A World Beyond the Evangelical Elite Mind
The Russia-Ukraine War could be wrapping up much more quickly than the experts had predicted. Talks between the United States and Ukraine, which are being hosted by Saudi Arabia, have already achieved positive results. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day ceasefire and has pledged to work toward securing a peace with Russia that is “enduring and sustainable.” President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that he agrees with the ceasefire in principle but needs assurances it will lead to a “lasting peace.”
Rejecting the delusion of a clear-cut Ukrainian victory and fomenting regime change in Russia, the Trump administration is trying to forge a workable peace and then extricate the U.S. from the conflict.
From reading the headlines after President Trump and Vice President Vance’s Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky two weeks ago, that the war could end soon is unfathomable. Instant analysis by political commentators on the establishment Left and Right was predictably poor then—and looks even worse in retrospect.
We were told that Trump and Vance threw away the prospect of peace in order to feed their egos. Putin would continue his diabolical plans, successfully using his pawns in the United States and elsewhere to his advantage. World War III may now even be imminent. “Serious” thinkers in the D.C. foreign policy blob instead want to increase weapons shipments to Ukraine, call Trump and Vance apologists for Putin, and endlessly invoke the phrase “our democracy,” thereby suggesting that anyone who disagrees with them thirsts for tyranny.
Like clockwork, these critics have been proven wrong yet again.
In the aftermath of the White House tumult, Zelensky quickly realized his grave error and backed down. He reiterated his desire to end the war: “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.” Zelensky even sent President Trump an official letter apologizing for his behavior, reports U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump’s and Vance’s diplomatic gambit clearly paid off. They pushed Zelensky into displaying his petulance and ungrateful attitude for all the world to see—the U.S., after all, has sent Ukraine at least $175 billion since Russia’s invasion in 2022. Instead of giving in to yet more demands, Trump and Vance stood strong for U.S. interests, which means ending a war that our country has devoted much blood and treasure in support of for over three years. As Dominick Sansone recently contended at The American Mind, “The United States will not be strong-armed by any other nation into taking an action it does not deem to be in its national interest. Trump, with the assist from Vance, made clear that America is the benefactor of Ukraine—and that America is therefore calling the shots.”
It also signals that our political leaders are listening to the American people. Trump won the 2024 election partly on his pledge to help end the war in Ukraine. In his recent speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance stated, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.” For much of recent American history, elections simply haven’t had consequences. No matter who’s been in power, the machinery of the modern administrative state has continued creaking on, thwarting the desires of Americans on policies from immigration to war.
The Trump administration’s reorientation toward Ukraine comes in the midst of a much broader shift in U.S. foreign policy. No longer will the U.S. look to be the security force for the liberal international order, draining our own coffers to preserve a system that’s been stretched far beyond its original purposes. The administration’s retrenchment makes sense in a multipolar world, one that looks very different from the immediate post-Cold War era of Bush and Clinton.
Rather than propping up Europe or, even worse, getting involved in yet another Middle Eastern quagmire, the Trump administration is focusing on our own hemisphere—perhaps a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. They’re working to extricate China from South America and get a handle on our own southern border, building more of the wall and fending off cartels that have weapons stockpiles that rival a small nation.
Alliances and networks must benefit the United States rather than being a black hole for our resources and effort. Hopefully, this also means we’ll no longer be spreading our military so thin across the world—the U.S. reportedly has 750 military bases in over 80 countries. Though some critics laughably call this position “isolationist,” Michael Anton has maintained that it’s directed toward securing prosperity at home and both peace and prestige abroad.
Whether or not the administration will be successful in this monumental project is an open question. But this reorientation in our foreign policy is necessary if our nation wants to maintain its status in the decades to come.
Less Is Moore
For evangelical elites who want to opine on matters of foreign policy but who don’t seem familiar with the basic principles of conducting statecraft and securing the U.S.’s strategic interests, none of the foregoing analyses will matter. This group tends to offer another “argument” altogether.
On the surface, they appear to advance a heavily Biblicist approach—for example, that the Bible demands we help Ukraine until they’ve achieved total victory over Putin and his henchman. These sentiments are then drenched in a heavy moralism. Finally, they question the salvation of those who disagree with them. At its core, however, this method simply Christianizes the general approach to foreign policy that Western elites, with help from the CIA and other intelligence services, have been undertaking since before the fall of the Soviet Union.
According to Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, attempting to end the war in Ukraine by opening up talks with Putin is not Christian. In a piece laden with simplistic binaries and all-or-nothing thinking, Moore hysterically condemns the U.S. for “murdering Ukraine,” a phrase taken from the title of his piece.
Among the many absurd sentiments expressed in the piece (I can’t call them arguments), he ludicrously likens Trump’s attempts to broker peace with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty forged between the Soviets and Nazis in 1939.
Hayden Daniel notes at The Federalist just how historically illiterate the comparison is. For one, he points out that “the Soviets and the Nazis were two highly aggressive military powers that were gearing up for a string of conquests.” It was a pact between two tyrannical powers to buy time, not to secure peace. But for ideologues like Moore, inconvenient historical facts don’t seem to matter. If there’s any way to turn Donald Trump and his evangelical voters into moral monsters, he’ll take up that challenge.
In Moore’s Christianized Marvel universe, it’s always the Avengers versus Thanos—good and evil are clear-cut. “For Christians, it demands some questions: Who would you rather be, Naboth or Ahab? Abel or Cain? The answer to these questions might not solve the war in Europe, but it will reveal something about you,” Moore writes. So Christians who disagree with the wildest dreams of the Brussels consensus are like the first murderer, Cain? The comparison is so infantile and silly that a rational response isn’t necessary.
Moore clothes endless war in Christian language, engages in childish fantasies as the bodies continue to pile up, and has fever dreams that even Zelensky, as noted above, has seemed to discount. Standing for Christianity in the public square apparently means keeping the war machine going, boosting myriad NGOs that represent the foreign policy blob, and never negotiating with a world leader whom you personally find objectionable.
“Decisions about war and peace are often morally complex. But in this case, the defense of the indefensible is happening through a social Darwinist argument that is already hollowing out much of American life,” Moore “argues.” Acknowledging that Russia has the superior manpower and munitions in the short term, along with an agile and more self-sufficient economy, isn’t “social Darwinist”—it’s a realistic assessment of the current situation (in the long term, it seems that Russia will run into significant problems, which the U.S. can leverage during negotiations in Saudi Arabia). Whether we like it or not, this is reality. Moore himself reduces what’s in fact a “morally complex” issue into a fundamentalist gloss that just so happens to allow him to condemn the enemies of our elites while boosting their own utopian fantasies.
Unserious and infantile analysis like Moore’s is what frequently passes for “deep moral seriousness” in evangelical elite circles, which helps explain why elites on the Right have seemed to shy away from Protestantism, going instead to Rome or Constantinople. Strangely, a guy strumming an acoustic guitar who also OKed Frankenstein-like experiments as the head of NIH is just not a draw for serious right-wing thinkers.
Moore is a case study of why most modern pastors and theologians should stick to talking about the things of God. Unlike their predecessors in England and elsewhere who could write commentaries on books of the Bible by day and treatises on logic by night, we tend to get third-rate drivel that’s so Manichean in its framing that even Mani, the third-century founder of that religion, would blush.
We’ve gone from the WASPs who essentially ran the United States for centuries to people like Moore who constantly show dreadful judgment every time they venture into the realm of politics. If you wonder why a new crop of evangelical elites is so desperately needed, look no further.
Image Credit: Unsplash
This website is not only a political site, it seems to be leaning Russia’s way. And with Trump leaning that way, one has to wonder how much Trump owes Putin for the election.
The confrontation that occurred in the Oval Office showed that Vance was acting as the White House Worship Leader. Zelensky had already publicly thanked America multiple times for the aid it has received. So why did Vance make such a big deal about Zelensky not ‘thank you’ to Trump on that day?
And what are the U.S. interests that Sabo talks about. Perhaps those interests include appeasing Putin who is brutal dictator. How many Putin critics and political opponents have been disappeared or eliminated?
And as George Will noted, not all peace deals are what they are portrayed to be. In one article he was criticizing Trump’s efforts as being too similar to when they were trying to appease Hitler–at that time, Hitler’s aggression was not fully known. In other words, some peace deals are merely invitations to endless wars if complete domination is not reached by the aggressor. Does Sabo condemn Russia for invading Ukraine without justification or does he insist that the invasion was justified and thus someone else’s fault? It’s not that Russia didn’t have legitimate concerns; it is that Russia had no justification to invade Ukraine.
And so WW II has taught us that not all peace deals are what they are advertised to be. And considering the kind of leader that Putin has shown himself to be, any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine has to be looked at in detail. In addition, European leaders should be involved in peace talks because the war is happening in their neighborhood and, like Russia, they have history-based legitimate concerns and sensitivities that need to be addressed.
Finally, we should note how Trump has started a trade war with a host of nations including, or especially, NATO members. And he has been talking about annexing Canada and Greenland. But how has he treated Russia? Sir Alex Younger, a former head of MI6, stated that with Trump’s geo-political shifting of the U.S., we have entered a period of strongman rule where the strongman leaders of the 3 most powerful nations are now deciding how to carve up the rest of the world. Younger seems to believe that Trump is acting as an independent party. But in making that assessment, he didn’t address how much Trump might owe Putin for his election win.
In addition, Sabo’s pejorative use of the label ‘elites’ and his other comments are an effort to play Jenga with Moore’s analysis. And that is what authoritarians do. They try their best to get their followers to reflexively or automatically accept everything that they have to say to reflexively or automatically reject everything that those with whom they disagree say. That is perhaps why Sabo used other unflattering terms to describe Moore’s analysis.
Pretty boy’s prissy punching-down piece is impoverished and pointless. (nice alliteration, aye?!)
About the conclusion
“We’ve gone from the WASPs who essentially ran the United States for centuries to people like Moore who constantly show dreadful judgment every time they venture into the realm of politics. If you wonder why a new crop of evangelical elites is so desperately needed, look no further.”
‘A new crop of Evangelical elites’? That’s a ‘NO GO’.
It seems that every other week I read about some Evangelical demigod found out, confessing or denying, thrust into court or big payouts, for sexual sin, after financial sin, after even more sexual sin, involving even more financial sin. As Jesus of Nazareth explained in more than one parable about ‘crops’ (since the writer used that analogy) … they are mostly weeds … weeds often come up quickly and wilt away after they blow their wad of nasty seed.
Excellent article. There are ways to argue that the US should continue to support Ukraine, but as you point out, Moore is not equipped to make them.
The sheep have long stopped listening to his voice and rightly so. He has only contempt for the very people he seeks to lead