Post-Cold War evangelicals briefly embraced humanitarian foreign policy agendas

Evidence

IN THE ABSENCE of a clear, external threat, culture warriors like Robertson, Dobson, Schlafly, and Buchanan identified a new battle, a war on which the soul of the nation depended. Thanks to the steady barrage of scandal, actual and imagined, issuing from the Clinton White House, they were often successful in stoking the fires of evangelical militancy. But during the 1990s, other, and in some cases opposing movements signaled potential new directions for post–Cold War evangelicalism. No longer preoccupied with defending against the spread of communism, many evangelicals began to embrace a more expansive foreign policy agenda as they turned their attention to global poverty, human trafficking, the global AIDS epidemic, and the persecution of Christians around the world. In 1996, the NAE issued a “Statement of Conscience” that elevated religious persecution and human rights as chief foreign policy concerns. As Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, explained, in the post–Cold War era evangelicals had become “more interested in making a difference than in making a statement.” For a time, it seemed evangelicals’ “knee-jerk bellicosity” might be waning as they began to embrace a more diffuse set of commitments. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 343

Categorization

• XREF: The counterfactual path not taken — that evangelicals briefly moved toward human rights before the militant-masculinity strand reasserted dominance, relevant to Du Mez’s argument that the militant strand was dominant, not the only one.
• QUESTION: Why did the humanitarian strand lose out to the bellicosity strand? Du Mez frames this as a brief possibility that faded — worth interrogating what re-channeled it.