A Christian Response to War

As a baby boomer child of the 1950s, I was taught to hate war.  For my generation, war was an unmitigated evil (though, happily, this notion did not spill over into hating or disrespecting our soldiers—later described as “peace-keepers”).  Our generation’s hatred of war was well expressed in the 1969 heart-felt anti-war song popularized by Edwin Starr, some of the lyrics of which were, “War!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!...War I despise, ‘cause it means destruction of innocent lives…It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker, friend only to the under-taker!” 

A more elegant and thoughtful song of that time was co-written and sung by Petula Clark, entitled “On the Path of Glory”.  It was more respectful of soldiers and applauded their heroism, but still denounced war with its ironic “path of glory” as a false and fatal ideal.

Because of my boomer background, I was all the more surprised to discover how different was the view of war in former times.  Indeed, just prior to the First World War, it was something that might be compared to a game of polo. 

I quote from John Garth’s fascinating 2003 book Tolkien and the Great War:  In the days of Tolkien’s youth “the sports field was an arena for feigned combat.  In the books most boys read, war was sport continued by other means.  Honour and glory cast an over-arching glamour over both, as if real combat could be an heroic and essentially decent affair.  In his influential 1897 poem ‘Vitai Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt had imagined a soldier spurring his men through bloody battle by echoing his old school cricket captain’s exhortation, ‘Play up!  Play up! And play the game!’…In the Edwardian era [war] was as if [a soldier] were engaged in little worse than a spot of polo.” 

This sanitation and glamourization of war—soon to be revealed for what it was—was a universe away from the denunciations set to music by Edwin Starr and Petula Clark.  But then both of these singers were heirs to the carnage that was the Great War and the Second World War—to say nothing of the Viet Nam war and other more localized blood baths.

Two questions press themselves to the fore:  what changed and what does this mean?

One thing that changed was the increased and ever-escalating mechanization of war.  At one time, war often meant a group of young men charging another group of young men on land removed from civilian dwelling. War therefore involved two groups of young men engaging in individual combat, fighting with swords or other weapons against a localized foe. 

One thinks of the comment made by the Raisuli, a Berber chieftain played by Sean Connery in the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion: “Men prefer to fight with swords so they can see each other’s eyes.  Sometimes this is not possible.  Then they fight with rifles.  The Europeans have guns that fire many times promiscuously and rend the earth.  There is no honour in this.  Nothing is decided from it.”  In other words, the mechanization of warfare using such long-distance weaponry as cannons was a step away from the reality of war as practiced in all previous ages. 

Further and more horrific steps would follow.  Cannons would be succeeded by tanks and chemical warfare such as poison gas—and of course by bombs dropped by airplanes, including possibly nuclear bombs.  The crucial step away from classical warfare (with its possibility of honour and glory coming from individual hand-to-hand combat) was decisively taken in the Great War.  Swords were out.  Explosions, great and small, were in.  And with the explosions coming from dropped bombs, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was increasingly eroded. 

It was, of course, still possible in theory to target only military sites, but in practice bombs were routinely dropped upon cities, where all the non-combatants lived.  It was no longer a matter of soldiers treading the heroic path to glory, but of civilians huddling helplessly under threat of falling death.  Glory had largely vanished from the business of war, as had much of the former honour.  With the increased mechanization of warfare, war was less about combat between soldiers and more about simple killing of populations.  Victory increasingly had less to do with courage than with superior weaponry. 

This, of course, does not take anything away from the dedication and courage of the young soldiers themselves.  Young men still fight courageously as they did in former times, and deserve the honour and respect shown to them.  But the wars in which they now fight have morphed almost out of recognition.  Instead of men riding a polo horse, the horse now ridden is ridden by one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 

And what does this change mean for us?—that we now live in apocalyptic times, times psychologically and spiritually cut off from all previous ages.  Sadly, war has always been how the human race has lived; we are a race that both makes exquisite music and also butchers our brothers.  The entirety of human existence has been lived under the shadow of the first and primordial murder when Cain killed Abel.

Briefly put, we are a race of fratricides, and human history has always been the lamentable history of war.  But the nature of war has changed.  Fortunately, we in North America have largely been spared the scourge of war in our own homeland (though the First Nations peoples would want to question that).  And now whenever we wage war, we are doomed by our technological advances to wage unjust war.  The innocence evinced by Tolkien’s generation when they enthusiastically enlisted in 1914 is now gone and can never recovered.

What can we do?  Pray, of course, and work for peace as best as we can.  But part of living as those who belong to the Kingdom of God involves remembering that a war must be sold to the populace as good and necessary before it can be fought.  Some wars, like the Second World War fought to halt the Nazi advance, were necessary, but many wars are not. The decision to fight a war in this modern age is mostly made by older, rich men, not by the men who will do the actually fighting, killing, and dying.  In order to convince a population that they should send out their young men to fight, kill, and possibly die, one uses propaganda.

We have seen in the comparatively recent past how this is done.  The U.S. must fight against Iraq before it can use its weapons of mass destruction. Germany must invade Poland to stop it from killing any more of its German citizens.  (Please note that I am not equating the two examples.) The reasons for war are always complex, but they always involve propaganda, which includes telling lies. 

The propaganda used to promote such wars will always paint the enemy in lurid and demonic terms, for it is only by invoking such a vision that young men can be persuaded to kill other young men whom they have never met.  Thus the Germans of the Great War were not Germans; they were “Huns”.  The Viet Namese were not men like themselves who happen to live in Viet Nam, they were “Gooks”.  To successfully wage war, hatred must be deposited in the hearts of those whose task it will be to kill strangers.

It is just here that Christians must dissent.  Christians may serve in armies and may legitimately wage war—since the time of Constantine the Church realized that strict pacifism is not a sensible or realistic option for a Christianized country.  But Christians must also realize that war is never good, and that those upon whom they fire and drop bombs are men like themselves, and their families are exactly like their own families.  That is why the post-Constantinian Church also penanced soldiers who shed blood in battle.

In other words, hatred and war must never be allowed a home in our hearts.  Christians ultimately stand not under their nation’s flag, but under the Cross, and all those killed in war will finally stand together before the dread Judgment Seat of Christ and face the same justice. 

We must remember that this war-torn planet is not our final home, and that in this age we Christians are strangers and sojourners.  The cry of Maranatha! must ever be in our hearts.  For it is only after the Lord has come that we will truly and finally hammer our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning-hooks.  It is only then that the glory of the Lord will cover this poor earth as the waters cover the sea.