Fourteen Points on Global Security and Christian Theology

Speakiing to a large church with many security professionals in the audience, I tried to offer some signposts regarding our apocalyptic times - and some encouragement.

This is the reconstruction of a talk given to National Presbyterian Church in Washington DC on 2 March 2025.

I’ll begin with scripture. ‘While people are saying “Peace and Security,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.’ (1 Thessalonians 5:3). This is one of many warnings from scripture against credulity towards political and popular discourses of security. It captures something of what it is to live in an insecure world. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson was accused of credulity with respect to security in the world when he made is 14 points to Congress about the world after the Great War. Nevertheless, I’m going to offer fourteen more to you today, not because I have Wilsonian ambitions but because I have recently published a book with 14 chapters – Security After Christendom (Wipf & Stock, 2014) – that I’m going to try to summarise for you in 25 minutes.

1. Objectively, we shouldn’t feel insecure, but we do.

Since the mid-twentieth century war has been less frequent and less costly. Over the same period, the world has become wealthier with hundreds of millions having been raised out of poverty. Liberal internationalism marched forward in this time as decolonization produced many new democracies, and vast increases in the number of humanitarian organizations. In the Western world, new frontiers of inclusion—of class, sex, race, gender—have been breached over the last century. Reams of statistical data demonstrate these trends. And yet the United Nations reported in 2022 that “those benefiting from some of the highest levels of good health, wealth, and education outcomes are reporting even greater anxiety than 10 years ago.” So, why do many of us feel so insecure? Answers have something to do with the fact that security is a relational (inter-subjective) condition.

2. Security is about inclusion, protection and provision.

According to Arnold Wolfers, security is, objectively, “the absence of threats to acquired values” and, subjectively, “the absence of fear that such values will be attacked.” We may say that security has three elements: 1) inclusion (who is to be secure); 2) protection (from threats to security), and 3) provision (to live life securely). These are the question of for whom, from what, and for what, of security. We typically answer these questions in terms of what the nation-state offers: security for its citizens alone, from other countries and enemies within, and for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But contemporary answers are apparently not working -maybe no answers ever have. Clearly, people across much of the world, including here in the United States, the wealthiest and best defended country in the history of humanity, feel more insecure.

So, how did we get here?

Points 3-6 concern Christendom. The Western world has been created by Christendom – the period from the 4th to 20th centuries where the church placed its hope in and sought to minister to government.

3. Christendom formed our security.

Even where you have formally secular but Christian-majority states, they were Christendom states in that their laws, values and cultures were formed under the influence of the church and the gospel. The problem was that government is not universal, unlike the church and the gospel. Thus, we saw the “Christendom dialectic” as the contradiction between the power of the cross and the power of the sword. Christendom was always in tension between cross and sword.

4. Christendom’s geography shaped our security.

A further problem was that Christendom was bound up with empire, both in the East (Russia) and the West. It was therefore divided. In 1948, Martin Wight, in address to the inaugural meeting of the World Council of Churches identified the Cold War as a conflict of the end of Christendom. And the global South was subject to these Christendom empires. Today, unsurprisingly, the church is growing fastest in those places which were subject to the sword of Christendom, not those places which wielded the sword.

5. Christendom gave us our security theories

The theory that Christendom bequeathed to understand global security was Christian realism, developed in the United States and UK in the early twentieth century. This community created International Relations – the field which seeks to make sense of global security through ideas like deterrence and the balance of power. But these are Christendom ideas. Power was divided because a sinful world was divided. The task of government was to separate powers at home and balance power overseas. The world needs restraining, and Christian realists felt that the balance of power must be held by a responsible power – a Christendom – like Britain in the 19^th c and the US in the 20^th c.

6. Christendom gave us our security ethics

The ethics of government and security were all formed in Christendom: democracy, human rights, and ideas of public integrity. Most importantly, perhaps, the idea of just war. War must be proportionate, it must be a last resort, it must wherever possible avoid civilian death. But how this work out in a world of UAVs and AI? Ethicists are scrambling to rewrite the rules of war, but they are way behind the curve.

Where are we now?

Then next four points relate to the secular age. The secular is not a break from Christendom but a product of it. The reformation and enlightenment created the secular and were created by the Christendom dialectic, not something apart from it.

7. The secular forms our present security environment.

There are plenty of positives to the secular as freedom – political and religious – is difficult without it. But there are downsides to its developments. Taylor notes two big developments: disenchantment (not just the decline in professed belief but the new tendency to seek meaning from science or art, regardless of God) and decentering (the shift away from the idea of a sovereign God or a centre to a world where the human leader or individual is in charge).

This secular world has given us two main approaches to security.

8. The security state promises defence but makes us more insecure.

This is a vision of security which is disenchanted and decentered to nation states. In 1 Sam 8, the prophets warns, the people that if they want a king they will be taxed and their sons will be sent to war. The bible as a whole repeatedly warns of the wars of governments. They create security dilemmas whereby we may be made less secure even by defensive measures. All strategists know this, but no one has an answer.

9. The liberal international order is not liberal, not international and not orderly.

This is a vision of security disenchanted and decentred to global civil society. This approach promises to overcome the security dilemma through global governance. But this has limits. The Tower of Babel in the Torah, the story of humanity’s attempt to build a platform to the heavens, where “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Gen 11:1), is one of many origin myths. While traditionally read as a story of pride-and-punishment of humans seeking to challenge Yahweh, Hiebert convincingly argues that “it describes the origins of the world’s cultures through a narrative world in which people desire uniformity and God desires diversity.” I’ve worked in the liberal order as an aid worker. We need aid and we need USAID. But aid is not about a single system of global security. It is political and cannot include, protect and provide for everyone.

10. Neo-Christendom is a dangerous myth.

Faced with these limits of the secular security state and the liberal international order, it is to be expected that some people want to re-enchant and re-centre security on some kind of new Christendom. This is what ideas of Christian nationalism and dominionism are about. They are crucial to explaining Putin’s Russia and perhaps Donald Trump’s America, among many other examples. But they cannot and do not work in a disenchanted and decentred world. And most supporters of Neo-Christendom are cultural Christians not practicing believers. That’s true in US, Europe and Russia too. Neo-Christendom offer no hope either.

Where are we going?

There is hope. It is found in the apocalyptic – that is the Chrisitan philosophy of history which characterized the one work of Christian prophecy. We are given this in the bible to tell us where we’re going.

11. The apocalyptic is our future.

Revelation is the Apokalpysis. It’s not about the day and the hour, the dispensations and the rapture. It is a story of hope, literally the unveiling of truth, which culminates in the beautiful visions of a people saved and a world restored in chapters 21-22. You may say that there’s plenty of war and bloodshed on the way – and there is. But crucially states and empires fight this; not the church. Our peaceful and hopeful community is not the state or liberal order or Christian nation. “Then the end will come, when he hands over the Kingdom to God the father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power. For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet.” (1 Corinthians 15: 24–25). Perhaps most telling is the contrast between Paul’s powers and Revelation’s dragon and beasts. Paul’s powers provide limited order for a temporary period – that’s also the theme of responsible government and our obedience to it in Romans 13. But these powers will be exposed for their limits and will fade away. Those that seek to capture the world for themselves are symbolized in the Roman and Babylonian imagery of Revelation 13. They will be destroyed.

So, our task is to find provisional security in the world in advance of absolute security in heaven. Our primary instrumental for doing this is not the state or the LIO, but the church.

12. Radical Inclusion is our means to a security community of the church.

Inclusion is not DEI (which is secular, fashionable and lacks grace) and it is certainly not anti-immigration measures. It is more radical than that. The French Catholic thinker Rene Girard believes that all forms of scapegoating and exclusion were fatally undermined by Christ on the cross. He took the place of the scapegoat and defeated the logic of scapegoating. Today our society is one of “undifferentiation”. The number of migrants – voluntary and forced – is expanding almost exponentially, regardless of government attempts to put up strong borders. Human equality cannot be denied however much some may want to put America or some other government first. The church has a long history of sanctuary and entertaining strangers. We should be doing this regardless of whether government supports it or not. And regardless of whether the strangers are Christian or not. This is not about opposing government directly, but it is about being for refugees and asylum seekers. In my city there’s a big ecumenical project which I help lead. I’m sure there are plenty in DC,

13. Nonviolent Protection works better than violent resistance.

Protection is not found in war and rarely achieved by defence. ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace” they say when there is no peace.’ (Jeremiah 6:14). The true Christian approach to war is not liberal pacifism but what my friend Nick Megoran has called “gospel peace”. Proclaiming Christ through risky actions of accompaniment or what has been called Unarmed Civilian Protection. Most wars are civil wars not thought by sophisticated armies. In these environments, accompaniment and protection via community security works better than taking up arms. And in resisting tyranny, there’s a lot of evidence that nonviolent resistance works better than armed rebellion.

14. Abundant Provision is found in sharing not competing.

Provision is not achieved by advanced capitalism making our planet uninhabitable and more unequal. The science tells a despairing picture of human-generated climate change. “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” (Romans 8:19). The Acts 2 church of sharing may be the only option; the world may need to be turned upside down (Acts 17) to be sustained. Global security in the future will demand the interconnection of small communities. Even the simulacra of security under large nation states will cease to be effective.

Finally, I have been in the US this week talking about another book, Indulging Kleptocracy. I am convinced there is a role for ethically-grounded and theologically-informed conversations about matters of states, markets and security. But that is not the primary task of Christian theology when it faces global security. The church writ large is the world’s largest community; it’s plurality and diversity are integral and do not distract from but rather constitute it as a provisional modelling of a peaceful kingdom. We are first to be secure in ourselves, second to do it for others, and third to proclaim it to the powers that be. This latter task – for the Christian security professional, that many of you are – involves difficult challenges of conscience and responsibility. There are no easy answers. But we can at least be assured that our primary citizenship is in heaven and our residency permit is secured through the church.