Faith and fear in foreign relations from 1650s England to Trump & Brazil’s Bolsonaro

The Second Tuesday Forum with Rev. Roger & Prof. John Watkins
May 13, 7:00 pm In the Library/Bookstore or at uuss.org/online.
Let’s learn about the direct impact of religious convictions on Western diplomacy over four centuries, from England’s relations with the Dutch Republic in the 1650s to the decision of President Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in 2017 and other present-day examples of unsettling theologies that affect world affairs.

Guest Speaker John Watkins is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is a sought-after speaker on topics of kingship/sovereignty, diplomatic history, and Mediterranean history and literature.  He has a Ph.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Oxford, and a B.A. from Indiana University, where he and Rev. Roger met as classmates in 1979.

Read more from John Watkins about Apocalyptic Diplomacy:

To what extent do religious beliefs shape the destiny of nations?

One dominant school of international relations suggests that such beliefs simply do not matter.  From that perspective, international affairs unfold in a mechanistic game of power within a state of global anarchy. Affairs below the level of the state have little impact on the behavior of states themselves within the international system. If threatened by an emerging power, states will respond in particular, highly predictable, ways whether they are democracies or dictatorships, religious or secular, atheistic or insistently devout.

But are there certain conditions that allow waves of radical doubt or radical devotion to affect the international system itself?

I will argue that even though it rarely happens, there instances where the conjunction of several political variables allow the strangest and most unsettling theologies to have an impact on world affairs. We may now be witnessing just such a conjunction.