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"I do not come out of the State Department and I do not come out of the Foreign Service. I'm not a career diplomat. I'm just a person who has known the President and his family for quite some time and I think I know how he thinks. I can represent that."

Danforth is an ordained Episcopal priest known among Washington insiders as "Saint Jack." His bipartisan credentials made his confirmation process a breeze. CT asked Danforth to reflect on the role of religion in foreign policy and whether the Christian mandate of "love your neighbor" should be extended globally.

He said, "I can remember in 1979 when I went to Cambodia and the border of Thailand. There was this horrendous situation there. I can remember one group of [American] children. They sent me a check for $26 and some odd cents, saying that they were concerned about the children of Cambodia and wanted to help. Well, the children who sent that money were at the St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis. They had their own problems. But they saw the children of Cambodia as their neighbors."

Danforth said the conflicts of the 21st century are going to be different from a generation ago. "We've gotten beyond conflicts between nations and we've gotten beyond basically the arrangement of the world in which the United Nations operated in the past. Many of the conflicts now are not between nations, they are between belief systems.

"It could be that all 191 of the members of the United Nations would agree on something. Yet if you had virtually any number of people who believe that it was their religious calling to strap bombs to their bodies and blow up innocent civilians, we would have a chaotic world situation.

"If you believe that the role of religion is to monopolize all truth and therefore conduct jihad or crusade depending on how you see yourself against the rest of the world, then we have got serious problems. On the other hand, the meaning of the word religion, the root, comes from the word ligament. To hold things together. If you believe that the role of religion is to hold things together, to hold diverse interests together, and different kinds of people together, and do so with a degree of tolerance and a degree of humility about your own limitations, that's an entirely different understanding of religion. It depends on how you see your faith."

Danforth said that religion has a vital place in shaping foreign policy. "The art of politics is to try to glue things together, not split things apart; to me that is a profoundly religious concept. As Isaiah says, 'My ways are not your ways, says the Lord.' It's a religious concept that none of us does have a monopoly on truth and we are seeing through a glass darkly."

Danforth is supportive of a new international caucus for democracy in which democratic nations would speak with one voice to promote freedom and self-determination. "There are democratic values shared by various countries and we should do better at articulating the values for which we stand: democracy, freedom, the rights of minorities."

Timothy C. Morgan is deputy managing editor for Christianity Today.

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48