AWOL Christian Soldiers?
BOTTUM, J.
AWOL Christian Soldiers? These days, America's religious leaders are far from bellicose. BY J. BOTTUM TWO DAYS AFTER the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell and Pat...
...Its threads run through every Christian community, from the Quakers in the radical reformation to the founders of Catholic monasticism...
...In a fascinating 1932 exchange in Christian Century, prompted by the question of whether the United States should intervene against the Japanese in Manchuria, the well-known Christian ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr wrote of what he called "the grace of doing nothing"—to which his brother, the even better-known Reinhold Nie-buhr, replied in the next issue of the magazine, "I realize quite well that my brother's position both in its ethical perfectionism and its apocalyptic note is closer to the gospel than my own...
...It declares that Christian life in the world is defined by the perpetual possibility of martyrdom, and that to be a Christian is to stand as a sheep among the wolves...
...That pacifism is always stern and hard edged...
...But even H. Richard Niebuhr's pacifistic position—which he would modify during World War II in a brilliant Christian Century essay called "War as the Judgment of God"—had much harder edges than the sermons that most Americans have been hearing since the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center...
...If the United States goes wobbly in its war on terrorism—if the campaign peters out in self-doubt and confusion after a few months of bombings— Christian feeling in America will have had something to do with it...
...In fact, American Christians are far more likely to feel the opposite temptation these days...
...What they heard, interspersed with prayers for the victims and rescuers, were instead admonitions not to indulge racist feelings against Arabs or give in to the angry lust for revenge—neither of which the churchgoing portion of the American public seemed to feel much temptation to do...
...BY J. BOTTUM TWO DAYS AFTER the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson opened themselves to national condemnation by declaring that the terrorists' success was a direct judgment of God, visited upon the United States for the sins of abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, pagans, and the ACLU...
...Paul declares that the proper ruler of the state "beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil...
...In a famous passage in Romans 13— one of the central passages from which theologians as diverse as St...
...High on our own Western shelf of false deities have been the gods of nominalism, materialism, secularism, and pluralism," Belz explained...
...Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther built their theories of government—St...
...But if the reports are accurate, they didn't hear many sermons that echoed Falwell, Robertson, and Belz...
...Righteousness has come to seem the equivalent of sel/-righteous-ness, and hardly anyone believes in genuinely righteous anger any more...
...In confessing that, I am forced to admit that I am unable to construct an adequate social ethic out of a pure-love ethic...
...It is as well a threat to American Christians, who can fulfill their religious duty either by accepting the suffering that H. Richard Niebuhr called "war as crucifixion" or by taking up the sword in righteous anger to guard the sheep against the wolves—but not by dithering between the two...
...Abraham Lincoln understood all this when he said, in the enormous sadness of his second inaugural address, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away...
...We have, as the last election showed on both sides, an astonishingly open return to the public square of religious rhetoric and concerns...
...J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...News reports claimed that more Americans were in church on the Sunday after the attacks than on any ordinary Sunday in recent memory...
...We have an attorney general of more muscular Christianity than any since the nineteenth century...
...The Christian believer who does not feel the tug of this pacifism has missed a constant theme of the gospels...
...New York built two...
...He has His own purposes, and if we are called to national repentance by the terrorists' attack upon the nation, it may be our own softness— our frivolity and unseri-ousness—that we are being asked to repent of and abandon...
...But, he added, "I find it impossible to envisage a society of pure love as long as man remains man...
...There were very few churches in which "Onward, Christian Soldiers" got sung last week— much less "The Son of Man Goes Forth to War...
...And it's hard to think of more apt symbols of all those 'isms' than the twin towers of the World Trade Center...
...Needless to say, soft pacifism is dangerous to a nation facing enemies without any softness or tradition of pacifism...
...All of which makes the question of the proper Christian understanding of the attack—and what we should do about it—of profound importance...
...Augustine, St...
...Meanwhile, World magazine, the evangelical weekly, fell over the edge in an editorial by Joel Belz that quoted, approvingly, the words of an Egyptian chauffeur as he praised the terrorists: "The Americans have forgotten that God exists...
...Among Protestants, the entire theological tradition of using martial metaphors to describe God's glory has fallen into massive disrepute...
...Yet, if God wills that it continue, . . . as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether...
...In point of fact, the United States did not intervene in Manchuria, and it was only after the attack on Pearl Harbor that most Americans came to see Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism as a better solution than his brother's Christian quietism...
...With George W. Bush, we have a seriously evangelical president in the White House for the first time since Jimmy Carter...
...We have, in the years since the Niebuhrs represented the mainstream of American Christianity, fallen back into a soft pacifism—the illusion of the comfortable classes—which lacks both the stern Christian pacifist's willingness to accept martyrdom and the hard Christian realist's willingness to use coercive force...
...Such views are contemptible, but they raise a significant issue...
...But there are other themes as well, beginning with the righteous anger with which Christ drove the money-changers out of the Temple...
...As for God's judgments, they are always difficult to discern...
...There exists, of course, a morally serious and intellectually rigorous tradition of Christian pacifism...
...The hope of attaining an ethical goal . . . without coercion . . . is an illusion which was spread chiefly among the comfortable classes of the past century...
...Among Catholics, concerns about the injustices that must necessarily happen during war (the concerns scholastics called jus in bello) have damaged the ability to hold almost any good reason for going to war (what the scholastics called jus ad bellum...
...Babel needed just one such tower...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 3
