Bishop Tom Wright, writing in this week’s Church Times commenting on the Bin Laden action, states that thy do, citing Robert Jewett, US New Testament scholar.
He writes:
If, in the past, the UK had discovered that there was a convicted IRA terrorist/murderer being sheltered in darkest Boston, and sent the SAS to take him out without informing the US authorities, I suspect that the US would not be pleased. In fact, there have been such people and US law has protected them (because of our unbalanced extradition treaty).
The US somehow has to learn that it is not the world’s policeman, and that other people’s sovereign territories are not simply an extension of Washington’s remit. US Christians sometimes cite Romans 13 as the “justification” for this kind of global vigilantism; this is absurd.
This, of course, doesn’t diminish at all the sense of relief at the closure of a very unpleasant bit of unfinished business. It is right that Osama bin Laden be punished for his horrible atrocities; it is right to seek closure, not least for relatives of 9/11 victims.
But every time the US or the UK operates like this, or as we are doing in Libya now, we increase the likelihood of more terrorists, more al-Qaeda lookalike groups; we encourage more people to view the West as the Great Satan, to be opposed with every breath in their body and every bomb they can make.
As many have been saying for a long time (and as the US has stoutly been resisting, for obvious reasons), we urgently need some properly constituted body, a kind of proper UN or International Court of Justice, to whom the whole world could look for proper policing on the one hand and proper justice on the other. Otherwise, we will remain at the mercy of the vigilante actions of whoever has the muscle to mount them.
Robert Jewett (author of Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil and The Myth of the American Superhero) writes of a set of myths still rampant in the US: (a) the forces of law and order are weak and inefficient; (b) the bad guys are getting away with it; (c) the hero has to act outside the law, under cover, to perform the redemptive violence that will restore order to the embattled community. When the community in question is the most powerful nation on earth, this looks thin; but it is the exact correlation of Obama’s actions with this myth that got him his standing ovation and has gained him massive political capital overnight.
Meanwhile, the Christian gospel waits, unheard, in the wings, speaking of love of enemies, prayer for persecutors, forgiveness of sins, and so forth. We in the West have hardly begun to imagine what that might look like.
Dr Tom Wright is a former Bishop of Durham; he is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Andrews University.
Dr Robert Jewett was Professor of New Testament at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary of the United Methodist Church in Evanston, Illinois.