Introduction
“Faith” has primarily a religious meaning, proclaiming transcendent universal truths.
Holding faith in an idea can have the effect of giving the belief more intensity and depth.
However, having faith in something is not always employed strictly in the religious sense.
One can have faith that someone will do the right thing, or in someone. Notions of faith can
also enter into the geopolitical realm, in that justifications advanced for policy actions can
contain faith-based reasoning. Whether these justifications are truly believed by decision-
makers or whether they are cynically exploited as a means to an end is difficult to ascertain.
However, they have demonstrated their capacity to motivate public opinion, and therefore
warrant analysis. Given the variety of ways in which the word is employed, it would be useful
to establish a definition of “faith-based” for this paper.
When reference is made to faith in this paper, it is to mean a basis for decisions which
is guided more by wishful thinking than a stark appraisal of the potential costs of competing
policy options. “It is so because we wish it to be so”. In the religious sense, faith has a much
more complex meaning and has a wide variety of interpretations according to the religion,
which will not be the focus of this paper. We shall see that although not solely based on
religion, American foreign policy has been heavily influenced by religious notions and
prophecy. From the United States being founded largely as a religious refuge to the Spanish
American War to the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has consistently been at least partially
based on religiously inspired assumptions. This is not to say that the decisions were
necessarily held to be of divine ordination, but rather that the logic used to justify the actions
was often based on “leaps of faith”.
This article will be based on a structuralist approach as employed in international
relations, according to which identities, norms, and culture play important roles in world
politics. That is to say, ideas are seen as the main motors of the interaction between states. As
Alexander Wendt specified, “Ideas have constitutive effects, on power and on interests
themselves.[…] The material force constituting interests is human nature. The rest is
ideational: schemas and deliberations that are in turn constituted by shared ideas and
More specifically, in this article we will try to determine how faith-based schemas
and deliberations explain certain aspects of the Bush administrations’ Iraq policy. In this case,
the norms used to make foreign policy decisions are either directly inspired by religious
belief, or are mirror images of religious beliefs with faith as a central component.
1
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 114-
115.
3
Convention