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Why Do American Evangelicals Endorse War as a Christian Cause?

Why Do American Evangelicals Endorse War as a Christian Cause?

Last updated on: March 8, 2022 at 2:17 am by Daniel K. Williams

Why Do American Evangelicals Endorse War as a Christian Cause? 2022-03-07T22:30:08-04:00 Daniel K. Williams

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“We feel your prayerful support,” a Ukrainian Christian who is on the front lines fighting against the Russians told his American friend a few days ago, in a post that’s now going viral among American evangelicals. “Sometimes something really incomprehensible happens, as if someone’s invisible hand is actually making bullets fly past us. . . . We believe that the Jesus Christ Himself is for Ukraine.”

(Ukrainian soldiers on parade – photo from Wikimedia Commons)

When a fellow Christian from my church forwarded this post to our community group, he added this note: “This reminds me of all the battles [where] the Lord’s hand was on the Israelites when they were outnumbered.”

When we see people fighting for the defense of a country that has been invaded by an aggressor without provocation, it’s easy to see that justice requires us to take the side of the oppressed. As others have noted, perhaps no other act of military aggression in Europe during the past eighty years has had such clear parallels with Adolf Hitler’s blitzkriegs.

So, in view of the obvious injustices being perpetrated by the Russian army in Ukraine, this may be a difficult time to be a Christian pacifist or even to be cautiously skeptical about claiming the endorsement of the Prince of Peace for the cause of war. But perhaps it is especially at such moments, when the rightness of a military cause seems so obvious, that it’s worth asking ourselves difficult questions about why we as Christians find it so easy to endorse a seemingly righteous war in the name of the Lord. This is true even for many non-evangelical American Christians, but it is especially true for evangelicals, who have been more likely than any other religious group in recent years to claim God’s approval for military ventures fought in the name of justice.

If American evangelicals see the Lord’s hand fighting for the Ukrainians, it certainly would not be the first war in which they’ve been firmly convinced that God was aiding a particular side. During the Civil War, as President Abraham Lincoln noted, Christians on both sides prayed to the same God and “invoked his aid against the other,” and both sides found numerous portents to indicate that God was favoring their cause in particular.

Yet for most of American history, the Christian nationalism that identified the nation’s military causes with the Lord’s work was not uniquely associated with evangelicalism; mainline Protestants and Catholics were equally likely to engage in it. When Kay Kyser sang “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” in 1943, he was not addressing an evangelical audience – or even an exclusively Christian one. (The author of the song, Frank Loesser, came from a secular Jewish background). And in several wars in American history – most notably, perhaps, World War I – liberal Protestants and Catholics were more likely to support the war than more theologically conservative evangelicals.

Chaplain Duffy

(New York Catholic military chaplain Francis Duffy presiding over a funeral in France during World War I)

But for the past half century, white evangelicals have been more supportive of America’s military ventures than any other religious group. While the liberal Protestant magazine Christian Century expressed grave concerns throughout the 1960s about America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today repeatedly published editorials supporting the American cause. In fact, the magazine even went so far as to print an article defending the bombing of civilians. And at the beginning of the 21st century, several evangelical leaders urged the George W. Bush administration to go to war against Iraq. When the Bush administration did so, white evangelicals continued to support the war long after other religious groups had turned against it. While both Catholics and mainline Protestants reported that antiwar sermons outnumbered pro-war messages from their clergy in 2003, evangelicals reported the opposite; when evangelical pastors spoke of the Iraq War from the pulpit, they were far more likely to give the war their endorsement.

Why is this the case? Why have evangelicals been more likely than others to see the fight against communism in Vietnam, terrorism in the Middle East, or Russian aggression in the Ukraine as a righteous cause – and thus the Lord’s work? Why have they largely rejected the religiously based antiwar message of many mainline Protestants and some Catholics? Why, in other words, do they equate the Prince of Peace with holy war?

To be sure, there are a few evangelicals who don’t take this position. David Swartz’s Moral Minority demonstrates that the evangelical left in the 1970s was very closely linked with opposition to the Vietnam War – and, to a large extent, opposition to war in general. Evangelicals who have drawn on Anabaptist theological resources, such as Ron Sider or Greg Boyd, have argued that Christians need to take seriously Jesus’s radical message of peacemaking and shun the weapons of the world. But evangelicals who have attempted to make opposition to war a central part of their theological message have found themselves part of a small, beleaguered, and politically marginalized evangelical left or have eventually decided that evangelicalism is no longer compatible with their views. The overwhelming majority of white evangelicals have eagerly accepted the idea that American wars (and now, by extension, the Ukrainian military cause that the United States supports) are divinely sanctioned righteous campaigns. What are the historical and theological reasons for this?

First, evangelicals have tended, to a greater extent than other Christian groups, to see the world in terms of dichotomous categories of good and evil. People are either on the side of God or of Satan; they are part of the kingdom of light or the domain of darkness. As a result, evangelical views of foreign policy have often lacked nuance, and they have tended to prize results over process. While liberal Protestants of the 1960s spoke of the need to secure the approval of the United Nations for any American intervention in Vietnam, evangelical publications such as Christianity Today spent no time worrying about the process and instead focused on the evil nature of communism and the need to stop it by any means possible. In the Iraq War, they knew that Saddam Hussein was evil (or even “Satanic,” as they said) – just as they had known that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were evil. Liberals, evangelicals have often said, have an insufficient understanding of human sin and propensity for evil. In the early 1960s, as the Christian Century’s critiques of American intervention in Vietnam were just beginning, Christianity Today ran a multi-part series that gave a detailed recitation of the Christian Century’s alleged blindness to the evils of Stalinism in the 1940s – with the clear implication that ministers who could not see the need to stand up to communism at the end of World War II could not be trusted when warning against the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

Because of their theology that evil is pervasive and that those who have sold themselves to evil are under the dominion of Satan and can never be negotiated with, evangelicals have tended to see war as a righteous necessity in the effort to secure justice and help the oppressed. Every war that evangelicals have supported in the last century has been, in their view, a fight to stop evil.

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy: Preston, Andrew: 8601401172956: Amazon.com: Books

As diplomatic historian Andrew Preston pointed out in his highly insightful Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, most Americans have always thought of the idea of “just war” not in terms of process but in terms of cause – and that has coincided very closely with the thinking of white evangelicals. In its classic medieval theological form, a just war is not merely fought for the right motive but also with the right means – that is, it involves proportional use of force, refusal to attack civilians, etc. But beginning with the Puritan wars against Native Americans in 17th-century New England, American Christians have claimed to be engaged in just wars even while engaging in brutal attacks on civilians, because for them, the cause mattered far more than the process. If the fight against Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan was right, it didn’t matter whether Americans engaged in fire-bombing in Europe and Tokyo or dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that instantly vaporized tens of thousands of unsuspecting civilians. A majority of Americans have always said, from the 1940s to the present, that the use of atomic bombs to end World War II was justified. American evangelicals have been especially prone to this thinking. In 1966, Christianity Today published an article defending the killing of civilians in Vietnam. Bombs were necessary to win the war, and sometimes civilians would die in the process, the evangelical magazine said. That was the nature of war. This war was fought for the right cause. And if the cause was right, the war was right – even if the means to end the war included the killing of civilians.

When thinking about the ethics of war, white American evangelicals have also placed a great deal of emphasis on the state’s “power of the sword,” as described in Romans 13. Anabaptists have traditionally seen the state as a sinful, worldly power that uses methods that are incompatible with a Christian’s calling in the kingdom of God, but evangelicals, in keeping with their European Reformed Protestant heritage, have tended to see the state as a “minister of God” that pursues justice. Preaching a message of cultural transformation rather than cultural separation, contemporary American Reformed evangelicals have sought to Christianize the state rather than condemn it. At moments in the early 20th century, many liberal Protestant ministers in the United States were similarly uncritical of state power, but their embrace of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s prompted them to adopt an ethic of nonviolence and a suspicion of the state’s use of force that has continued to the present. Evangelicals are thus alone among Protestants in seeing the state’s use of the sword as a ministry of God and a righteous tool of justice.

Christian nationalism has exacerbated evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the state’s use of the sword. In doing this, they have gone even further than the Lutheran “two kingdoms” doctrine would suggest. While Lutherans have often appealed to the “two kingdoms” doctrine to argue that the state can legitimately engage in actions that would be wrong in the kingdom of God – such as restraining the evildoer by force, for instance, instead of turning the other cheek, as Jesus commanded – they have tended to see the state’s actions as separate from the actions of the church and inferior to it. But in the contemporary United States, Christian nationalism has blurred this distinction. If the United States is a Christian nation, and if its wars are holy, the appropriate model to understand them is no longer a model of two separate kingdoms but rather the Old Testament model of a Davidic king or biblical judge leading godly troops to battle in the cause of righteousness – which, not coincidentally, are the exact biblical motifs that many evangelicals casually invoke when speaking of contemporary American wars. And if that’s the case, the church should not merely passively stand aside and allow the state to pursue its method of justice but should instead actively endorse and support the state. Churches should proudly display the American flag in their sanctuaries and praise American war efforts from the pulpit. They should carve out time in their services to honor troops attending in uniform and should play patriotic songs.

Before the 1960s, many non-evangelical Americans routinely did all these things in their houses of worship, because civil religion is deeply engrained in American Christianity. Wars summon our deepest emotions about justice and evoke thoughts of eternity and transcendence as we contemplate the call for the ultimate sacrifice. They are therefore deeply religious occasions. In the past, American mainline Protestantism and Catholicism have been affected by civil religion, just as evangelicalism has. But the Vietnam War undermined the civil religious tradition in much of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism, while reinforcing it among American white evangelicals who saw the war as a righteous struggle against communism. As a result, white American evangelicals now stand virtually alone in the degree to which they have unquestionably conflated the weapons of war with the goals of God’s kingdom.

But does it have to be this way? Does our righteous feeling of revulsion at the Russian massacre of the Ukrainian people have to be channeled into an unquestioning conflation of war with a holy cause? Is this a necessary conclusion from evangelical theology?

I think that the evangelical doctrine of the pervasiveness of original sin should give us the tools to see that sin resides even in (maybe even especially in) a state that claims the mantle of righteousness. Perhaps evangelicals should take another look at the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, a non-evangelical who nevertheless reflected deeply on the implications of the doctrine of original sin in ways that evangelicals could benefit from reading. A state made up of a large number of individual sinners will be more prone to evil than any individual acting in isolation would be, Niebuhr asserted. And though Niebuhr believed that the use of military force to stop evil was necessary, he was also deeply suspicious of the claim that a state was waging a war of righteousness in doing so. He was one of the earliest ministerial critics of the war in Vietnam. While evangelicals were largely endorsing the war as a just cause, Niebuhr was organizing ministers against the conflict and taking out newspaper ads in order to warn people about the dangers of thinking that the war was justified.

But in addition to learning from Niebuhr, American evangelicals could also learn from members of peace churches that the violence of the state is not the only way to resist evil and oppose injustice. American white evangelicals have long viewed Romans 13 as a justification for viewing the state as a minister of justice, but there is a much longer list of Bible passages that speak of the kingdoms of this world as opponents of God perpetuating injustice until the Messiah defeats them through the power not of weapons but of weakness – that is, the weakness of the cross. Evangelicals, of course, believe those passages, but they have nevertheless generally thought that the American government and the governments of America’s allies were on the side of the angels – at least when they were fighting enemies that they thought were on the side of Satan. Other Christian groups have disagreed, because they have thought that the weapons of this world can never be made holy (except by being beaten into plowshares, perhaps). These groups of pacifist Christians have instead employed spiritual weapons to fight against injustice. The Mennonite Central Committee, for instance, has been working through volunteers in the Ukraine to assist refugees, feed the hungry, and, above all, pray for peace. Though they do not believe in taking up arms to fight the Russian invaders, Mennonite volunteers are doing everything they can to be a force for good in Ukraine and oppose injustice.

Most American evangelicals will probably not become Anabaptists or Christian pacifists. Perhaps they will never agree with Mennonites who think that the best way to pursue justice in Ukraine is to do so through nonviolence. But even evangelicals who do not fully agree with Christian pacifism can still benefit from asking themselves whether being more supportive of war than any other religious group in America is the best gospel witness for evangelicalism. American evangelicals should be commended for their concern about justice. But does their quickness to embrace war as the answer to global injustice demonstrate faith in the power of the cross and the message of the gospel that they proclaim? That is the question that those of us who are evangelical Christians in the United States need to ask ourselves, even as we reflect on the heartbreaking images of injustice that are coming to us from Ukraine.

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