Category: American Empire

The quest for a unipolar world order

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Ted Grimsrud—November 4, 2025

The several years following World War II emphatically stamped the United States as an imperial power, not one that would seek to further the ideals of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech of 1941 (such as self-determination and freedom from war everywhere on earth). As articulated in Harry Truman’s 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech, instead the US would commit itself to be ready to intervene militarily everywhere on earth in order to defeat its enemies. Though the practices of the American Empire in the quarter century after World War II contradicted the ideals of the Four Freedoms, most Americans embraced an uncritical nationalism that prevented them from a clear-eyed view of their country’s actual way of being in the world.

From the colonial era through World War II, the North American colonies and the US pursued a domination agenda. From the start, the colonies utilized the superior firepower of European weapons to displace indigenous peoples and created an economic system that required coerced unpaid enslaved labor. While the American Empire could have made choices that moved in more humane directions, the odds for such humane choices always remained small. At the end of World War II, American leaders faced perhaps the greatest (and last?) opportunity to choose for the more humane. The US could have actually committed to the ideals of the World War II purpose statements that reflected the long-stated democratic hopes in the American tradition.

A choice of paths

American leaders in late 1945 faced two basic options. One, the US could have pursued a multipolar world order. Such had been hoped for (but not achieved) with the League of Nations after World War I. Then, during World War II, many leaders expressed the hope that this time the great powers might do it right. They hoped for structures that would allow for many different power locations that would find ways to cooperate. These hopes led to the creation of the United Nations. This time, unlike with the League of Nations, the United States embraced its role as a world leader. In fact, this time the world leadership organization would be located in the US.

Or, in contrast, the world order could be based on the dominant power of a single nation and its close allies. World opinion at the end of the War did not allow for an open affirmation of such an approach. The two powers (Germany and Japan) whose open quest for world domination had been so devastating lost the War. No other power would dare advocate such an approach. However, the War ended with a single nation having achieved a dominant global stature that had never before existed. The US could seek dominance without openly claiming to.  

The US found option two to be irresistible and embarked on a 50-year effort to establish and sustain a unipolar world order. However, the US “victory” in the Cold War did not result in American “full spectrum dominance,” an achieved unipolar world order. Rather, the years since the end of the Cold War have seen a steady diminishment of American power. Can the American Empire give up its quest for dominance and affirm the emerging multipolarity?

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The war that changed everything

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Ted Grimsrud—October 31, 2025

The American embrace of World War II as the “Good War” played a major role in the shaping of my embedded theology and its uncritical nationalism. This embrace hid from me the realities of that war and its impact. Due to World War II, the American Empire embraced a vocation of world dominance. The US government established three pillars of domination during the war—the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons regime. These pillars played a central role in the transformation of America into a national security state—with disastrous consequences.

Early in the 20th century, the US moved to the brink of being a world power. However, the final step proved to be difficult. It would take some major world-shattering events before the country crossed that brink. In World War I, the Americans played a secondary role. They remained reluctant to get “entangled” in global affairs after the war ended. They refrained from joining the League of Nations. American momentum toward colonial expansion at the end of the 19th century slowed a great deal.

When global tensions intensified in the 1930s, the US remained mostly on the sidelines. The tensions did finally reach a breaking point. Japan’s violence towards China led to a full-on war. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by declaration of war by Great Britain and France. President Franklin Roosevelt made clear that the US sided with Britain and China but still insisted that the US would not participate beyond providing military and economic support. Finally, the US did join the war full-on—and that war changed everything.

Preparing for engagement

The Americans greatly accelerated their arms production and in other ways readied to go to war during the two years after the European war’s start. During that time, Roosevelt sought to persuade the country to move toward full engagement. As part of that effort, he articulated what were, in effect, purpose statements for America’s entry into the war. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech in January 1941 was followed by the Atlantic Charter a few months later.

In Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address, he spoke of plans to ask Congress to approve weapons for Britain. He introduced the “the four essential human freedoms” he sought to further: freedom of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear. These ideals, widely expressed, soon became a shorthand for America’s war aims and remained central in pro-war propaganda. As Roosevelt discussed each “freedom,” he claimed to seek their realization everywhere in the world. This idealistic aspiration mobilized popular support for the nation’s engagement in the wars against Germany and Japan. It then animated calls US leaders made for continued military preparations and interventions in the years after World War II.

In August, Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill created the Atlantic Charter that outlined the Allies’ war aims. It shaped what the Allies said about their purposes for fighting and shaped the postwar world. The Charter’s key points included to eschew territorial aggrandizement and to affirm “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and equal terms of trade to all nations. Together, the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter state the ideals that American leaders would claim to seek to fulfill.

Entering the war

As Japan became more aggressive in China in the early 1930s, the US increased its support for the Chinese military. A couple of key moments closer to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 pushed the tensions to a breaking point. The US imposed an economic embargo on Japan that led Japanese leaders to panic regarding their access to vital materials. Roosevelt also ordered the American Pacific Fleet greatly to expand its presence in the Pearl Harbor base located in the American colony of Hawaii—an expansion perceived by the Japanese as highly provocative.

Though looking for opportunities to escalate the conflict, Roosevelt likely did not anticipate that the American fleet would be devastated by a sudden attack on December 7. Japan’s aggression led to a transformation of American opinion. Congress approved Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war on Japan on December 8. For a brief moment, uncertainty remained about war with Germany. Adolf Hitler, though, ended the question whether Congress would declare war on Germany when he declared war on the US on December 11.

With the Pearl Harbor setback, the US only slowly responded militarily. In time, given their significant advantages in resources and their resolve to retaliate, American forces inexorably moved toward Japan. By the summer of 1945, the Americans had all but won their victory as Japan’s military was in shambles and its air defenses non-existent.

Hitler’s declaration of war had surprised American leaders. They were not prepared for an immediate military response. In fact, not until June 1944 did US troops land on European shores at Normandy despite Joseph Stalin’s pleas for a sooner engagement. In the meantime, the main theaters for the European wars were on the eastern front following Germany’s surprise attack on Russia in June 1941. Eventually, though, the Soviets managed to slow and then repel the attack. By the time of Normandy, it had become clear that the Allies would defeat Germany.

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Empire as a way of life: The colonial era to World War II

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Ted Grimsrud—October 28, 2025

In the posts that remain in this series, I want briefly to flesh out what we see when we describe without blinders the American Empire as it has emerged and functioned over the past 500 years. I consider this story with a critical perspective shaped by the biblical politics I have summarized above. I am especially concerned with how this Empire has embodied oppressive and violent sensibilities typically characteristic of the great empires of the world. A clear-eyed look at the American Empire may well lead one to recognize that it is not worthy of the kind of blank check loyalty it asks for.

The reasons that Europeans first moved to settle in North America varied greatly. Their impact, though, was to extend the newly emerging European empires with powerfully devasting effects on the inhabitants of the “new world.” Some Europeans stayed only temporarily, mainly having interest in profiting from their time away from home before they would return from the adventures and resettle in Europe. Many, though, intended the trip from the start to be one-way. Those who meant to stay in North America may be called “settler colonists.” Since they intended to stay, they needed to displace those already living on the land. Settler colonialism depended on violence. It reflected the basic assumptions of empire: The people not part of the core colonial community will be seen as “Others” who may be exploited, displaced, even eradicated.

Settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny

Imperialistic ideology had been central in the settling of North America and remained central to the identity of the newly established United States. The new nation continually expanded West, dominating and displacing the indigenous nations without pause. The land taken from the natives came to be worked by massive numbers of forcibly imported enslaved Africans.

The term “Manifest Destiny” was not coined until 1845. However, its basic meaning that God willed the expansion of the US to the Pacific Ocean characterizes the intentions of the new settlers from early on. Throughout the colonial era and beyond, Americans simply assumed that God had called their nation into existence, a sense of divine calling that lent an air of inevitability to the expansionist efforts. God supported displacing the “heathen” indigenous populations and exploiting the “heathen” enslaved Africans. Once the drive to expand the US Empire across the continent took hold, it would not stop when the “frontier ended” in North America by the end of the 19th century. At that point, the empire was only getting started.

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The tragic American Empire story in light of the gospel

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Ted Grimsrud—October 24, 2025

I recognize my upbringing as a proud citizen in the world’s most powerful empire to be part of my identity. As I described previously, I experienced an eventful meeting between two world-defining stories—the American Empire met Jesus’s gospel of peace. American Christians tend to see faith and nation as fully compatible, even mutually reinforcing. In contrast, for me their meeting was a collision that forced me to make a choice. It had to be one story or the other.

I chose the Jesus story to be my defining story—and chose against the American Empire. That choice led me to affirm Christian pacifism and turn from the uncritical nationalism central the Empire story. I started to interpret the story of the American Empire without blinders. At the same time, I found the Bible to be a key source for a peace-oriented, anti-empire defining story. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had asserted a high view of the Bible as direct revelation from God. However, such an assertion had not protected them from uncritical nationalism. Rather than rejecting the Bible when I rejected fundamentalism, I started reading the Bible in a different way. I no longer ignored Jesus’s peace teaching as I had been taught to do; I made it central.

The basis for stepping away from uncritical nationalism

When I began to read the Bible for peace, I noticed its critique of uncritical nationalism. I noticed the Bible did not teach the submit-to-the-government message as Americans assumed. If the Bible be central, I would choose Jesus’s gospel of peace instead of uncritical nationalism. The Old Testament provides a template, in Torah, that critiques all human territorial kingdoms. Torah pointed to a new kind of kingdom committed to justice and the wellbeing of all its people. The Old Testament kingdom, though, in practice evolved ever more toward injustice, militarism, economic stratification, and corruption. The brokenness grew to a point where the prophets saw the kingdom’s leaders not as agents of God but as enemies of the original vision of a just society.

Eventually, those who retained a commitment to Torah made sustaining those convictions more important than remaining loyal to any kind of territorial kingdom. The story continues with Jesus’s ministry. He announced the presence of God’s kingdom as a non-territorial communal expression of the ways of Torah. Echoing Genesis 12, Jesus’s kingdom message meant to bless all the families of the earth. This blessing would not come through a close connection with territorial kingdoms (or nation-states). Rather, the blessing would come through the witness of countercultural communities that put convictions about the ways of Torah at the center.

Does this story have relevance for our contemporary world? Let me identify four biblical themes that speak to life amidst the world’s empires. (1) The practice of justice should define the aspirations of societies that seek to be healthy. This justice will center on care for the vulnerable of the community since a society cannot be healthy without the good health of those most easily exploited and discarded. (2) People in power should always be treated with skepticism. Power tends to corrupt. People in power tend to be deluded by their commitments to sustain that power at all costs. Such people should be pushed to guide the society toward justice with an expectation that they will likely tend toward serving their own interests and not those of the vulnerable in society. (3) The “horses and chariots” problem tends to define territorial kingdoms and leads to the proclivity to prepare for and engage in warfare (warism). The accumulation of weapons of war favors society’s wealthy and powerful and leads to devastating conflicts. (4) Throughout human history (and in the Bible’s stories), territorial kingdoms and nation-states have provided some of the central rivals to God as the objects of human trust. This type of idolatry, as Israel’s prophets show, leads directly to injustice.

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Christianity’s accommodation to empire

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Ted Grimsrud—October 21, 2025

Amidst its diversity, we may discern in the Bible a specific political sensibility. God has called into being a community to know God’s love and to embody that love so as to bless all the families of the earth. Torah provides a social framework for this blessing that includes mutual aid, welcome to the vulnerable, justice for all in the community, no social stratification, and a recognition that God’s blessings can be resisted and will be revoked when the community turns from the core teachings of Torah. Jesus then reinforces this Torah-based framework.

So, what happened to Christianity? My Christianity in the early 1970s little resembled the ideals of the Bible. Christians have tended more to be complicit with empire than oppose it. How did this happen that Christianity accommodated to empire? We have two reasons to repudiate such accommodation. First, to make it easier to recover the truths of the biblical story. Second, to help us find ways to break uncritical nationalism and American warism. We need self-awareness about the problematic of Christianity and empire in order to discern a new healing path.

Struggles with Rome

Early Christians did to some extent embody the way of Jesus, but always with difficulty. The picture presented in the seven messages to congregations in Asia in Revelation 2–3 applies to the first several generations of the Christian movement. In Revelation we meet a few churches that adhered closely to Jesus’s teaching and example and faced persecution. These tended to be small and poor. Others found more prosperity and comfort—but too easily collaborated with the surrounding culture. They risked losing their connection with Jesus and his message.

The Bible does not tell of a golden age when the community got everything right but of an ongoing struggle that continues to characterize Christianity. Those who embody Torah’s and Jesus’s message will always be at odds with their wider culture and tempted to compromise that message. The earliest Christians come from the margins of society. In time, the communities attract more people of higher social status and their antipathy toward the Empire lessens. Persecution of Christians continued as empire elites found that to scapegoat this fringe religious minority helped strengthen their hold on power. By the end of the third century CE, however, many in the churches looked for more accommodation with the Empire.

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A second conversion and a new community

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Ted Grimsrud—September 30, 2025

War and peace concerns filled the air during my college years (1972-76). I had to face the possibility of being drafted. I would have gone if called but did not like the idea. The draft ended the year I turned 19 and saved me from that. Then, I learned to know several returning Vietnam War vets. Those encounters showed me how traumatic their experience had been. I never had any kind of discussion in any of my churches about a principled opposition to war. No one ever said in my presence, to quote a John Prine song of the time, “Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason for.” I am not sure I could have said what “pacifism” even meant. But the idea of going to war did weigh on my mind.

A decisive step

All of a sudden, though, something clicked for me. I took a decisive step, once and for all, and decided against war. I realized that I could never take up arms, and that in fact Jesus always opposed violence no matter how it might be justified. I did not make this move due to careful, thorough conversations with like-minded friends. I simply, at the right moment, accepted this conviction. That move set the direction of the rest of my life.

Though my turn toward pacifism meant a decisive turn away from Francis Schaeffer, he had pointed me toward an influence that became the catalyst for my pacifist conversion. I had discovered that Schaeffer had interesting colleagues such as a British scholar, Os Guinness. Guinness’s book, The Dust of Death, offered a wide-ranging and sympathetic critique of the American counterculture of the 1960s. He did note with respect the problems with American culture that protesters cried out against. He recognized the need for social change as advocated by the civil rights movement, the emerging feminist movement, and the antiwar movement. He affirmed many countercultural concerns but brought into the picture a Christian sensibility.

In the Spring of 1976, I read Guinness’s chapter, “Violence: Crisis or Catharsis?” He critiqued of the counterculture’s advocacy of violent revolution. He drew heavily on a French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, whose book, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, gave a good critique of the self-defeating nature of violent revolutions. It came clear to me—Yes, violence does not work! I immediately thought of war. I realized that I could never go to war. I realized I was in principle opposed to all war, a pacifist. Happily, I was so unfamiliar with that term that I did not recoil against it. I accepted it, found it helpful, and still do.

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How does one step away from warism?

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Ted Grimsrud—September 26, 2025

When I began college in the Fall of 1972, I had recently registered for the draft. I knew I’d go willingly if called. I accepted my place in the American warist environment—the willing conscript. By the time I finished college in the Spring of 1976, I rejected warism. I considered myself a pacifist and knew I would never go to war or support war in any way. This post will describe what led to this radical change. In the Fall of 1972 turmoil reigned in the United States. At that point I remained mostly oblivious to the currents that swirled as Richard Nixon wrapped up his presidential campaign and won a landslide victory—and planted the seeds that led to his fall with the Watergate break-in. I knew that the Vietnam War seemed to be winding down, though when I started my freshman year the draft remained a possibility.

I started at Oregon College of Education (OCE) in Monmouth, a small town about 15 miles west of Salem. OCE mainly focused on training schoolteachers, but it had evolved to be a general liberal arts college. About 3,000 students attended, mostly from small Oregon towns. Even though I knew hardly any other students, I felt surrounded by people like me. I found it to be a pleasant place to be, and I enjoyed my two years there. I felt fine with my classes. I could get by pretty easily, though nothing really caught my attention. Sports, not ideas or big questions, provided the connecting point with my new friends. In general, I experienced my first two years in college as a relaxed and congenial time. However, I did feel uneasy about my faith. I only cautiously brought up faith convictions with others. I had no luck in finding a church or fellowship group. I visited a few places but found nothing that seemed interesting or nurturing.

The ironic 1972 presidential election

I had exulted when Richard Nixon won the 1968 election. As far as I remember, I felt positive about Nixon during his first term. I certainly sympathized with him far more than his antiwar opponents. I rejoiced when the law changed to set the voting age at 18. I had long wanted to vote. I delighted that the first presidential election after the law changed would happen when I was 18. I proudly cast my ballot for Nixon and celebrated his resounding victory.

That I would have so unthinkingly supported Nixon indicates that my embedded theology of uncritical nationalism remained operative. I later learned of deeply problematic Nixon warist policies as well as of his many character flaws. Those flaws played out in ways that would have been in tension with the values of my familial embedded theology, but at the time I remained ignorant of them. Ironically, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had more compatibility with most of my values. His integrity, genuine Christian faith, and convictions about helping life be better for vulnerable people should have rung true for me. In relation to the peace convictions I would later embrace, McGovern stands as the most attractive major party candidate in the entire 20th century. The mainstream media did not give McGovern a fair shake, but even if they had, I would not at that time have been attracted to the policies he advocated.

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Competing embedded theologies

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Ted Grimsrud—September 23, 2025

In these posts, I wrestle with why so many Americans, including so many Christians, have such an uncritical attitude about the violent behavior of our country. Uncritical acceptance of a deep-seated warism flies in the face of the peaceable values most Americans and just about all Christians understand themselves to have. How can this be? To address this question, I reflect on my own life, especially my transition from an American patriot to an antiwar pacifist. I have focused on what I call the “embedded theology” of uncritical acceptance that I grew up. As I grew, though, I also absorbed a different kind of embedded theology that made my transition to a pacifist possible. This different embedded theology played an even more decisive role in the evolution of my convictions than the patriotic embedded theology. However, while I find the patriotic embedded theology difficult to name in clear ways, I find this different kind of embedded theology even more difficult to bring to the surface. I attempt to do that in this post.

Looking for a sense of coherence

When I first became a Christian, I sought to make sense of life. The Christianity I initially embraced offered a coherent worldview but ended up being at odds with what I actually sought. I took several years to figure that out. Even as I realized I needed a different kind of Christianity; I still needed more time to put the pieces together. The catalyst for the shift had to do with war and peace. However, that I could make the shift and that I make it quickly and free from trauma had mostly to do with the general orientation toward life provided by what I will call my familial embedded theology (distinct from the societal embedded theology I discussed in previous posts).

My new orientation became quite distinct from and, in time, antagonistic toward my old one. The way the transition happened—and its continued viability for me—makes me believe that all along I did not actually care that much about the certainty offered by fundamentalist Christianity. Rather, I sought the coherence that only an embrace of our essential human connectedness and love-centeredness offers. It just took some time for me to figure this out.

Growing up in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, I experienced the embedded theology of uncritical nationalism as pervasive. However, when it hit turbulence during the Vietnam War era, I readily replaced it. Something more basic to the way of being in the world that I got from my family took its place. As revised and applied through my new learnings and experiences, this different embedded theology actually provided the kind of coherence I sought.

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Fundamentalism and warism

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Ted Grimsrud—September 19, 2025

The connection between American Christianity and the preparing for and fighting wars has been long-standing. In this post, I will recount my own somewhat unusual path in navigating this connection. Growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s, I knew little of the wider world. The social and political currents I described in earlier posts certainly shaped the general sensibility of the world I grew up with. However, the impact on me was at most indirect. A key factor for me, in time, proved to be religious faith. Surprisingly, because my family had little religious involvement and my home community would have been considered largely irreligious. Yet….

On the margins of Christianity

I grew up on the margins of Christianity. In my small hometown, Elkton, Oregon, my family attended a tiny Methodist congregation until I was eight years old, when the congregation closed its doors. Our town hosted only one other congregation at that time, a community church. After our Methodist church closed, we would go to Sunday School at that church most weeks.

As a child, I was on my own in terms of faith convictions. I had a lot of curiosity and talked about religion with friends though I do not know why I was so interested. I don’t remember anything from my experience of going to church that ever piqued my interest. I didn’t get challenged by my parents to think about such things. I suspect I had a natural curiosity about the meaning of life and the religious dimension. My interest in God and the big issues intensified as I got older. I had a self-conscious perspective when I entered my teen years inclined to conclude that God did not exist. But it was an open question that I had a keen interest in.

The first move for me came during the Spring of my sophomore year in high school. A friend of mine died of cancer when he was in his twenties. His death left the community grief-stricken. During his funeral, I felt for the first time a strong sense of the presence of God. From then on, I no longer thought of myself as an atheist. About a year later, I started spending time with a somewhat older friend who had became active in a Baptist congregation that had recently started in town. My friend gently engaged me in conversations about faith. He mainly conveyed a general message of God’s love and a simple process to gain salvation. That process mainly involved the seeker praying to God a prayer of repentance for one’s sinfulness and of a desire to trust in Jesus Christ as the savior whose death on the cross opened the path to God’s forgiveness. Finally, one evening in June 1971, I offered the prayer my friend had described to me. I experienced this as a moment of genuine change.

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Resistance to the American Empire

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Ted Grimsrud—September 16, 2025

As the US embarked on a quest for world dominance after World War II, leaders’ quest for “full spectrum dominance” did not meet with total support from Americans. Opposition to newly expansive US warism received little media attention, though. It rarely effected policy makers. I knew nothing of the dissenters as a youth in my little corner of the world. For the story I tell in this series of posts, though, we should note the small pockets of dissent—both to indicate that American warism was not unanimous (people did dissent) and to recognize that the peace efforts that did shape my convictions beginning in the mid-1970s had important antecedents. 

Antiwar voices

In the late 1930s, many spoke in opposition to the US joining the War. Congress, which would not support a war declaration proposal from the president, did pass legislation for a draft in 1940, but only narrowly. Large movements of anti-war sentiment arose both from the right (the America First movement of traditional American isolationism) and the left (the popular antiwar movement that had arisen in the early 1930s after disillusionment with World War I). However, this war opposition almost immediately evaporated after the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. With the Japanese attack the “America first” conservatives quickly jumped onboard in favor of what was widely perceived to be a war of national defense.

During negotiations in Congress on the draft, representatives from the various peace churches (led by the Quakers) managed to get alternative service for conscientious objectors included. With the popularity of the war and the government’s prowar propaganda, though, only a tiny fraction of draftees took the CO option. Most of the 12,000 draftees who performed alternative service were traditional, somewhat apolitical pacifists. Only a few thousand would have been opposed politically to the war effort. In addition to the legal COs, about 6,000 war opponents went to prison as draft resisters—though the large majority of those were Jehovah’s Witnesses whose refusal to cooperate with the draft had to do with the government refusing them ministerial exemptions, not their political opposition to the war effort.

Out of the tiny handful of COs that we could understand to be anti-empire did come important leadership for the resistance that found expression in years following. Imprisoned COs such as Dave Dellinger and Bayard Rustin developed their ideas about war resistance and nonviolent social change while spending the war years in prison and emerged afterwards as important peace movement leaders. It was also the case that the experience of many of the COs during the War had a significant formative impact. For example, numerous Mennonite COs shaped educational, service, and antiwar efforts among Mennonites and in the wider society in postwar years. Mennonite pacifism tried more to influence the wider world toward peacemaking.

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