An American Christian’s view of US-Taiwan-China relations and what to do in the event of war.
This article is published in collaboration with Campus, a Taiwanese evangelical magazine.
In the summer of 2021, American public opinion reached a new milestone: Just over half the country, per a survey by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, supported sending US troops to defend Taiwan if China were to invade.
Since then, as cross-strait tensions have heightened and the US began supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression, American opinion has wavered. Though increasingly likely to say Taiwan-China tensions are a very serious problem for the United States, Americans are not of one mind on what our country’s policies toward Taiwan and China ought to be.
Our disagreements on this subject don’t follow clear partisan or religious patterns. Though Democrats and Republicans are strongly polarized on many issues, when it comes to Taiwan, polling shows mixed views across partisan lines.
Americans increasingly view China as an enemy and are increasingly worried Beijing will choose to invade. But ambiguity isn’t just an official US strategy; our national thinking on this subject really is ambiguous, and American Christians generally and evangelicals specifically aren’t distinct from our compatriots here.
What if China attacks Taiwan? What the United States should or would do is a truly open question in American politics, and what Taiwanese Christians should do is an even more complex question.
The last two years of escalation in tension in US-Taiwan-China relations are worrisome—most of all in those cases where such escalation could have been avoided. Careless rhetoric from US president Joe Biden and provocative but ultimately unnecessary US political visits have …
