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Naming the Idols:
Biblical Alternatives for U.S. Foreign Policy
By Richard Shaull
Oak Park, Illinois, Meyer-Stone Books, 1988. 176 pp. $9.95.

Richard Shaull is often mentioned by Latin American liberation theologians as one of those who inspired their movement. They are referring to a well-known speech that he made at a World Council of Churches meeting in Geneva in 1966 urging support for revolutionary movements in the Third World. His most recent book makes it clear that his views have not changed. Like the liberationists, he is convinced that poverty in the Third World is the result of "structures of exploitation produced by human greed, but also structures that could be changed," and that "dehumanization and suffering is not decreed by God nor by Fate but is the product of an unjust human order." Like them, too, he bases his critical vision of the contemporary economic order on the Bible, principally Exodus, Christ's espousal of the poor, and Paul's claim that

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belief in Jesus will produce "a new man." Like them, too-but even to a greater degree-he believes that the suffering and oppression of the poor is the result of United States policy of support for Third World elites, motivated by a "mindless anti-Communism." The other culprit is the transnational corporation which manipulates international prices and controls the mineral exports of the Third World for its own profit rather than responding to the needs of the people.

Americans who take their biblical and revolutionary heritage seriously says Shaull, should support Third World revolutionarie's in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua who are attempting to empower the poor, develop self-reliant local communities, and respond to basic needs. They will work for the coming of "God's Reign," which, although it can never be perfectly embodied in earthly regimes, can bring into existence a more just society, because "those who make revolutions often demonstrate an extraordinary passion for justice and concern for the victims of injustice." Those Christians who support conservative or liberal foreign policies in the name of freedom and democracy are guilty of idolatry and "demonize" those who oppose them as agents of the Soviet Union while ignoring the suffering of the poor majority in the contemporary world.

Just how far this "preferential option for revolution" can carry one is revealed in the Foreword to the book, written by my colleague at Princeton University, Richard Falk, who asserts that the cold war framework that guides our involvement with the Third World has placed us "on the losing side of history" and claims that "the Marxist outlook is fundamentally opposed to oppressive forms of economic, political, and cultural domination in the region." All of this seems quaintly out of date in a book published in the late 1980s. We now know much more than we did earlier about the oppression that takes place in Marxist regimes like that of Cuba and the Sandinista claim to be a popular government directed toward helping the poor looks unconvincing in the face of the massive decline in living standards in Nicaragua and the recent repudiation of the Sandinistas at the polls. In the past, the United States has supported some rather unsavory regimes in the name of antiCommunism, but this has been much less true in recent years. To take a specific example cited by Shaull, the United States not only has not supported the Pinochet regime in Chile (pace Shaull's statement on page 12), it has prevented it from even buying arms in the United States since 1976, and since the middle 1980s it has actively supported, with funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, its democratic opponents in their successful effort to oust the dictator.

There is much in contemporary United States foreign policy that a biblical Christian might oppose-massive and wasteful defense budgets, cuts in welfare expenditures, support for ex-Somocistas in Central America-although convinced conservative Christians do not agree even on this. But to accuse all those who do not endorse Marxist revolutionaries around the world of idolatry smacks of the same kind of "demonization" that Shaull attacks. An option for the poor can be

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exercised in many ways by a Christian, and this book is not at all persuasive that Richard Shaull's shrill and self-righteous version is the one to be preferred.

Paul E. Sigmund
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey