BOB ABERNETHY, host: One of the big events of the new year will be the inauguration of Barack Obama to a second term, so we asked a wide variety of religion leaders what they hope for during the president’s next term.

REV. SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference: If President Obama would revert back to the—that young, powerful, fiery spokesperson in the 2004 Democratic National Convention who talked about reconciling the blue and the red state, about the God of the blue state and the God of the red state, then I believe that he has a chance to really emerge as a transformative, catalytic president reconciling our nation. We are more polarized today than ever before.

REV. JOIQUIM BARNES, New Hope CME Church, South Carolina: I’m hoping that he would be able to work well, that Congress would be able to work with him to come up with a real budget that’s going to help the least of these, and because when you help those who are in the most vulnerable situation, you end up helping the whole country.

SISTER MARY ANN WALSH, US Conference of Catholic Bishops: Foreign aid is 1 percent of the budget, and we talk about cutting that, and that’s a frightening thought while some of us are eating at banquets while people are starving outside our door. That’s not right.

REV. RICHARD LAND, Southern Baptist Convention: To pass a comprehensive tax reform that would get rid of most of the deductions. Not charitable deductions, however. Charitable deductions are critical to civil society, but to eliminate a lot of loop holes and to bring about a bipartisan effort to get the government on a sound footing.

REV. JIM WALLIS, Sojourners: The principle is you’ve got to protect poor and vulnerable people as you find a path to fiscal sustainability. Both are moral issues.

BISHOP GENE ROBINSON, Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire: It’s hard to overestimate the importance of getting healthcare to 40 or 50 million people who did not have access to it before. That’s just huge, and as the wealthiest nation in the world, not to have healthcare for all was just a profound embarrassment.

BISHOP JAIME SOTO, Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento: As bishops we’ve been working on healthcare reform for years. Now there are issues about the healthcare reform that’s been passed, the Affordable Healthcare Act, that we have concerns about, one, some of the conscience issues.

RODRIGUEZ: I hope he protects religious liberty. I hope he defends the right and protects the right and advocates for religious pluralism.

RABBI SHIRA STUTMAN, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue: The issue of marriage equality, because I think he’s already started to take that on in his first administration, and I just feel like we’re so close we can taste it as we saw, as evidenced in the past election with more and more states, thank God, passing legislation about marriage equality

REV. LUIS CORTES, Esperanza: We have a coalition of people of faith who are actually trying to get both the Republicans and the Democrats to have a conversation on immigration. The president did promise that he wanted to address it. We’re hoping that Congress can work together and this year we can come to an agreement on a more comprehensive immigration reform package.

ARCHBISHOP GEORGE CAREY, Former Archbishop of Canterbury: If we can solve the problem of Israel and make sure that Israel has a proper, proper nation with safe borders and so on and yet at the same time allow the Palestinians to have their own state. If we can solve that one, then many of the world’s problems in terms of interfaith dialogue will be resolved.

SAYYID SYEED, Islamic Society of North America: It’s very critical for America to have good reputation, to have good liaison, with the Muslim world.

HODA ELSHISHTAWY, Muslim Public Affairs Council: We do hope that the president could maybe visit a mosque or attend an American Muslim institution and really show that direct engagement, that hey, listen, you are part of the American framework and part of the building of this country.

RAJDEEP SINGH, Sikh Coalition: We’re cautiously optimistic that the Obama administration will finally allow Sikhs to service in the U.S armed forces with their articles of faith intact. It would be a very important and historic step.

LAUREN ANDERSON YOUNGBLOOD, Secular Coalition for America: We’d like to see the Obama administration take the lead in acknowledging and including nontheistic Americans in the decision-making process.

WALSH: Pro-life issues are always a concern. Someone has to protect the innocent life, and certainly we think our government ought to be able to do that.

STUTMAN: I also really hope and pray that in the second administration he takes on the issue of climate change. I think that unfortunately it’s become a politicized, highly contentious issue and that it’s not, and it’s becoming more clear to us as the days go on that it’s something that we need to take on.

RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: Whatever can be done to make our children safer, including stopping availability of assault weapons and these magazines that can kill people, and having people able to get weapons without adequate background checks. It’s really time to put an end to that, and I hope every parent in America calls for it, and when political leaders move, the religious community will be there to give it both moral sanction and political support.

SOTO: As a religious leader, we always have religious hope, and we expect the best of our political leaders, and that’s important for us to do now. I think it’s important for us to pray for our political leaders and to ask that they do the right thing.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile today of one of the most prominent leaders of the evangelical Christian right. He is Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land plans to retire next October after 25 years as a leader of the culture wars.

Many observers have seen in recent polls and in last month’s election returns evidence of a decline in the influence of evangelical conservatives, a setback for the causes Land has led. But he concedes no such thing.

RICHARD LAND (President, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): I think it’s not a fair reading. For instance, on the pro-life issue a majority of Americans now say that they are pro-life.

ABERNETHY: I thought that legal abortion in almost all cases is favored.

LAND: The question about whether it should be legal in most cases is a different question, and the percentage who would make it illegal in most cases is actually going up. And when you begin to peel the onion, you discover that the reason that a majority now say that it is pro-life is that for the last 39 years pro-life people have been having their babies, and pro-choice people have not been having their babies with near as much frequency, and so there’s a huge shift. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be pro-life.

ABERNETHY: But what about the votes in support of gay marriage, which Land opposes vigorously? Was that a setback for him?

LAND: These four state elections where the same-sex marriage folks won are four of the most liberal states in the country. They won with a high of 52 percent of the vote, having outspent their opposition 9-to-1. We still have won 33 elections, they’ve won four now, and I think the country is still deeply divided on the issue of same-sex marriage.

ABERNETHY: I asked Land whether he was concerned about poll data such as we’ve reported on this program that show almost 20 percent of the country say they have no religious affiliation at all.

LAND: That implies they don’t have any religion, and most of them do. What you’ve got is a disaffection with organized faith, and I can understand reasons for that. I’ve had reasons for being tempted to be disillusioned with organized faith myself.

ABERNETHY: Land has called the culture wars “a titanic struggle for the nation’s soul.”

LAND: It’s still a titanic struggle, and…

ABERNETHY: But who’s winning?

LAND: Oh, I don’t think either side is winning. I think both sides are winning in different places. We have a gigantic rift running through our culture, and it’s a rift that doesn’t run between denominations and between institutions. It runs through them. It makes less difference whether you are a Catholic or a Baptist than whether you believe in traditional values and traditional morality or whether you are a post-modernist. If you had the same America that you had in 1972, when 75 percent of Americans lived in homes where they were married, Romney would have won in a landslide. But we live in 2012 America, where only 48 percent of Americans are married and living in homes. When 53 percent of our babies that are now born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock, we’re in deep trouble.

ABERNETHY: For Land, the antidote to social problems is a return to religion.

LAND: Spiritual revival. I do not see us, the traditional values folks, winning this struggle without a spiritual revival that ripens into an awakening and culminates in a reformation. The single greatest advantage, Bob, that an American can have today, and it trumps all others, is to be born into a home with a mother and a father who stay married to each other. If you are born into such a home, it trumps religion, it trumps ethnicity, it trumps economic rank, it trumps IQ, it trumps everything, and yet over half of our children have lost that home by the time they are seven. As far as I am concerned, that is collective societal child abuse.

ABERNETHY: Land was very close to President George W. Bush, and he publicly endorsed Mitt Romney. He is scathing about President Obama, as he indicated when I asked him whether he thinks Republicans and Democrats can find a compromise to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff.”

LAND: It’s there, but the president has to want it. I don’t think he wants it. I don’t think the Democratic leadership wants it. I think they’ve come to the conclusion that it’s to their political advantage to let us go over the cliff.

ABERNETHY: You really think that the president of the United States wants to do damage to the country?

LAND: No, I don’t think he thinks it will. I think he’s wrong, but I don’t think he thinks it will. For all of his brilliance, this man has never mastered Economics 101.

ABERNETHY: Before we finished, I wanted to ask Land about Christian evangelizing—trying to convert people of other faiths.

Do Christians have an obligation to try to evangelize Muslims?

LAND: Absolutely. Just as they have an obligation to try to evangelize Jews and Mormons and anyone else who is outside the Christian faith. And Mormonism is at the very least another religion. It’s not the Christian faith.

ABERNETHY: What do you say to a Muslim or a Jew or anybody else who says, “Well, Christianity is okay for you, that’s fine, but for you to try to tell me I must convert is to disrespect my religion”?

LAND: Well, if the price of respecting your religion is to disrespect mine, the price is too high.

ABERNETHY: You would be comfortable telling Mitt Romney that you think that he’s not a Christian?

LAND: Sure. That would be my duty as a Christian.

ABERNETHY: Dr. Land says he is resigning his job next fall, not retiring. He says, of the social issues, I’ll probably continue to talk about them.”

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On July 1, President Obama signed legislation imposing new unilateral sanctions on Iran that he promised would “strik[e] at the heart of the Iranian government’s ability to fund and develop its nuclear program.”

“We’re showing the Iranian government that its actions have consequences,’’ Obama said. “And if it persists, the pressure will continue to mount, and its isolation will continue to deepen. There should be no doubt—the United States and the international community are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.’’

At the same time, Obama suggested that the United States and the international community have learned something from the morally disastrous sanctions imposed on Iraq two decades ago, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe that left the civilian population devastated, the infrastructure in tatters, and hundreds of thousands of children dead.
The new Iranian sanctions, Obama said, would be targeted or “smart’’ sanctions, aimed at the elite and those “who commit serious human rights abuses,’’ while exempting technologies “that allow the Iranian people to access information and communicate freely.’’

Obama also insisted that “the door to diplomacy remains open.’’ But there is no new diplomatic initiative in the offing, according to Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative scholar and foreign policy commentator who attended a White House briefing on the Iran sanctions this summer. Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that the White House believes the new sanctions against Iran “would at least cause the regime significant pain,” but at the same time the president acknowledged “that the regime may be so ‘ideologically’ committed to getting a bomb that no amount of pain would make a difference.”

The sanctions bill passed Congress overwhelmingly, 99-0 in the Senate and 408-8 in the House, with not a lot of debate on Capitol Hill and little discussion outside the halls of Congress. It was welcomed by the roughly 50 members of the conservative group Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, while a number of policy analysts voiced their misgivings. The unilateral US sanctions, accompanied by a similar set of unilateral measures from the European Union and Asian nations, followed a fourth round of United Nations-imposed punishments—its harshest sanctions yet against Iran—that were approved by the Security Council on June 9. Yet in early September the New York Times was reporting that, despite sanctions, Iran “has dug in its heels, refusing to provide inspectors with the information and access they need to determine whether the real purpose of Tehran’s program is to produce weapons.” So far, at least, sanctions have not forced Iran to change its direction.

The tough new measures on Iran coincide with the publication of “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions” (Harvard University Press), a comprehensive and devastating look at the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 and kept in place until the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies in what was called “the coalition of the willing.’’ The author is Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and a prominent voice for many years in debates over the ethics and morality of using economic sanctions in international public policy.

“Invisible War” is a harsh moral and practical judgment on the role the US played in imposing sanctions on Iraq, and it sounds a timely ethical warning about the future use—and misuse—of sanctions. Gordon writes:

The sanctions regime on Iraq, as it was designed, interpreted, and enforced by the United States, evinced a willingness to see appalling things done in the name of security, and this requires us to consider that measures equally damaging and indiscriminate may be pursued in other circumstances, whether in the name of stopping aggression, drug trafficking, or terrorism. We must come to grips with the perversity of this. It is simply not good enough to say that atrocities committed for the right reasons, or by respected international organizations, are not really atrocities after all.

She states the case even more strongly in a recent post on one of the blogs of the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine:

It is hard to look at the current sanctions on Gaza and Iran without recalling the Iraq sanctions regime—both the structural damage and pettiness. It seems that what the US learned from Iraq was to claim that it now employs “smart sanctions,’’ which will never do the kind of broad damage as we saw in Iraq. … As we hear that Israel will now allow potato chips and juice into Gaza, it is hard to fathom how anyone can rationalize that these ever posed a threat to Israel’s security. But above all, what we should know from Iraq is this: causing destitution in distant lands does not make the world a better place, or make the United States, or anyone else, more secure.

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, as the Cold War ended and new forms of international conflict arose, sanctions emerged as a major tool of foreign policy and international governance, and one that has been employed especially by the United States, acting either with the United Nations or with allies or unilaterally. As Gordon and others have pointed out, more than two-thirds of the 60-plus sanctions cases since 1945 were initiated by the United States, and three-quarters of those involved unilateral US actions. Writing on ethical economic sanctions 10 years ago in the Jesuit magazine America, David Cortright and George A. Lopez of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame declared, “Sanctions have become the virtual 911 of international decision makers to enforce norms of justice and international peace.”

Sanctions are attractive to policy makers—and the public—for a number of reasons. They seem more substantial than diplomatic finger-wagging, less costly to impose than military action, and morally preferable to war. “They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment, not an act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs,’’ Gordon wrote in a 1999 issue of CrossCurrents, the journal of Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Over the years, as the humanitarian consequences and punitive social impact of comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and other countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia became apparent, ethicists began debating more urgently how this tool should be understood. Albert C. Pierce, professor of ethics and national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, writing in a 1996 issue of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, argued that economic sanctions “are intended to inflict great human suffering, pain, harm, and even death and thus should be subject to the same kind of careful moral and ethical scrutiny given to the use of military force before it is chosen as a means to achieve national political objectives.’’ According to Gordon, “because sanctions are themselves a form of violence, they cannot legitimately be seen merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing international law.…They require the same level of justification as other acts of warfare.’’

Pierce, Gordon, and others say sanctions should be evaluated in much the same way and with similar principles as force is evaluated, that is, with the just war doctrine. Gordon, for example, argues the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated both the criteria that must be met before going to war, such as just cause and the probability of success, and the criteria for how the war is conducted, employing such norms as proportionality and discrimination,’ which bars directly intended attacks on noncombatants and noncombatant targets.
Comprehensive economic sanctions as employed against nations such as Iraq in 1990, Haiti in 1991, and Cuba since the 1960s, have failed to achieve their goals while at the same imposing devastating hardships on the civilian population. Gordon cites studies that found the economic sanctions leveled against Iraq were responsible for the death of some 237,000 Iraqi children under age five. At best, sanctions have been successful in just a third of the cases where they have been employed. US sanctions in Iraq “systemically overrode many of the basic principles of international humanitarian law,” she writes, adding that “many have maintained that the magnitude of the suffering was such that the sanctions regime could properly be termed genocidal.”

Some experts, however, pointing to the cases of South Africa and Yugoslavia, suggest there have been at least modest successes with the use of the sanctions tool. “Even in Iraq,’’ according to Cortright and Lopez, “where the frustrations and humanitarian agony of sanctions are most acutely evident, sanctions initially had some impact in convincing Baghdad to make concessions to UN demands.’’ They argue that sanctions can be reformed, and smart sanctions can be used to deny decision-making elites access to financial resources while trying to avoid harm to civilian populations, thus meeting moral and ethical standards.

They have also written that “some degree of civilian pain is inevitable with the application of sanctions and does not make every use of the instrument unjust. International law professor Lori Fisler Damrosch argues that, although sanctions impose hardships on vulnerable populations, they may be ethically justifiable if carried out for a higher political and moral purpose such as halting aggression or preventing repression.”

Cortright and Lopez have suggested that “the use of targeted measures, if properly enforced, could be a means of enhancing the effectiveness of sanctions while reducing their adverse humanitarian consequences.’’ They caution that “substantial improvements in international compliance will be necessary, however, for financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and travel sanctions to have the kind of targeted impact reformers seek.”

In particular, they argue that “sanctions work best as instruments of persuasion, not punishment,” and concessions by a targeted regime “should be rewarded with an easing of coercive pressure.” Even the imposition of smart sanctions “should be limited by specific ethical standards of just cause, last resort, right authority, probability of success, proportionality, and civilian immunity.’’

Applying just war criteria allows for making some distinctions. Lopez, for example, has endorsed the most recent round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, arguing they have a reasonable chance of success. He has also noted they “capture the important policy subtlety that sanctions must pressure for compliance, not punish for capitulation,’’ are smart in that they “undermine real assets and capabilities that Iran might use for weapons production,” and make sanctions “the cornerstone rather than the entire edifice of a nuclear rollback policy.”

But Lopez has been critical of the unilateral US sanctions, testifying before Congress in December the proposed unilateral step by the US “will inflict economic pain in Iran, but produce no political gain on issues important to the United States.” They would have, he said, an adverse impact on the human rights situation in Iran, strengthen the ruling regime, and would undermine “the reasonably strong coalition of support condemning Iranian actions that has emerged over the past year, and which is the ultimate leverage against Iranian misbehavior.”

Looking at past examples of where sanctions-stimulated reversals have occurred—Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, or Libya—Lopez said the lesson for the Iranian case is “we cannot punish them into a nuclear deal.’’

“Only an astute mix of narrow sanctions to focus their attention, continued engagement, and versatile incentives will provide this,” he told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, gives the current sanctions regime “good marks in terms of being well-structured in relation to the goals,’’ and she praises the Obama administration for its effort to “standardize the message about the goal of sanctions: to coerce Iran back to meaningful negotiations—not to destabilize the regime.”

Yet as she has argued in an online interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, if the sanctions are to have “any hope of bringing Iran to the table in a meaningful way, they need to be perceived by Tehran as a serious threat to regime stability. And that would involve some real stress on the Iranian economy such as major inflation, growing unemployment, unrest over economic circumstances.”
But that pushes the situation toward the ethically questionable outcome of inflicting harm on civilians rather than regime leaders and raises inevitable questions about the relation between sanctions and force. For Gordon, sanctions themselves are “a form of violence—no less than guns and bombs—and it is ethically imperative that we see it as precisely that.” For Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “If there is no will to use force to back the sanctions, then the sanctions are morally dubious.”

In March, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a member of Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, called Iran “the most dangerous regime in the world” and said “the diplomatic virtues of patience must not be used to conceal the vices of inaction and appeasement.”

The conservative leaders, who include Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Bill Donohue of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others, did not address any ethical issues but focused on the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“We are running out of time to apply diplomatic pressures to this dangerous regime, and every day we delay, every moment we fail to show resolve, that regime comes closer to threatening the region and stability of the world with nuclear weapons,’’ the group said in June.

Nor have more liberal religious organizations broached the Iran sanctions issue with ethical analysis. In its most recent statement, the World Council of Churches warned in 2007 that “threats to begin another war in the Middle East defy the lessons of both history and ethics.” The council said it was referring to “the belligerent stance of the US toward Iran and of Iranian threats against the US and Israel. The region and its people must not suffer another war, let alone one that is unlawful, immoral, and ill-conceived once again.”

The lack of particular religious and ethical response to the latest round of sanctions against Iran may be due in part to the fact that so far the sanctions are targeted rather than comprehensive, aimed Revolutionary Guard-owned businesses, Iran’s shipping industry, and the country’s commercial and financial sector.

But the US sanctions also target Iran’s energy sector. The July unilateral sanctions penalize companies for selling refined gasoline to Iran or supplying equipment in a bid to increase its refining capacity. Despite being a major oil producer, Iran imports at least a third of the refined gasoline products it needs and, if tightly enforced, sanctions could bring about widespread disruption of the Iranian economy. Some policy experts worry, however, that such secondary sanctions—targeting firms that do business with Iran—inadvertently do more harm than good.

“They are sanctions against our allies, and the people that we need to get on board with us, to help us deal with them,’’ Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said in an online interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robert Einhorn, the State Department official who oversees US sanctions against Iran and North Korea, told National Public Radio on Sept. 1 the sanctions are beginning to work—at least to put pressure on the government if not to bring it to the bargaining table.

“It’s interesting to know that Iran’s imports of gasoline have dropped very substantially in recent months,” he said, “so that is putting pressure on Iran.’’

At the moment, however, nobody is raising moral and humanitarian concerns about either sanctions imposed by the United Nations with a general international consensus or the more stringent measures imposed unilaterally by the United States and the European Union. But sanctions create an ethical conundrum. If smart sanctions do not appear to be working, if they do not have the right combination of pain and incentives to induce a regime to come to the bargaining table, if they are seen, in just war terms, as unlikely to produce success, then the temptation for policymakers is either to abandon them for another alternative, usually armed force, or to ratchet up the penalties closer to the punishing comprehensive embargo imposed to such devastating effect—Gordon calls it “gratuitous harm”—on the Iraqi people.

Either move entails the risk of violating just war principles. But a choice in one direction or the other might at least generate a more robust public conversation about the ethical justifications and moral implications of economic measures designed as an alternative to war, and more vigorous debate about the proper policy toward Iran—a debate that has yet to take place.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “Drones and the Ethics of War.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: The principles of a just war are well known in religious thought. Now, as Americans weigh the pros and cons of leaving Iraq, a conversation about a just exit. What are the moral considerations of pulling out?

William Galston is a political and moral philosopher and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Nancy Sherman has taught ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy and is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Her latest book is STOIC WARRIORS. Richard Land is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. His new book, THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA?, is about to be published.

Welcome to you all. Richard, what are the top moral considerations in this discussion about what to do in Iraq?

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention and author, THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA?): Well, I think that just war has as one of its most important principles is proportionality. What are the costs of staying and the costs of going? And I think it’s very important for us to take into consideration at every step the Iraqis who have believed in us, the Iraqis who have cooperated with us, the Iraqis who have fought side by side with us. Twelve Iraqi soldiers have died for every American soldier that’s died in this war, and we cannot have a repeat of the disgraceful exit we had from Vietnam, where we left our friends behind to a terrible fate.

ABERNETHY: And what does that mean? Does that mean asylum for refugees? Does it mean — what does it mean?

Dr. LAND: Well for me it means all who want to leave, we help them leave. We protect them. In the North, if the Kurds want to continue to have freedom, we do what we can to help them defend themselves. I mean, Kurdistan is pretty much pacified.

ABERNETHY: Nancy, what are the top moral considerations for you?

Professor NANCY SHERMAN (Georgetown University and author, STOIC WARRIORS): For me, just war needs to include, although it doesn’t always, the obligation to our own troops. And so sending more troops out, given the way they’ve come home already, to me is an enormous moral peril.

ABERNETHY: Do you mean the “they” meaning the wounded?

Prof. SHERMAN: The wounded, and 19-to-1 are coming home surviving their wounds. And the care is enormous, with post-traumatic stress disorder, limb replacement. To send more in that kind of environment where they come home — all war is ugly. This one, given the nature of the war, the injuries are greater and I think the moral complexities of the war that soldiers face when they’re there is something we don’t often talk about. There’s enormous corruption, enormous moral ambiguity in who the enemy is and how you target the enemy when you’re fighting, and difficulty in separating police-fighting from war-fighting. So the exposure of a long life, of after-life of war, to our troops is really critical and an important part of thinking about just war.

ABERNETHY: And that concern for the troops to you adds up to an early exit?

Prof. SHERMAN: It adds up to an early exit and to taking very seriously what we’ve learned from those who have already come home.

ABERNETHY: Bill?

Professor WILLIAM GALSTON (Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution): Well, let me offer an analogy. You run into someone who has a problem, someone in need. You decide to try to help, but through lack of knowledge, lack of competence, you commit sins of omission as well as commission that in some respects make the problem worse. At that point you have incurred a moral obligation to deal with the consequences of your well-intentioned effort. We have generated or contributed to the generation of enormous refugee flows. We have direct moral responsibility to those refugees. Not only that. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis have directly cooperated with us in our effort to effect a transition to democracy. And if, God forbid, we have to leave with the mission not completed, we have a direct moral obligation to them as well.

ABERNETHY: And you were one of the most vigorous and public opponents of going in there in the first place. But now you see a situation that requires us to perhaps stay longer than we want to.

Prof. GALSTON: As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said more than 2000 years ago, you cannot step in the same river twice — not even the Tigris or the Euphrates.

ABERNETHY: So let me ask you this. By our presence there, a foreign occupier, are we doing — is the result of that to do more harm than good, and does that mean that in order to accomplish the ends that we have to get out?

Dr. LAND: I think the Iraqis are very ambivalent about our presence there. A lot of them understand that things could get very bad if we leave, that there could be a bloodbath. In fact, I think there’s a danger of a regional war between the Sunnis and the Shia, with people coming in from outside.

ABERNETHY: The Administration argues –

Dr. LAND: Well, and I think it’s a very real concern, and we need to be concerned about it. But I think clearly we need to be working toward reducing our footprint and increasing the Iraqis footprint in their own country as quickly as is feasible.

ABERNETHY: But the question — go ahead.

Prof. SHERMAN: I’m just going to address that because that is exactly what puts enormous strain on our troops, and we fail to take seriously our obligation to them. Those situations are ambivalent, psychologically ambivalent, but they’re also morally ambivalent. And many of the cooperative arrangements they have with working with the security and the like involve knowing that the Iraqis have detention centers, which our young men and women in uniform see, especially if they are advising the police or the security, and don’t quite know how to terminate them on terms that the Iraqis will accept. So there’s a lot of moral “dirty hands,” you might say, that we expose our troops to, in a war where those that are helping us play by somewhat different rules than we’re willing to accept.

ABERNETHY: Does it come down, then, to a question of can we succeed?

Prof. GALSTON: That is a critical question, not just from a factual standpoint, but from a moral standpoint, because it’s an ancient moral principle that states that “ought” implies “can.” An obligation to do something implies that you have the power to do it. We don’t know whether we have the power to bring about the result we seek. We’re going to find out in this calendar year, and if we don’t, then, as Secretary of the Defense Gates has said, it would be irresponsible not to have a Plan B.

Dr. LAND: And that’s part of just war theory. You know, will the good gained outweigh the damage caused? And that’s, you know, that’s not a science, that’s an art. It really is an art, and what happens on the ground really matters, and how the Iraqis respond. This war will not be won or lost by the American presence there. It will be won or lost by whether or not enough Iraqis grasp and commit to a vision of a democratically elected government in a democratic society.

Prof. SHERMAN: But I would just pick up on a point, Bill, you made. You can’t step into the same river twice, Heraclitus famously said. But we’ve done a lot of experimenting. This is five years with a lot of our investment of our money — taxpayer money — and troops. This is very similar water to what we’ve stepped in before, and so there are lessons from the past that we need to heed.

ABERNETHY: You mean Vietnam?

Prof. SHERMAN: Vietnam and to the four years that have preceded — the war changes. It’s fluid. The cause changes. The morale needs to be changed. But it’s the same kind of war.

ABERNETHY: Is a lesson from Iraq that it is extremely difficult to intervene in another country militarily and that we need to be very, very careful about that in the future?

Prof. SHERMAN: I think that’s certainly a lesson, and I also think the Pentagon knows that the kind of war we were prepared to fight isn’t what we have seen. And the models of war fighting have really changed. And there’s enormous moral responsibility to the troops to send them out with the best kind of war models that have — nonconventional warfare requires very different fighting from targeted missions.

ABERNETHY: Bill, the last word?

Prof. GALSTON: There’s one more implication. Ultimately, as Richard has said, and as everybody can see, if the Iraqis don’t want this as much as we do, then we cannot succeed.

ABERNETHY: Okay. Richard Land, Nancy Sherman, William Galston — many thanks to each of you.

The post Iraq War Anniversary appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Science and religion are sometimes at odds over the environment, but one prominent biologist is pleading for both to work together in order to protect the earth’s biodiversity — the many species of plants and animals that scientists say are at risk. E.O. Wilson is the author of a recent book, THE CREATION. He spoke with Bob Abernethy.

ABERNETHY: The thin layer of life covering the earth’s surface is made up of perhaps 10 million species of plants and animals, maybe more, and many scientists say those forms of life are in mortal peril. One of those sounding the alarm is biologist and retired Harvard University professor E.O. Wilson.

Dr. E.O. WILSON (Biologist and Author, THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): I want us to save the creation — not just care about it, but to save it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson is a broadly learned man with many honors, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his lifework — the study of ants.

Dr. WILSON: Here is a typical drawer of hundreds if not thousands of specimens.

ABERNETHY: His mission now is to protect all the Earth’s species. The greatest threat to biodiversity, says Wilson, is humankind’s appetite for more and more lumber and food and minerals and space to support six-and-a-half billion people, on the way to nine billion. Wilson says it is human over-consumption that’s the greatest threat to other species, and therefore a problem for us, too.

Dr. WILSON: We are threatened by the immense loss of future scientific knowledge, of future products that could enrich humanity and give us a higher quality of life. But the loss that I care about most is in our — in spiritual enrichment, in living in the magnificent original environment in which humanity was born.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says the natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.

Dr. WILSON: Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says scientists have identified 25 so-called hotspots — two-and-a-half percent of the earth’s land surface — in which nearly half of all the plant and animal species have been found. He wants the world to spend $30 billion to protect those ecosystems, in his words to “throw an umbrella over them.” The same species in other places might be endangered, but those in the hotspots would survive.

Wilson has long been a secular humanist, but he was raised a Southern Baptist in Alabama, and he understands religion’s power. So his new book, THE CREATION, is addressed to an imaginary Southern Baptist minister.

Dr. WILSON (From THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): Pastor, we need your help. The Creation is the glory of the earth. Let’s see if we can’t get together on saving it, because science and religion are the most powerful social forces on Earth. We could do it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson’s imaginary pastor could be Richard Land, a Southern Baptist minister who is the chief spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s a radio broadcaster and the author of his own book on the environment, THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God put man in charge under his headship. Human beings have dominion and are given dominion. But then that’s tempered by Genesis chapter 2, where man is put into the Garden to till it and to keep it. We’re not to just worship nature in its pristine form. We have a divinely mandated responsibility to both develop the earth for human betterment and to protect it and to guard it and keep it and exercise creation care.

ABERNETHY: Land accuses Wilson of being too concerned about wildlife and not enough about humanity.

Dr. LAND: He looks upon human beings as an alien species to the habitat of nature and that we are the ones that are destructive and that we have been a catastrophic event. Nature would have been far better off without human beings. As a Christian, we believe that God created the creation for humankind. So while we are to give respect to all life, we must treat human life with reverence. And there is in Christian theology a hierarchy of species, and there is a firebreak between human beings and the rest of creation. It is human beings that God gave a soul.

ABERNETHY: And protecting other species?

Dr. LAND: We certainly need to do all we can without causing grievous harm to human beings. There’s the difference — without causing grievous harm to human beings.

ABERNETHY: Land says millions of people, especially the very poor, would be devastated by some proposals for protecting the environment. Wilson insists that biodiversity could be protected without hurting humans.

Dr. WILSON: It would increase our standard of living if we did it sensibly with less material and energy consumption and conservation of the rest of life. We can actually increase the productivity of the world while saving all of the, or most of the remaining species.

ABERNETHY: Wilson sees a problem in what he says is the implication for some Christians of the belief that Christ is coming again.

Dr. WILSON: And that therefore there isn’t a lot of value in paying any attention to what we do to the Earth. We could go ahead and tear it all to hell and back, and I do consider that, frankly, as a gospel of despair, a view of humanity and our place on this Earth that is indefensible.

Dr. LAND: I personally have never met an evangelical Christian who believes that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a mythic figure. I believe that history will culminate in a radical second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to redeem his creation and humankind. But I specifically repudiate that you can draw from that that we can ignore the biblical admonitions and the biblical commands to exercise creation care. I think that is a false theology.

ABERNETHY: And Wilson’s idea of setting aside those 25 hotspots to protect their ecosystems?

Dr. LAND: As long as it can be done by not severely damaging the human beings who are in that eco-culture.

ABERNETHY: Land acknowledges that protecting the environment is becoming a high priority issue for many evangelicals.

Dr. LAND: Oh, I think that’s right. I think it’s a growing consensus among evangelicals and a growing consensus among Western civilization in general, and evangelical Christians are a part of that. The devil’s going to be in the details. It’s going to be in how do we address this?

The post E.O. Wilson appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Q: E.O. Wilson says that up to half of the 10 million or so species could be gone by the end of this century unless we take some action. He wants what he calls the two most powerful social forces on earth, science and religion, to put aside their differences and work together to save biodiversity, which he calls also “the Creation.” He writes this in the form of a letter to an imaginary Southern Baptist pastor. You are a real Southern Baptist minister. How do you respond to him?

A: I believe that as Christians we have an obligation and a responsibility for creation care, and I think there are points at which we can make common ground. It’s interesting that when he’s making the self-interested argument — you know, human beings need to preserve the species because it’s good for human beings — he uses one of the examples that I use in the book that I wrote in 1992 called THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: the rosy periwinkle. The rosy periwinkle is this little tiny flower that was on the verge of extinction in the Amazon rainforest when they discovered that there’s an enzyme that was previously unknown that can be extracted from the rosy periwinkle (and now, of course, can be made chemically) that is one of the most important treatments we have for leukemia and for other diseases of the blood. And the argument that I made is that if we believe as Christians that God created everything — God is a God of order, not a God of discord, not a God of chaos — and if he created everything he created everything for a purpose and we ought to, as an act of stewardship, try to keep some of everything that God created alive until we discover God’s purpose for it and then use it for that purpose. I use the rosy periwinkle as an example. [Wilson], coming at it from a slightly different direction, uses the same example of the rosy periwinkle. I would say that as a Christian we believe that the earth is the Lord’s. It is divine ownership. God owns the Earth, we don’t own it. We don’t have the right to treat it as if we own it. Secondly, we have human responsibility. Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God put man in charge under his headship. Human beings have dominion and are given dominion, but then that’s tempered by Genesis chapter 2, where man is put into the garden to till it and to keep it. The word “keep” means to guard and to protect. We would call it Earth-care creation here. To till it means to cause it to bring forth its fruit, to plow it, to cultivate it. We’re not to just worship nature in its pristine form. We have a divinely mandated responsibility to both develop the Earth for human betterment and to protect it and guard it and keep it and to exercise creation care. And we will give an account of our stewardship.

Q: The word “stewardship” means different things to different people. I think to Professor Wilson it means taking very, very good care of all the species and not using them, perhaps, to their destruction for our own purposes. Where do you differ with Professor Wilson? It sounds, as you say it, as if there’s no difference, but I suspect there is on this question of to what extent we should make it a goal of ours as people to preserve all 10 million species.

A: I think that one of the areas where there would be profound disagreement is in the nature of humanity as a species and humanity’s place in creation. On page 54 of his book he says, “Let us think upon what we and the other aliens are doing to the rest of life, and to ourselves.” He’s talking about alien species that have been brought into places which are not their natural habitat. Now what he’s clearly saying — and he defines nature, by the way, exclusive of humanity; he does that earlier in the book. Nature with a capital “N” is exclusive of human imprint on nature, i.e. the human species. He looks upon human beings as an alien species to the habitat of nature and that we are the ones that are destructive and that we have been a catastrophic event. Nature would have been far better off without human beings. As a Christian we believe that God created the creation for humankind and that he created it for humankind, and he placed humankind within it. So while we are to give respect to all life, God made a covenant with all of life, with every living creature in Genesis chapter 9, and we don’t have the right to treat any life with disrespect. We must treat human life with reverence, and there is in Christian theology a hierarchy of species, and there is a firebreak between human beings and the rest of creation. It is human beings that God gave a soul. It is human beings that are treated as different in kind, not just in degree or sophistication, and I think that most of the differences that I would have with Dr. Wilson and he would have with me would arise from that one pretty serious distinction and one serious difference.

Q: Do human beings have the right to destroy other species for our benefit?

A: To destroy? No. To use? Yes. One of the distinctions I make, for instance, is if we need to cause the death of some animals, as painlessly as possible, but if we need to cause the death of some animals to create a Salk vaccine? We haven’t only the right to do so, we have the obligation. I don’t think we have the right to cause animals pain or cause animals discomfort to create new cosmetics, but medicines for human betterment? Yes.

Q: I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the preservation of the species, all the species, and that’s the issue. Do we have the right for our purposes to destroy some other species?

A: No. No, we don’t have the right to destroy them. We do have a right to make value judgments about whether human beings are more important than other species. I’ve been accused of being a “speciesist.” That’s valuing your own species more highly than you ought. I do value human beings more than I value the rest of creation. Just to use a mundane example: I think God created spotted owls, and we ought to try to keep some spotted owls alive. But if the choice is between keeping all the spotted owls alive and causing 10,000 families the loss of their livelihood, I say keep some of the spotted owls alive, not all of them.

Q: Professor Wilson says scientists who have worked on this estimate that by the end of this century half the plants and a quarter of all the other living things could disappear. If that’s true, do you believe that we as human beings have a right, a duty, to do heroic things to try to prevent the disappearance of as many species as we possibly can?

A: I think it depends on what you mean. The difficulty is in the details. We certainly need to do all we can without causing grievous harm to human beings. There’s the difference — without causing grievous harm to human beings. To use a controversial example, the Kyoto Protocols, if they were to be implemented, it is estimated, would cause the global temperature to go down .5 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of this century, and the immediate economic impact world wide, particularly on people at the margins, people who are at subsistence level, would be catastrophic. It would be fairly significant on people at the margins in North America, which is why when it was brought up in the Senate it was voted down 99 to zero. Should we try to do things that will mitigate global warming? My argument has always been to people who say, well, global warming hasn’t been proven, I don’t think it’s been proven that human beings are the main cause of it. But, you know, I take the same attitude toward climate warming that I took toward the military capabilities of the Soviet Union. I would rather overestimate their capabilities and be wrong than have underestimated their capabilities and pay the consequences. But I think we have to always put in the factor of what is the human cost, and how do we mitigate the human cost? For instance, I’m a far stronger believer in human ingenuity, human technology to help us solve these problems without catastrophic decreases in human standards of living.

Q: So when Professor Wilson says he is reaching out his hand to the imaginary Southern Baptist pastor he is writing to, asking that we set aside differences, for instance, over evolution and work together to preserve the species, do you agree with that?

A: I do. Work together when we can and where we can, understanding that we do have, in many cases, diametrically opposed worldviews which happen to meet at the point of contact of creation care. We both believe that we have an obligation as human beings for creation care, for different reasons, for different purposes. By the way, in the book and others as well have said that there are a lot of Christians who think that we should just ignore the environment, we should just ignore the creation because the Lord’s coming back soon and we shouldn’t worry about it. Well, I personally have never met an evangelical Christian who believes that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a mythic figure. First of all, there’s a lot in the Bible about creation care. Secondly, there’s a very specific statement by Jesus himself who says no man knows the hour, the day of his coming. And anybody who thinks he knows doesn’t, and so we have an obligation and a responsibility. He put us into the garden and he said that we have a responsibility to till it and to keep it. I think it’s important for people to understand that as long ago as 1992 I wrote a book called THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: CHRISTIANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT. It talks about a theological ethic of the environment and creation care. It talks about divine ownership, human responsibility, and personal stewardship. So there’s a far greater base of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who understand the responsibility that they have for creation care. But we are going to have some divergences, and the biggest one is going to be the priority that is given to human beings.

Q: The idea that Christ is going to come again, that history is going to come to an end as we know it sometime, perhaps in our lifetime, this whole idea of the imminent end times, and if that’s going to happen we don’t need to worry about protecting the environment or any species — you specifically disagree with that?

A: I would specifically repudiate it. As someone who deeply believes that history will culminate in the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem human kind and creation — the Bible is very clear about this, that part of Jesus’ mission is to reclaim the creation, which is also marred by sin. That’s another difference of opinion between Dr. Wilson and myself. We as Christians do not see nature as the benign ecosystem that he does. We believe that, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans, the whole creation groans and travails together until now, waiting for the redemption, the redemption that will be brought about in the culmination of Jesus Christ’s second advent. But at the same time I’m a Christian, and I have a Bible, which is my lifestyle manual, and the Bible says that we are to be stewards of God’s creation. It says that we are to till it and to keep it and that we’re going to give an account of our care of God’s creation. I believe that history will culminate in a radical second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to redeem his creation and humankind. But I specifically repudiate that you can draw from that that we can ignore the biblical admonitions and the biblical commands to exercise creation care.

I think that is a false theology and one which has in the past and in the present led to a rapaciousness concerning God’s creation and has caused far too many human beings, religious and otherwise, to believe that they have the right to despoil and use up God’s creation as if it were their own and to treat living things as if they were inanimate objects.

The Bible is very clear that God made a covenant with every living creature, which means that while I may eat steak (and I do; as a Texan I consider it my patriotic duty to eat steak) we should seek to treat cattle as humanely as possible, and when it is time for them to have their lives end to be used for human good that that should be done as humanely as possible, and we do not have the right to deliberately mistreat or neglect any living creature.

Q: You said that the differences between you and E.O. Wilson on these things meant that although the idea of working together to protect the Earth and protect the species was attractive, there would be places where your different points of view about that would make working together very difficult. What would be a major example of where that would happen?

A: I think Dr. Wilson would be far more ready far more quickly to adopt policies to protect the environment and to protect species that would cause a radical reduction in the living standards of human beings than would I. I think that human beings have preeminence in the creation over other species.

Q: He would argue that that doesn’t have to follow, that you can protect the species and not only preserve but improve the standard of living of human beings.

A: To the extent that that’s true we have no disagreement. But I read his book, and his book does have a fundamentally different viewpoint about humanity and its relation to nature. He defines nature with a capital “N,” deliberately excluding humanity from it as a species, and he describes human beings as an alien species on the planet. He makes the same analogy for human beings to the planet that he does for red ants being transformed from South America to North America. In North America they’re an alien species doing damage. That’s his analogy for human beings on the planet. I fundamentally disagree.

Q: He says that if human beings spent $30 billion one time to preserve the ecosystems in something like 25 areas of the Earth where there’s a lot of biodiversity, it could be preserved. In his terms an “umbrella” could be put over it. Would you think that makes sense?

A: Sure, as long as it can be done by not severely damaging the human beings who are in that eco-culture or a provision is made to make certain that they are not negatively impacted by the preservation of the eco-structure. Sounds like an awfully good priority for the Clinton Global Initiative.

Q: How do you think Southern Baptists in general will respond to E.O.Wilson’s proposals?

A: It’s always dangerous to try to predict how Southern Baptists in general are going to respond to anything. Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and there’s a significant amount of diversity among us. I mean, after all, I’ve voted against [three] Southern Baptists in my lifetime who were running for president — Jimmy Carter twice, Bill Clinton twice, and Al Gore. So they were Southern Baptists with whom I have some diversity. But I find that Southern Baptists are very responsive to the issue if it’s framed in a way that they don’t turn it off. For instance, I talk about creation care. I talk about our biblical mandate to be good stewards of God’s creation. I assiduously avoid the phrase “global warming,” because I find that if I want Southern Baptists and Southern Baptist audiences to listen to me, that’s a phrase I should avoid, because when I use it they either turn me off or they begin to look at everything else I say with a jaundiced eye. They understand what the Bible teaches about creation care. Creation care and stewardship of the earth is a far less controversial than global warming, so I just assiduously avoid it. I talk about what our obligation and responsibility is both individually and societally for creation care and for conservation and for stewardship and talk about some of the possibilities for technological advances that could help us meet some of Dr. Wilson’s goals, and goals that I would certainly share without radical reductions in human standards of living. Another area I do avoid completely is population control, and that’s also an area where Dr. Wilson and I would disagree. I look upon human beings as resources, each one, not as a burden, and I think if you unleash human ingenuity we can preserve the environment, and this Earth can sustain a lot more people than we now have.

Q: You spoke about differences among Southern Baptists, and I would broaden that to differences among evangelical Christians in general on lots of things. Within the evangelical movement, would you agree that there are major differences about how to take care of the environment?

A: Yes, there are. There are even among those who are committed to creation care, and I think that most, at least abstractly, are committed to creation care. There would be a major split between those who want to immediately assume that there have to be drastic reductions in human and certainly Western standards of living, as opposed to those who are far more optimistic about human ingenuity and human technology and applying human ingenuity and human technology to try to, at the same time we preserve the environment, not cause undue burdens on human beings.

Q: Earlier this year, 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement about global warming. You and 20 or so others signed another letter saying global warming is not a consensus issue.

A: Well, it’s not. That’s a simple fact.

Q: But it seems that within the evangelical Christian movement as a whole there is a growing willingness and conviction that the environment needs to be better protected.

A: Oh, I think that’s right. I think it’s a growing consensus among evangelicals and a growing consensus among Western civilization in general, and evangelicals are a part of that. The devil’s going to be i the details. It’s going to be in how do we address this? Do we address this through technology or do we address this through radical reductions in human standards of living?

Q: That’s a red herring Wilson would say, I think. You don’t have to reduce the standard of living in order to protect.

A: Well, it may be a red herring for Wilson. The Kyoto Protocols, if they were to be implemented, would have dramatic impact on Western standards of living in the immediate future, and it would impact those least able to afford it the most, so the Kyoto Protocol is not a red herring.

Q: Do you find yourself moving toward a position that humanity needs to do more about protecting the earth?

A: No, not at least in the last 20 years, because my views on this were fundamentally changed in 1970 when I read Francis Shaeffer’s book POLLUTION AND THE DEATH OF MAN. Francis Shaeffer probably had as much impact on me and my own intellectual and spiritual development as any person in my life, and I’m not alone in that regard. There’s a whole generation of us evangelicals who look upon Francis Shaeffer as our St. Francis. He really did help us to understand the full-orbed responsibilities of Christians in relation to society, in relation to culture, in relation to public affairs, and in relation to the environment, and in 1970 he wrote that book, and it was a very radical book at the time, and I read it within a month of its publication when I was a first-year seminary student, and so I don’t think my views have changed much over the last three-and-a-half decades I’ve been committed to creation care. I became the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in 1988, and in 1991 our annual seminar was on the subject of creation care.

Q: How do you define creation care?

A: God is the owner of the Earth. He’s made human beings his vice-regents. Genesis 1 says human beings are to have dominion, but that dominion is then circumscribed by the fact that in Genesis 2 he put us into the garden, and he said you are to till it and to keep it. Till it is to guard it and protect it; till it means to cause it to be developed for human betterment, and so we have an obligation and a responsibility to treat creation as God’s, not ours, and we’re going to be giving an account to him of our stewardship of his creation.

Q: And what does stewardship mean? Taking care of but not necessarily preserving all species?

A: I believe God is a God of order. I believe God is a God who if he created something he created it for a purpose, and we certainly should strive to preserve some of all that God has created.

Q: And you and E.O. Wilson would differ on that definition of “some”?

A: Yes, we would, I suspect. An example I would use is deer in the United States. We’ve preserved more deer than we can deal with. Dr. Wilson would say that’s because human beings are the problem; there are too many human beings getting in the way of the deer. That’s where our differences begin to arise. Remember, he defines nature without human beings, and he describes human beings as an alien species doing damage to nature in the same way that red ants are an alien species to North America doing damage to the habitat of North America. We fundamentally disagree on that. We believe that human beings are an integral part of nature and that we are more important to God in the creation than any part of the creation, although we are not separate and distinct from the creation.

Q: But we do have a duty, in your judgment, to preserve all the species?

A: I think we do. I think we do. I think we have an obligation and a responsibility to try our best to keep some of everything God created alive, because God created it for a purpose and God wants us to discover that purpose, the rosy periwinkle being the classic example.

The post Richard Land Extended Interview appeared first on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Q: Three years ago you told us the U.S. would be morally justified going into Iraq. Do you still believe that?

A: Yes, I do. I think it’s one of the nobler and finer things we’ve done as a nation, and I think that it’s going to, in the end, produce a government in Iraq and a society in Iraq that is far more conscious of human rights and far more conscious of human freedom, and in the end it’s going to remake the Middle East.

Q: Three years ago, a lot of people were talking about Iraq’s imminent threat against us, and weapons of mass destruction were a big part of that. Does the fact the no weapons were found undermine the moral argument for going in?

A: My main justification for going in was never the weapons of mass destruction threat. It was part of a cluster of reasons for going into Iraq, and I think the administration made a mistake putting so many of their eggs in that basket. But, at the same time, I think the fact that we haven’t found them doesn’t mean that [Saddam] didn’t have them, that he wasn’t trying to maintain the ability to reconstitute them once the pressure was off. He had had them, and he had shown a willingness to use them against his own people and also against his neighbors. And while I never made an assertion of a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, there certainly were multiple connections between terrorist groups and Saddam Hussein, and the fact that there could be the possibility of cooperation that could lead to terrorist attacks against the United States in the future was one that I thought would be untenable for us to continue to countenance.

Q: Drawing on just war theory, what did you think were the justifications for this war?

A: You have to have a just cause. Our cause was not to conquer Iraq, but to liberate it. It was to defend ourselves and our allies from the possibilities of future attacks from a man who has shown a willingness to cooperate with and to train tens of thousands of terrorists and to give them safe harbor.

It also met the laws of proportionality. We have, I think, led to the saving of lives and not the costing of lives by going in. I mean, let’s remember that we have found mass graves of 350,000 dead Iraqis who were killed, often in horrible ways. That would have continued. Saddam Hussein would’ve continued to destabilize the Middle East, and in my own particular case I’ve always made the argument that Gulf War II was a continuation of Gulf War I. We had a cease-fire at the end of Gulf War I, and it was predicated upon Saddam Hussein complying with more than a dozen United Nations resolutions, which he repeatedly refused to comply with, and so after 12 years, we picked up the cease-fire and continued Gulf War I, which was started as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait.

Q: One of the criteria is a reasonable expectation of success. Are you satisfied we had that?

A: I think we did have a reasonable expectation of success, and I think we’ve had reasonable success. We’ve had three free elections in little more than a year in Iraq, elections in which, every one of them, more Iraqis as a percentage of their population actually participated in the election than participated in our presidential election in 2004 or our presidential election in 2000. The Iraqi people braved threats of violence, threats of retribution, threats of being killed, to come out and vote three times in this last year in rather impressive numbers, upwards of 70 percent in the last election, and we are on the verge of having a government elected by the people, representing the people, one of the most representative governments ever elected in the Arab world. We have an Iraqi army that is now in charge of half of Iraq in terms of day-to-day security and military operations, and it is estimated by our military and by their military that the Iraqis will be doing 80 percent of the front-line military and security action by September 1. We just had a military operation, a rather complex one, an airborne assault where 800 of the troops were Iraqi and 700 of the troops were American. So I think we did have a reasonable expectation of success, and we are, I think, reasonably successful.

Have there been bumps in the road? Of course. There are always bumps in the road. Projections go out the window when the first shot is fired. I think we would have to say, looking backward, that the actual liberation of Iraq went better than expected and the building of a democratically elected government in a country that is under a constitution has been more difficult than we had imagined it would be because of the insurgency. But I think it met our reasonable expectations of success, and I think we are going to be successful.

Q: Some ethicists who initially thought the war was justified under just war criteria now say that was mistaken. Does the just war ethic call for constant reevaluation, based on emerging facts?

A: The assessment now that it wasn’t justified is an easy one to make from the relative comfort of North America. Seventy-five percent of Iraqis think that their lives are better now than they were under Hussein and that their lives are going to be better in the future. I would say that armchair quarterbacking from the relative comfort of North America is one thing. Being there on the ground in Iraq is quite another. Every time the terrorists bomb the police station or the army recruiting station, before they can even clear the rubble away there are more Iraqis standing in line waiting to join to fight for their freedom. The Iraqis believe it was worth it; they believe they have a potential future now that is far better than the dismal future they faced under Saddam Hussein. They are living, they are dying, standing up and being willing to die for their country every day, and I believe we have a moral obligation to stand with them until they can defend themselves. When it comes to falling into chaos, the Iraqis don’t see it that way.

You know, if you listen to the Iraqis and talk to the Iraqis instead of just listening to the news reports that come from our major electronic media, you find a very different picture. I have talked to the Iraqis, I’ve talked to people in the government, I’ve talked to people in the country, and they’re quite encouraged about the future. We none of us like to see these levels of violence that we have, but, you know, India is one of the most successful democracies in the world, and they have several thousand people who die in religious and ethnic violence and strife every year. The Iraqis actually, I believe, have responded rather admirably to the extreme provocations of the terrorists who have tried to foment civil war and have been unsuccessful.

When it comes to the question of hindsight, you should always look at what happens as a result of your decisions and evaluate your decisions in terms of further evidence, to refine your position, to reexamine it, and you should always be open to reexamining your positions to see if they were right or wrong. A good example of that is George W. Bush saying in the wake of 9/11 we have to acknowledge that the way our country did business in the Middle East for 50 years under Democratic presidents and Republican presidents, including his own father, was wrong. We supported fascistic and oligarchic regimes that repressed their people, in the name of anticommunism and then in the name of stable oil supply, and it was our support of these governments that helped to breed terrorism and helped to breed anti-Americanism. And the only way to answer this question and to answer terrorism was to completely reexamine the way that we were doing business and to no longer support these regimes, but to seek to remake the Middle East according to what we believe are universal values — not Western values, not American values.

It was John F. Kennedy who said that freedom is God’s gift to mankind, and here on earth God’s work must be our own, and George W. Bush echoed it when he said that freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to mankind. We are betting the farm on the belief that what our forefathers said in the Declaration of Independence is universally true. We believe that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that when people all over the world are given the choice, they will choose freedom and governments that are accountable to them, not governments run by megalomaniacs.

Q: Can you imagine a situation in Iraq that would lead you to say you thought we were morally justified, but now believe it wasn’t the right decision?

A: Sure. If Iraq descended into chaos and as a result of that chaos one or more of the three major regions of Iraq ended up with a dictator as brutal and repressive and evil as Saddam Hussein, then I would have to say that it may not have been worth the effort. But if one or more of the three major segments of Iraq continue to be free countries, free, stable regions — I mean, what we desire for all of Iraq is already happening in the Kurdish section and has been happening for several years. The Kurds have far more freedom, far more respect for human rights, far more representative self-government than they’ve ever had before, during the period after Gulf War I and certainly Gulf War II. If we can extend that to the Shias and the Sunnis and we can create a federal republic of Iraq, we will have helped to remake the Middle East. I think, for instance, already the fact that we are in Iraq and that we are helping the Iraqis realize this self-determination has had a big impact on surrounding areas. I think it has encouraged the Lebanese to work to throw off the yoke of Syrian domination. I think it certainly encouraged the Orange revolution in the Ukraine. It has led to the beginnings of elections in Egypt, the beginnings of at least a semblance of elections even in Saudi Arabia.

I believe that there is a reverse domino theory and that what we’re doing in Iraq can, indeed, help to remake the Middle East, which will benefit Arab peoples throughout the Middle East. But if Iraq were to collapse into chaos and end up in an Iranian-style dictatorship, I would have to say that would be a failure.

Q: Just war theory also talks about right conduct during a conflict. Have the U.S. troops met those standards?

A: Yes, they have. We have sought to minimize civilian casualties. We have conducted ourselves in an honorable way. There are always exceptions to that. There are exceptions in every war, but let’s just take Abu Ghraib, for instance. The soldiers who were found guilty of the grotesque acts that took place at Abu Ghraib have been sentenced to prison. Under the old Saddam Hussein regime, they would have been given medals for the same conduct and promotions for the same conduct and would have been praised and promoted for the same conduct. Therein lies the distinction. Do American soldiers always conduct themselves perfectly? No. But we can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and I’m quite proud of the record of our armed forces in Iraq.

Q: Does just war theory offer guidance for a period of occupation, a postwar period?

A: Well, first of all, I would quibble with the definition of “occupation.” We have an Iraqi government elected by the Iraqi people. They have a prime minister. They have a president. If they told us to leave, we’d leave. They don’t want us to leave. Authority was transferred back to the Iraqi people by the American vice regency over a year ago. I think, yes, the just war theory is a guide to help us conduct ourselves in the most honorable and ethical way possible — in terms of the way we approach armed conflict and the goals of armed conflict, when we’re in the process of suppressing terrorism and helping to engage in nation building, as well as when we’re engaged in liberation, yes.

Q: What ethical principles should guide deciding when the troops should leave Iraq?

A: If the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we should leave. We’re there to help them; we’re there to assist them in being able to get to the place where they can defend themselves. As the president has said, as the Iraqi armed forces and police forces stand up, we will stand down. We have no desire to be there any longer than we’re needed and any longer that the Iraqi government wishes us to be there. At the point where the Iraqis are able to defend their citizens and to deal with terrorist activities and those who would destabilize their society, and they are able to approach the place where the sovereign government of Iraq will have a monopoly on the use of force, which is one of the definitions of a civilized culture, when the government has a monopoly on the use of force.

You know, there’s a part of the just war theory, actually, that it’s only a duly constituted government that can authorize the use of military force. Lethal force has to be authorized by the proper legitimate authority, and that is the civil government. That’s part of just war theory. We could not have gone into Iraq either the first time or the second time, in my opinion, without a joint resolution from the Congress of the United States. Now there are some in our nation who would argue that you have to have the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. It’s nice to have their encouragement, it’s nice to have their approval, but as an American citizen I strongly believe that the duly constituted authority to authorize the use of lethal force by the armed services of the United States are the duly elected representatives of the government of the United States, namely the House and the Senate, through a joint resolution or a declaration of war.

Q: The administration has reaffirmed a concept of a preemptive war. How does that fit with just war tradition?

A: I think it fits with aspects of the tradition. It depends on the individual circumstance. If you believe you are under the threat of imminent attack, and you’re dealing with an enemy for whom deterrence does not work, if you’re dealing with people who are suicide bombers and people who are willing to annihilate themselves in order to attack you, then deterrence doesn’t work. If you believe you’re under imminent threat of attack, you have a responsibility to defend yourself, and you don’t have to wait until you’re attacked.

Q: Doesn’t that open the door for some very risky situations? Couldn’t Iran attack us, arguing that we’ve made threatening statements against them?

A: Well, it might, but I would say that the people who died in the twin towers on 9/11 and their family members would probably say that the pre-9/11 definitions of when preemptive force would be justified need to be expanded, and I would agree with them. If everyone in the world doesn’t want to attack its neighbor, to the extent the United States does not want to attack its neighbor, no one’s going to attack each other. Would we be concerned about Iran if Iran had not for more than a decade now sought to conceal its nuclear weapons program? If they didn’t have on their actual missiles they parade through Tehran Farsi banners that say, “Death to Israel, Death to the United States,” and [if] they did not express their intentions to use weapons against Israel and against the United States — would we be concerned? No. Are we concerned about India having nuclear weapons? The president just proposed an expansion of a treaty and a new treaty with the Indians, and people say we’re treating the Indians differently than the Iranians. Well, yeah. The Iranians are supporting terrorism around the world and have made very clear their willingness to use whatever weapons they have to destroy their enemies. India does not support terrorism. India is a force for stability and democracy in the world. It makes a difference who has these weapons and who’s seeking these weapons and what they’ve declared they’re going to do with them.

In 1929, Hitler laid out in MEIN KAMPF precisely what he was going to do. If the world had listened to him and had prevented him from doing it, there would be tens of millions of human beings who would not have died. It’s riskier not to believe that fanatics will behave fanatically.

Q: Given the Iraq experience and how much the world has changed and the realities we now operate in, are there areas of moral reasoning, of just war teachings, that need to be expanded or developed?

A: Just war theory has mainly been applied historically to acts of aggression by one nation against another nation. I believe it needs to be expanded to acts of aggression and violence by governments against their own people. I argued using just war theory in Bosnia back in the early 1990s, and if we had intervened in Bosnia we would have saved possibly 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women from being raped as a systematic act of terrorism by the Serb forces. We would’ve certainly stopped Milosevic much sooner and not made it necessary for us to go into Kosovo, and would’ve saved the Kosovars a great deal of suffering as well.

I believe we should have intervened in Rwanda, and we should intervene in Darfur. Not by ourselves, if possible. If possible, we should seek to work through international organizations, but if NATO wouldn’t do it, then I believe we had a responsibility to. We have got to develop ways to address terrible acts of aggression and hostility and atrocity and genocide by governments against their own people in the 21st century. It’s just, to me, simply unacceptable that in the 21st century we could have the kinds of atrocities that are going on in Darfur go unaddressed, and the kinds of atrocities that took place in Rwanda go unaddressed, and the kind of atrocities that took place in Bosnia and Kosovo go unaddressed as long as they did.

Q: What lessons about intervention have we learned from the last three years in Iraq?

A: It’s taught us that we need to do as good a job as we can getting better intelligence, and that means building a better intelligence apparatus now. We’re still suffering from the evisceration of our intelligence apparatus by Senator [Frank] Church and the Church reforms that took place in the wake of Vietnam. There’s no substitute for really good, hard, ground intel, and that legislation led by the Church committee literally gutted our intelligence apparatus, and you talk to anybody in the intelligence community, and they’ll tell you exactly the same thing. I think we need to do a much better job rebuilding our intel abilities throughout the world, particularly in the most difficult parts of the world, so that we’ve got better intel on the ground, and we know more what we are dealing with when we go into a situation than we did in Iraq. That’s the first thing.

I think the second thing is that we need to, perhaps, reexamine some of our military policies in terms of how many troops are necessary to completely stabilize the situation. If I were to make a critique in hindsight of our operation in Iraq, I believe that we probably should have put more military on the ground. One of the reasons that we did not have these kinds of problems in Japan and in Germany was that there was such overwhelming force on the ground. We probably had too few troops committed to do the job as expeditiously as possible.

Q: Has Iraq changed your thinking about the use of force?

A: It’s certainly reminded me that war is a terrible thing. It’s certainly reminded me that war should be a last resort, but not a last resort that’s so defined down that you never get to it. Sometimes, you know, war is a terrible thing. But sometimes it’s the least terrible thing. And I believe that the Iraqi people would tell you, if you asked them today, three quarters or more would tell you that what they’ve experienced in the last three years and what they face in the future is less terrible than what they lived under before.

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BOB ABERNETHY: Now, the latest battle in the long-running war between conservatives and moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) — with almost 16 million members, the largest of all Protestant denominations, by far.

At its meeting in Corpus Christi, the huge Texas Baptist Convention — nearly one fifth of all Southern Baptists — sent a strong signal of discontent to the national SBC. Led by moderates, the Texans voted overwhelmingly to cut $5 million of the $25 million they send the national group each year.

The president of the Texas Baptists railed at what he called a “loveless, witch-hunting fundamentalism.”

Dr. CLYDE GLAZENER (President, Texas Baptist Convention): Jesus is not pleased today by religious folks who become thought police, or their followers, and dictate their belief patterns, even if they claim to be evangelicals.

ABERNETHY: The Texas Baptists also voted to open up their group to members from other states and that raised the question of a full SBC split.

Dr. JAMES DUNN (Wake Forest University): It is possible that this action by Texas Baptists could set in motion a chain of reactions that would lead to another national convention, another national denomination.

ABERNETHY: After Martin Luther preached “the priesthood of all believers,” Baptists developed their radical commitment to freedom. No hierarchy, no creed, absolute separation of church and state.

Baptists do not practice infant baptism, because they think each person should be old enough to make his or her own faith decision. Baptists speak of “soul freedom.”

Dr. DUNN: It means simply the right of every individual and the responsibility of every individual to come immediately to God. Any intervention — by a belief, a person, an institution, a structure, or a coercive force — any intervention between an individual and God is heresy from a Baptist perspective.

ABERNETHY: In 1979, political and theological conservatives won control of the Southern Baptist Convention. They insisted that the Bible is the true, literal word of God and that every SBC employee must affirm the Baptist Faith and Message statement.

At its convention this year, SBC leaders changed the Faith and Message in a way some moderate Baptists thought gave the Bible more authority than Jesus. Moderates charged the SBC leaders were creating a creed; conservatives denied it.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (Southern Baptist Convention): I think the charge of creedalism is nonsense.

ABERNETHY: The differences are narrow, but — in general — moderates say, their primary authority is personal experience of Jesus, and conservatives say, it is scripture.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (Southern Baptist Convention): The most important thing that I ever learned in my life, or will ever learn, I was taught in vacation Bible school in a Southern Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, and it is this: Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.

ABERNETHY: Two years ago, the SBC offended many moderates when it emphasized a wife’s duty to “submit herself graciously” to her husband. Then, at its convention last June, the SBC said that women should not be pastors of Baptist churches.

Professor AMMERMAN: The issue of women pastors comes down not just to the issue of women, but to the issue of who can tell the local church what to do. That goes against the strain of independence that has always been there in Baptist life in general, and is especially alive and well in Texas, because there is nobody more independent than a Texas Baptist church.

ABERNETHY: Last month, after the SBC statement on women pastors, former President Jimmy Carter announced he could no longer be part of the SBC. Now, with the Texas vote, the question is what the repercussions will be in other states, and for Baptists in Texas.

Dr. LAND: They will become a full-fledged denomination. And I might add that when that happens, they will be much smaller than they are now because the vast majority of Southern Baptists in Texas are Southern Baptists first and Texas Baptists second.

Prof. AMMERMAN: What we see is a fragmentation. The Southern Baptists Convention will issue their resolutions, pass their motions, and make headlines, but it will be more and more clear that they do not speak for all, even all Southern Baptists as Baptists align themselves with a variety of other organizations.

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