Theology and politics are not two distinct discourses but one. The medieval theology of sin explained the ways of God to man, justified worldly suffering due to war, plague and famine as expressions of divine punishment for sin.

This was recycled in twentieth-century America by an influential Protestant theologian, but what had begun as a Christian theology of sin and submission is now made to work in a new way within an entirely new problematic: the project of global governance through selective retribution and the dissemination of liberal democratic values.

The vision does not articulate a belief that simply justifies military intervention. What it articulates are attitudes that constitute intervention aimed at rescuing humanity and extirpating evil in the world: the political and the theological work together.

But although some of its elements derive from the Christian tradition, the vision itself no longer depends on that tradition but on modern sensibilities and predispositions that have an adventitious fit. When its theological past is repressed (because we live in liberal democratic states) parts of it can be appropriated as “secular,” as an enterprise that is apparently no longer burdened by the intrusive demand of the gods.

Nevertheless, seeing the vision as political theology allows one to understand how human atrocity (the work of evil) is distinguished from transcendental force (the demand of history). Like the secular language of international law, the language of that political theology is not equally - nor equally plausibly - available to all.