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What do you mean when you say the great fundamental conviction of the English-speaking powers is that "God is a liberal"?

I mean liberal in the sense in which 19th-century English writers like Thomas Macaulay would use the word. Historically, religions have often been linked to the absolute power of state rulers. Think of the Catholic absolute monarchies of France and Spain. If you were for freedom of religion, you were irreligious.

But in the English-speaking world, the idea that has taken hold is the freedom of people to choose a religion or to choose no religion. We've come to that conviction on religious grounds. It's not that we think religion is bad or dangerous. It's because we think religion is good and important that we believe in freedom of religion. And so the English-speaking world has believed that religious liberty, political liberty, and economic liberty are consonant with Christianity; indeed, that it is through those values and institutions that God's will for humankind is most fully achieved.

In addition, I'm trying to argue that in Anglo-American religion, the individual who looks to God for a justifying faith looks to a God who's going to reveal himself in the future. Look at the faith of Abraham—in a lot of Anglo-American preaching, Abraham is the pattern of faith. What's God's command to Abraham? "Get up and go. Leave your father's country. Stop worshiping your father's gods. Go to a new land and there I will fulfill the promise."

This idea of a relationship with God that's realized in a world of change, in a world of departure, is an incredibly important aspect of how the Anglo-American world has become so fitted to live in a world of capitalism, which is a world of accelerating and intense social, political, and economic change.

It's not just change, but a kind of optimism about the future.

There's something very deep in the way Anglo-Americans have looked at the world that makes this kind of optimism so natural, since it's the flip side of this faith. If you have a faith that God is acting in history, that God is bringing good out of evil, and that God is writing straight with crooked lines, then that kind of faith can very easily shift gears and become an optimism about the future. You understand God's plan completely, and you can see that God is about to complete his plan with you.

The optimism of the Anglo-American world of faith is basically a positive quality. But one of the temptations we have to constantly guard against is to let our faith turn into a belief that we understand God's providence, we are the instruments of God's providence, and we're about to accomplish his will once and for all.

Our history shows that this optimism has not always been justified.

We Americans look at the last 300 years of history, and we basically see a world that's getting better and better. The rule of freedom expands. The economy develops. We have risen to become the world's greatest power. The American people are extraordinarily comfortable, affluent, and secure. It's easy for us to make the argument that God's purpose is being fulfilled through history and through the rise of American power. And to some degree, it probably is.

But suppose you are a sincere and pious Muslim. What you see in 1700 marks the beginning of the rise of England and America, the beginning of the great decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately it will be divided into little pieces. The English are beginning to challenge the great Islamic empire of India. The Persians are beginning to lose their greatness. Over the next 300 years, it just gets uglier and uglier. The Muslims are driven out of Europe and in many cases, ethnically cleansed or persecuted. The English stopped the expansion of Islam in Nigeria. The Spanish colonials stopped the expansion of Islam into the Philippines. What you see is a history that's gone wrong, a very different attitude about the modern era and the values that have shaped it.

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3