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Historians and foreign-policy experts have rightly chronicled the abuses of American evangelical overseas missions, especially in the era of colonialism. But Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger Sr. Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes a different tack. While acknowledging the darker threads of both American and Christian overseas engagement, he argues it is more necessary than ever that evangelicals play a role in American foreign affairs. Mead makes this case in his most recent book, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Knopf). CT senior managing editor Mark Galli asked Mead to unpack his thesis.

You say your book is about the biggest geopolitical story in modern times. What is that story?

The rise of this global system of politics, power, investment and trade, and culture and ideology that was first dimly sketched out by the Dutch, taken over by the English and then by the Americans. This is the operating software on which the world still runs: Version 1.0 was introduced by the Dutch in about 1600, version 2.0, by the British in 1700, and version 3.0, by the Americans in about 1945.

Think about transportation. When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed. You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane—not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

Or take communications. The first telegraph line was from Washington to Baltimore. The underseas cables that for the first time united the world in instantaneous communication, right up through the development of commercial and national radio networks, television, cable, satellites—all of this has come about under this global system.

A lot of it has been driven by the economic basis of that global system, which is capitalism. It was the need of investors to get news fast and move people faster from one city to another. The transportation and communication revolutions would alone be enough to talk about a massive contribution to world history.

But also think about the ideas of democracy, pluralism, liberalism, and freedom of religion. Again, these things, which you can trace back to the Dutch Republic, have become the foundations of national and international politics.

What role did religion play in this story?

This very individualistic form of Protestant Christianity that became so basic in English and then American life is to a large degree responsible for the historical success of Britain and America. That's part of it—this form of Christianity, which is above all a very individual relationship with Christ. What is the swiftest moving and global religious movement in the history of the world? It's Pentecostalism, which is only a little over 100 years old, and started in Los Angeles and grew primarily out of a long tradition in Anglo-American Christianity. On one hand, this religious tradition has been shaping Anglo-American success, but on the other hand, especially in the 20th century, this kind of Christianity has had an extraordinary impact on people who live far beyond the boundaries of the U.S. or Great Britain.

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3