The Mighty
and the Almighty Reflections on America, God,
and World Affairs by Madeleine Albright
HarperCollins, 352 pp., $25.95
Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations, wants to impart timely insights about God, America, and the world. But The Mighty and the Almighty might better have been called the Gospel according to Bill, as recorded by Madeleine.
This is a superficial book about one of the most important topics of the day. Most people understand that matters of faith have always influenced politics. It is the experts--like those in the field of foreign policy--who have tried to eradicate religion from public affairs. Albright is to be commended for directly addressing the relationship between faith and politics, especially since she comes out of the largely secular-realist strain in U.S. foreign policy. But it is a pity that she offers platitudes, rather than substantive reflections, about the central themes of realism, religion, and foreign policy.
American realists have had to adapt their approach to fit the United States. The theory holds that nation-states are the main actors in the world; regime differences do not matter in interactions between states; power and influence are the key indicators of a state's strength and goals; there is a hierarchy of states; and negotiated peace defined primarily in terms of order and stability is the highest achievable end.
Albright practiced a revised realism in the Clinton administration, following in the footsteps of, most notably, Henry Kissinger. These American realists still believe in hardcore realism, but they grant a special place to the American model of democratic government. They do not always know what to do with America, but they intuit there is something admirable about it. In the case of Albright, Kissinger, or Zbigniew Brzezinski--all realists and all immigrants who fled Nazi or Communist tyranny--this is especially true. Their adopted country is not perfect, but they know that it is better than the alternatives.
This is also a specious book about faith and politics. In addition to looking at the role of religion in world affairs, Albright purports to be writing about America and God. But she does not take faith seriously. Her analysis of religion espoused by anyone on the right is a caricature. Albright clumsily links the Christian right in the United States to the "religious conservatives in pre-revolutionary Iran" and depicts conservative Christians as foreigners in their own country; elsewhere, she all but equates Jerry Falwell with al Qaeda. Although she briefly criticizes the far left for focusing on the blemishes in U.S. history, she stresses the parallel "between religious fundamentalism and the unquestioning jingoism that views all of history through a narrowly American lens. Both traits are fed by a desire for certainty, a hunger for solid answers on which to build a comforting and coherent picture of the world."
Albright fears certainty and rebukes those who believe in absolutes. As a result, she indicts George W. Bush and other conservative Christians for the sin of self-righteousness that comes from "a tendency to believe that one has learned all there is to know." Her main criticism of Bush on policy grounds is that his core convictions led America from 9/11 to "the invasion and prolonged occupation of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks." In this view, Bush and al Qaeda are equally guilty of the same rhetorical excesses.
And finally, this is an amoral book about faith and morals. Albright describes herself as an optimistic and hopeful Christian, although with doubts, who was raised a Roman Catholic with a Jewish heritage that had to be hidden from the Nazis. Never mentioning her present religious affiliation, she respects other religions because "they are reaching for the same truth, though from a different angle." But while she expresses her Christian faith--or, more precisely, quotes other Christians expressing their faith--she is a relativist when it comes to putting that faith into action.
To be fair, she does not completely sever "doing what works best" from "doing what is right," as a pure realist would do, but she sees them as more parallel than connected. Her spin on realism, then, is not grounded in anything good but in the rejection of what all can agree to be bad: specifically, al Qaeda. So, more accurately, we might call her a half-relativist.
Nowhere does this half-relativism come out more plainly than in Albright's misuse of Jesus and Abraham Lincoln. In a central paragraph criticizing Bush for his certainty--his absolute conviction in seeing the fight against terror as a battle between evil and good--Albright is quick to say, "If Al Qaeda is not evil, nothing is." Immediately following, though, she asks, "But who is completely good?" Even Jesus of Nazareth, she adds, when called "good master" by a stranger, responded, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God."
This complex passage from the Gospel of Mark--where Jesus also tells the rich man to follow the commandments, give up his earthly wealth in order to have treasure in heaven, and follow him, and then preaches to his disciples that it is difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, but that all things are possible with God and that "many who are first shall come last, and the last shall come first"--seems to make no impression on Albright. Her out-of-context interpretation of Jesus' teaching instead leads to the declaration that the war on terror should not be considered a battle between evil and good but between evil and "pretty good," or between evil and "not bad," or between evil and "doing the best we can."
Lincoln receives similar contextual abuse. Perhaps, Albright says, we should adopt Lincoln's formulation and call the war on terror a fight between evil and "right as God gives us to see the right." For Albright, Lincoln is also a relativist and proves that Bush is a self-righteous absolutist rather than a confident leader. She does not grasp that Lincoln based his second inaugural address on the self-evidence of human equality and the rightness of the Union's cause. Indeed, the second inaugural is Lincoln's most powerful presidential statement on religion, morality, and politics, comprehending that while both sides "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God," the scourge of war may well be the necessary atonement for the national sin of slavery, for "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." But in her half-relativism, Albright uses Lincoln to argue that Westerners have to be moral relativists, even though radical Islamists are not.
In the end, Bill Clinton eclipses both God and Lincoln. Unfortunately, Albright gets him right where she gets Lincoln and Jesus wrong, and Clinton only buttresses her half-relativism. "[T]he whole shooting match, the whole shebang," she recounts him saying to her, is whether we are willing to admit that we are not in possession of the whole truth. "It is OK," he adds, "to say you believe your religion is true, even truer than other faiths, but not that you are in possession in this life of a hundred percent of the truth." She goes on to cite Clinton quoting Saint Paul on the difference between life on Earth and in heaven: "For now I see through a glass darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known by God."
To use this well-known passage from Corinthians about the meaning of charity--self-sacrificial love--as an argument for moral relativism is incredible. Knowing "in part" did not prevent Paul from knowing, or striving to know, the truth. What Paul meant was that full knowledge would come in eternal life when he saw God face to face.
Whether she finds it in al Qaeda or the Christian right, Albright is afraid of absolutism. In her efforts to avoid everything that could be called absolute, she cannot say that anything is ultimately true. As she puts it toward the end of the book, "Wisdom comes from learning, which comes from education. The heart of education is the search for truth. But there are many kinds of truth." She then stresses that Bill Clinton reminds us that none can claim full title to the truth, and that America can only hope for leadership at home and abroad "that will inspire us to look for the best in ourselves and in others." Inspiring leadership--and comfortable followership--replaces both religious faith and principled statesmanship.
Albright again co-opts Lincoln--appealing to "the better angels of our nature" and fighting in a just cause but never claiming a monopoly on virtue--as support for both Clinton and herself. We must lead in a divided world, according to Albright, as Lincoln led a divided country. But she appropriates Lincoln, whose "better angels of our nature" from his first inaugural is in defense of preserving the Union, in order to conclude that "we should blend realism with idealism, placing morality near the center of our foreign policy even while we debate different understandings of what morality means."
Albright deserves credit for acknowledging that religion is part of public life in both domestic and foreign policy. But she looks through a glass darkly, with dim vision that never strives to see the truth of God, America, or international politics face to face.
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is the author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism.