The American Spectator

Over at OpinionJournal, our own Paul Beston reviews a book by “extremist for love” Shane Claiborne. Mr. Claiborne bears more than a passing resemblance to the sort of Marxist-pacifist you might see speaking to a gathering of old hippies in a college town somewhere. All that distinguishes him is his Christianity, and even that’s not entirely unique; it echoes the Jim Wallis argument that a genuinely Christian politics amounts to almost unreconstructed leftism, tempered by a dash of abortion heterodoxy and animated by anti-war passions.

I’ll leave it to Christians to debate the underlying theology. But the fact is that foreign policy, at least at the superficial level, has become in many ways a cultural issue turning on the relationship between support for the troops and support for their mission. As long as military culture and church-going remain as intertwined as they are now, it’s hard to see the Christian Left becoming more than a bit player in American politics.