Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, talks about politics as a battle of good and evil

He’s told audiences, “Jesus Christ … is the only solution for our world.”

By Tara Isabella Burton@NotoriousTIBtara.burton@vox.com  Mar 15, 2018, 10:40am EDT

President Donald Trump’s Cabinet is full of evangelicals, many of whom seek to bring a specifically Christian perspective to social issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights to health care. But the addition of former CIA Director Mike Pompeo — who is set to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state after Tillerson’s shock Twitter firing — could bring an unsettlingly theocratic attitude to America’s foreign policy.

That Pompeo is an evangelical Christian is, on its face, not particularly notable; 25 percent of Americans are. But Pompeo’s specific brand of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on seeing Muslim-Christian relations as an apocalyptic holy war, makes him an unnerving choice for such a senior foreign policy position.

During his tenure as CIA director, and before that as a member of the House of Representatives, Pompeo has consistently used language that casts the war on terrorism as a cosmic divine battle of good and evil. He’s referred to Islamic terrorists as destined to “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior is truly the only solution for our world.”

Pompeo clarified that only a small percentage of Muslims were, in fact, terrorists (although in a 2013 speech, he called them potentially complicit in terrorism). Still, his language echoes a wider point: that the war against terrorism can be fought, in part, with Christian faith.

In other speeches, he’s characterized American domestic politics as a similarly apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, in which other (non-Christian) faiths and political views were signs of cultural decay. He cited a sermon previously delivered by Pastor Joe Wright in front of the Kansas state legislature: “‘America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.’” Sources inside the CIA told Foreign Policy that Pompeo’s speeches within the CIA are no less loaded with explicitly religious language.

Faith-based outlets like the Christian Broadcasting Network have praised Pompeo’s selection. Erik Rosales, CBN’s national security correspondent, celebrated Pompeo as a man who “even held a Bible study inside the White House.”

But Pompeo’s specific brand of dualistic, evangelical faith — dividing the geopolitical into good and evil — and the office of secretary of state may be at odds.

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https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/3/15/17117298/mike-pompeo-trump-secretary-of-state-politics-battle-evangelical-holy-war-christian