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The morality of war
| Article
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18819 |
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12 / 1991 |
1,848 Words |
| Author
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Walter W. Benjamin
Walter W. Benjamin is professor of religion and applied ethics
at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. |
When President Bush agonized over whether to put coalition forces into combat to fulfill the mandate of UN Security Council and Congress, he sought guidance from the Reverend Edmond Browning, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. "War is not an option that would serve anyone," was the response.
"I wish the bishop would read the eighty-four-page Amnesty International report on the rape of Kuwait," Bush later remarked, "and then tell me what to do!"
Subsequently, the president turned to Billy Graham. This shift in focus from a mainline bishop to one of our most popular evangelical pastors illustrates a significant change in American religious loyalty.
In the fifth century, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, Saint Augustine set forth the seven criteria for the justum bellum, the just war. The followers of Jesus of Nazareth had evolved from an ascetic, world-denying sect to a powerful church and had entered public and social life. They needed guidance regarding the legitimate use of coercion. Eschewing the extremes of pacifism and the jihad, Augustine set forth the criteria for the defensive yet "mournful and tragic" war. Those principles--last resort, worthy cause, and proper authorization, together with proper attitude, proportional force, and relative safety of noncombatants--have been the moral frame for the Western approach to war for fifteen centuries.
Augustine knew, as did the major theologians who followed him, that the world could be ruled neither by moral homily nor by ecclesiastical fiat. It now appears that most mainline Protestant and many Catholic leaders have repudiated this classical moral tradition.
The Vietnam War's influence
The churches are still prone to the antimilitary hyperbole engendered by Vietnam. For many clergy, Vietnam, unlike World War II, irrevocably sullied the very root of the soldier's being. As a result, sailor, soldier, airman, and marines now belong, in the minds of these clergy, to a Gnostic realm of darkness from which redemption is impossible. Military holy worldliness is impossible, according to this dualistic cosmology of good/evil, light/darkness, civilian/military, pacifism/force. To enter the military is to be swallowed up in a modern heart-of-darkness experience like those so graphically filmed in Apocalypse Now and The Deer
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