President Bush said today that “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” I won’t waste much time dissecting the various legal problems with this statement and its mindest, (i.e. the lack of a Constitutional mandate to save the world), inasmuch as I suspect that the majority as ya’ll can spot the problems right off the bat. I do wish to address the theological and culture impacts, however.

Firstly, this should not be confused with postmillenialism. I say this because there are those who confuse the current secular Messianicism/Jacobism with postmillenialism. In a nutshell, postmillenialism holds that Christ will expand His kingdom on earth via means we’re not aware of. Hence, as Christians we’re to spread the gospel and raise Godly families, amongst other things.

The mindest of Bush and the neoconservatives, one that was previously held by Northern Unitarians and French Jacobins, is to free mankind through force. The mindset here holds that if man has “freedom”, he’ll be better off. While it’s true that freedom is great for man, it is rarely defined. (Bret McAtee has written a great article about the subject. Read also his Inauguration musings.) To be fair, this isn’t limited to the neoconservatives and liberals, there are a lot of conservatives and libertarians who talk about freedom and liberty without offering much a definition. And were they in power, they’d have problems as a result of that as well.

I attended a lecture by Steve Wilkins once, and he made the point that it used to be that when we wanted to change a country, we would send missionaries. Now we send the Marines. It’s a good thing to wish to be rid of tyrants, but at the same time they have a pesky tendency to replace each other. We threw down a tyrant in Iran, only to get the Shah.

The Middle East will see no peace until it embraces the Gospel. (I include Israel in that, there seem to be some evangelicals who have forgotten that Israel is as pagan as its neighbors.) The military is made to break things, not to fix them and certainly not to build them. The new-world-order types may mean well, but they’ll only become tyrants themselves if they follow this course.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C.S. Lewis

To get back to my original point, postmillenialists would not advocate conversion at gunpoint. The new Jacobins certainly do. Whether or not you’re a postmillenialist isn’t my concern, (though I would hope that you are), but I don’t wish to see the term nor the perception of its ideas sullied by a secular ideology.