American evangelical Christians “are embracing international causes with the same moral fervor they have long brought to domestic matters.” From Evangelicals Give U.S. Foreign Policy An Activist Tinge:
Led in part by the irrepressible Mr. Horowitz, a neoconservative at the Hudson Institute think tank, evangelicals are embracing international causes with the same moral fervor they have long brought to domestic matters. Since 1998, they have helped win federal laws to fight religious persecution overseas, to crack down on international sex trafficking and to help resolve one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil wars, in southern Sudan.In so doing, evangelical groups, once among America’s staunchest isolationists, are making a mark on U.S. foreign policy. They have tipped the balance, at least for the moment, in the perennial rivalry in Washington between “realists,” who believe the U.S. has limited capacity to change the world and shouldn’t try, and “idealists,” who strive to give U.S. conduct a moral purpose.
This, of course, sounds a lot like the British Empire of the 19th century:
This activism harks back to another world power that struggled to balance ambitions for gold and God: the British Empire. Though driven in its early years by slave traders and other rogues, the British Empire later was increasingly influenced by evangelicals — who in 1807 succeeded in abolishing the global slave trade. Fifty years later, the “Christian element” was hotly debated in London, when some critics blamed a mutiny by colonial Indian troops on heavy-handed Christian moralizing. Religion played a role in Britain’s push into the Mideast later in the 19th century, too, after William Gladstone, a deeply Christian prime minister, railed against a massacre of Bulgarian Christians by Ottoman Turks.As in today’s Washington, Britain’s imperial evangelicals made common cause with the neoconservatives of their era, known as liberals. The liberals’ mission was spreading representative government and free trade. (“The two pioneers of civilization, Christianity and commerce, should be inseparable,” said David Livingstone, the famous explorer of Africa, in 1857.) Mr. Horowitz says U.S. evangelicals are driven by the same “tough-minded Christianity” that propelled Britain’s empire.
Naturally, Muslim extremists view any conflict with the US as a religious war. Acting explicitly on behalf of Christian interests supports that point of view — and may conflate democracy and rule of law with Christianity.