Aghast by the church’s historical “moral sausage-making” when it comes to the political outworking of the gospel in the area of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson—a Baptist minister and a nuclear policy expert—responded by launching the Two Futures Project (hereafter 2FP). Billed as a “grassroots Christian disarmament movement,” 2FP’s goal is to educate the broader evangelical community about the possibility of a future world without nuclear weapons and to provide ideas and avenues for advocacy. Since its debut last April at the Q Gathering in Austin (where Wigg-Stevenson shared the stage with former Secretary of State George Shultz), 2FP’s whirlwind “tour” has included the National Cathedral, PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) Leaders Forum, and Willow Creek Community Church’s young adult ministry, Generation Axis. As 2FP received a $120,000 Ploughshares Fund grant in October 2009 to “expand [its] public campaign,” 2010 is anticipated to be an even bigger year for the organization.

In starting 2FP, Wigg-Stevenson has demonstrated a keen comprehension of the current nuclear policy landscape. Since January of this year, nuclear abolitionism—or at least the call for the intentional pursuit of the goal of a world without nuclear weapons—not only received honorable mention in President Obama’s inaugural address, but was the centerpiece of two speeches (5 April in Prague; 24 September at the United Nations) and a joint statement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (1 April in London). Obama’s stance on nuclear abolition has been built on a foundation erected over the last number of years by a host of former US national security practitioners. In 2007 and 2008, four doyens of U.S. Cold War nuclear policy—Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn—penned two now-infamous articles in the Wall Street Journal. Now known as the “four horsemen” editorials, they were written in light of the 20^th anniversary of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik and the coming expiration of the START agreement and offered policy prescriptions for moving to a world free of nuclear forces.

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