The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a most convicting piece on “trashing America’s global good name.” He wrote:  “When I worked in Tokyo in the 1990s, a Japanese colleague told me a story about her father’s defining experience with Americans.  In the days after Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, he was a young boy living in a small town. As American troops moved to occupy the country, the mood was one of panicked terror. The Japanese had been told by their leaders that the victorious Americans would murder, rape and pillage just as their own troops had treated their defeated enemies—though of course the Japanese people didn’t know that.  Eventually American trucks rolled through the town and he and his family cowered indoors, awaiting the inevitable savagery. They watched as GIs jumped down from their vehicles and began placing heavy boxes on the street. At first they assumed the boxes contained some terrible weapon—poison gas perhaps, or booby-trapped bombs—but when the troops were gone and the boxes remained, some of the more curious and braver kids ventured out and began opening them. Inside were layers and layers of chocolate bars, candy, and other treats the near-starving Japanese had not seen in years.  The memory lived with him his whole life, and the story moved me greatly, as I have traveled across the world and become a proud American myself. It is one small vignette of how the U.S. has used not only the power of its economic and military strength to advance its interests but the awesome force of its values, the example of its commitment to human dignity, freedom and justice. As a picture of soft power it is all the more vivid because it came just weeks after the U.S. had undertaken the most terrifying demonstration of hard power in history, incinerating tens of thousands of those same Japanese whose children were now being saved by the American military.”

Baker concluded: “America’s reputation, built on its ideals and burnished over centuries, is the greatest geopolitical brand ever created. But as someone put it to me this past week, we may be witnessing the greatest exercise in brand destruction in history. Brands have real value . . . Destroying geopolitical brand value can be devastating too.  President Trump isn’t wrong when he complains that the world has taken advantage of America and its mostly benign leadership for too long . . .  But redressing that injustice requires not only robust new policies. It requires a targeted and subtle diplomacy.  Allies—staunchly pro-American friends from Canada to Denmark to Poland—are sullen, angry and scared. Adversaries who have long envied our power and tried unsuccessfully to undermine it, are hugging themselves with joy . . . This behavior damages more than our moral standing in the world. It is actively counterproductive . . . But casting off America’s reputation as a place that reveres freedom, dignity and the rule of law will harm the brand—and not just in the long term.”

There are two illustrations of Baker’s thesis that are noteworthy:

First, an evangelical community that once celebrated George W. Bush’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) program—the AIDS initiative that has saved an estimated 26 million lives—has now either applauded or stood by passively as Trump has decimated American foreign aid and damaged a program that was one of America’s greatest humanitarian accomplishments.

Christianity Today editor, Russell Moore, reports that “In a recent panel appearance, David Brooks argued that researchers at Boston University estimate that 55,000 adults and 6,000 children have died in just the four months since the dismantling of PEPFAR began. When you add to that the other disease-curing measures suspended by these cuts, the total reaches 300,000 deaths. And Brooks’s New York Times colleague Nicholas Kristof reported from South Sudan with names and faces of specific people who have died or lost loved ones. He writes of Evan Anzoo, a five-year-old boy who was born with HIV. Through PEPFAR, this little boy was kept alive with antiretroviral medicines that Kristof notes cost ‘less than 12 cents a day.’ After the freeze on aid, the medicines ended, and Evan died of an opportunistic pneumonia infection . . . And evangelical Christian journalist Mindy Belz . . .  witnessed to the ‘Coffin Row’ she once saw in Malawi, the result of the staggeringly high death rate there from HIV/AIDS. She compared it to the scene now in a warehouse in Kenya where millions of antiretrovirals sit unused by order of the State Department. Belz cites the consensus of global experts that these cuts will result in 1.6 million deaths just in one year.”

Moore correctly concludes: “The horror of all this is magnified by its pointlessness. This does not bring down the budget deficit or the national debt, which is constantly reaching new heights. Meanwhile, it hurts American geopolitical interests around the world, leaving a void to be filled by China or some other rival. And the human tragedy involved ought to be especially poignant for American evangelical Christians, in every aspect of that phrase.”

Second, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, at the end of May, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”  Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.

As evangelical columnist and attorney, David French remarks, “True enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. Yes, we’re all going to die, but it matters a great deal when, how and why. There’s a tremendous difference between dying after living a long and full life that’s enabled at least in part by access to decent health care, and dying a premature and perhaps needlessly painful death because you can’t afford the care you need.  All of this should be too obvious to explain, and it would cost Ernst—who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state—virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip. But we’re in a new normal now.  That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.”

What did French mean?  The next day Ernst posted an apology video.  “I would like to take this opportunity,” she said, “to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall.” But her statement devolved from there. “I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”  She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

As French astutely declares that, “Americans are now quite familiar with the ‘no apologies’ ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes . . .  Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.  But why bring Jesus into it?  America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.”

But Christianity is a cross-shaped faith. The vertical relationship with God creates horizontal obligations with the image-bearers of God—i.e., human beings. “While Christians can certainly differ, for example, on the best way to provide health care to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, it’s hard to see how we can disagree on the need to care for the poor.”

• When the sick and lame approached Jesus, he did not say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.” He healed the sick and fed the hungry and told his followers to do the same.
• As the Book of James declares, “If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, stay warm, and be well fed,’ but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it?”

French concludes that “People often ask me if I think the evangelical church has changed during the age of Trump or if its true nature is being revealed. There is not a neat yes or no answer. Certainly Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts. When faced with a conflict between their stated principles and their access to power, millions of Republican Christians chose power over principle—and they are continuing to do so every day.”

Compassion, empathy, kindness and care were terms normally associated with America in both its public and its foreign policy.  Few would use these terms to describe the transformation of both public and foreign policy in the last several months.  The American “brand” is not only being re-shaped; it is being damaged, perhaps irrevocably so.  Many are weeping at what America has become.

See Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (8 April 2025); David French, “Evangelical Christianity has taken a wrong turn” New York Times (4 June 2025); and Russell Moore, “Moore to the Point PEPFAR and the Uneasy Conscience of American Christianity” Moore to the Point (4 June 2025).