the meantime, then-Governor Bush was testing the waters with his domestically oriented compassionate conservatism. Bush has never been a globetrotter—before he became President, he had traveled abroad three times in his adult life. As governor, Bush's foreign policy amounted mostly to advocating freer trade with Mexico.

At his inauguration, Bush laid down themes that would blossom later. America, Bush said, is "the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess." He also reached back to the Declaration of Independence to talk about "our democratic faith" that "is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not own."

Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for governmental affairs, talked at length with two sympathetic Bush speechwriters about religious persecution in Sudan and China. Horowitz, Colson, and others lobbied Bush's political guru Karl Rove on the same issue. That spring, at the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan, Bush declared his concern for religious freedom abroad, but also declared his reluctance to criticize religious persecutors; he thought it immodest to "lecture the world."

White House staffers admit that both Bush's foreign policy initiatives and domestic agenda were stalling in early September 2001, before the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11. In response to 9/11, Bush's vision became coherent and deeply linked to his Christian convictions. He declared during the Washington National Cathedral's 9/11 memorial service, "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Bush no longer sounded like a balance-of-power realist, but like an abolitionist intent on ridding the world of vice. The service ended with a powerful rendition of the abolitionist war song, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

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May 2003, Vol. 47, No. 5