Anxious About Empire is a collection of 13 essays written by various Christian academics and theologians ranging from Robert Bellah to Wendel Berry.  I honestly picked it up because I saw Wendell Berry’s name and knew Amos was a fan.  In the book, the primary topic is The Bush Doctrine, specifically centered around the document, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.”

Empire is a term that I fear may be losing its potency from overuse.  It is a popular term with those who currently critique America’s actions abroad and especially among those who critique American Evangelical Christianity.  However, it is an appropriate term when considering America’s worldwide troop placement.  Empire will aways be sought after even if it is called by another name and if America is truly a ‘Christian’ nation, should this be the course pursued by such a nation? 

I tend to hold off on some current event books because not all of the details have usually been uncovered and therefore can be made obsolete quite rapidly.  If anything, their purpose is to have a hand in policy and public opinion shaping.  Not that trying to sway opinion is a bad thing, we all do it.  But some books have an alarmist tendancy that, when coupled with the immediacy of the event being covered, causes the reader to lose sight of the bigger picture.

However, the book itself says on the back cover it is “a guide not only for our current historical moment, [but] has long-term relevancy.”  So, maybe a retrospective is in order.

The book is broken down into 5 sections, each based on a rhetorical question:

  1. Is It Time To Pay Attention?
  2. What Must We Know?
  3. How Might We Talk?
  4. And If There Is No Going Back?
  5. Whither The Church?

I wanted to comment on this book because these questions stood out to me as watered down, bland, and self-serving.  All of which are unfortunate, as a stronger voice of dissention from the ranks of theologians and religious intellectuals could have provided a brake to the rampant nationalism that swept the American Evangelical Church at the time of its writing.  Such  nationalism has no place in the Christian “body”, because, once there, it is quite hard to extract.

Such nationalism also leaves the Church vulnerable to exploitation by political parties.

I plan on writing 13 individual posts looking back on each essay retrospectively to see if and why their predictions and comments were accurate or not.  While a may just be a small fish in the blogging pond, the authors are always welcome to respond.

part 1 - part 2 – part 3 – part 4