From Ivan Eland for Antiwar.com, a comparison of the influence of Christian evangelists during Woodrow Wilson’s and George W. Bush’s eras:
[T]he messianic zeal of some evangelical Christians to convert others began being misdirected to infuse official U.S. foreign policy beginning in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the last century. President William McKinley wanted to use armed force to convert Filipinos to “Christianity”—even though most of them were already Catholics. Today, the idea that Americans are the “chosen people” who need to use force to make others more like themselves has morphed into the more secularly appealing notion of spreading U.S.-style democracy around the Middle East and the world. Instead of “saving” foreign peoples with “fire and brimstone” religion, the U.S. government is now “saving” them with democracy. …
It is the interventionist U.S. foreign policy that has contributed to the rise of radical political Islam in the first place. … More:
The United States has made a great error in conducting a messianic, albeit often hypocritical, campaign to convert the world to “democratic” government using an interventionist foreign policy. Instead, U.S. policy makers should spend more time defending liberty at home from al Qaeda and other real threats and becoming a peaceful refuge of human rights for the world to emulate—the kind of American exceptionalism that the founders originally intended.
Excerpted from The Harvest of Messianic Foreign Policy: Anti-US Radical Islam by Ivan Eland, published at antiwar.com. To get the full import of Eland’s analysis, read the article in its entirety.