A new foreign policy journal, Providence, had its official launch last week. The journal is called “a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy.” Its purpose seems to be to affirm evangelical and Protestant support for an activist foreign policy and to counter critics of the same. Mark Tooley, one the journal’s publishers, identified one of the “problems” that the journal wants to address:

Dangerous assumptions about a peaceful world where force of arms and strategic calculation are no longer needed pervade much of American Christianity. There has arisen a new generation of Evangelicals detached from and even embarrassed by earlier Evangelical leadership that enthusiastically supported a strong U.S. foreign and military policy.

Young Evangelicals are prone to a neo-Libertarian isolationism, pessimistic that America has any major constructive role in sustaining global order.

These are frankly very strange complaints. Christianity in this country hardly suffers from too much pacifism and antiwar sentiment, and if anything our churches are far too willing to endorse or acquiesce in whatever military intervention the U.S. is carrying out or supporting. The possibility that some younger Christians are now more inclined to “isolationism” (i.e., not attacking or interfering in other countries) is a small sign that U.S. foreign policy could improve in the future. This isn’t something that thoughtful Christians should be discouraging or opposing, and yet that seems to be one of the reasons why this new journal has been created. The last thing that the U.S. foreign policy debate needs is more advocacy for intervention and global “leadership,” and the last thing that conservative Christians in this country need to be doing is providing another stamp of approval for an aggressive foreign policy.