More than sixty years ago, in the midst of World War II, the great liberal theologian, Harry Emerson Fosdick, preached one of the great sermons of the twentieth century.  At the time, the sermon shocked some of the listeners, and engendered a good deal of dislike directed toward Fosdick.  The title of Fosdick's sermon was "Worshipping the Gods of a Beaten Enemy."  Already, midway through the war, Fosdick could see that the allies were on a road to victory.  He was also in the midst of his own war, a theological war against a rising tide of radical fundamentalism and biblical inerrancy that threatened to wash away centuries of Christian thought.

Confident in the winning of both these wars, Fosdick worried about the aftermath.  He worried that victory itself would be a kind of defeat.  He fretted that Americans, conquering over fascism abroad and intolerance at home, would adopt both the tactics and the attitudes of those they had broken.  

The worries that he expressed in the middle of the twentieth century should speak to us in the twenty-first.  Not just in Iraq, not just in our churches, but also as we face the results of a historic election.