War and Faith

Forty-three years ago I came to the realization that I was a pacifist. That realization came during a recruitment week for British Army chaplains at Bagshot Park in Surrey, then the home of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department.

I want to say clearly that I did not arrive at that realization from a place of hostility toward chaplains. Quite the opposite. I was deeply sympathetic to the work I saw they did. I was especially moved by those who had served as chaplains in the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982. Their care for soldiers, their willingness to be present in fear, grief, and danger, impressed me deeply. I respected it then, and I respect it now.

Near the end of the week, I noticed the chaplains’ badge over the fireplace: “In This Sign Conquer.” I was told during the course that it was one of only two British Army cap badges with an English motto, the other being the SAS motto, “Who Dares Wins.” As I read the chaplains’ motto, I was immediately aware of their association with Constantine and the tradition that before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE he saw a sign in the sky and was told, “In this sign, conquer.” That story became one of the great symbols of the alliance between Christianity and imperial power.

That marked a tragic historical turn. It opened the way for the long accommodation of Christianity to violence. In later centuries that accommodation would find expression in the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, in anti-Jewish violence and pogroms, in enduring habits of Christian hostility toward Islam, and quest for imperial glory with religious legitimation. Before Constantine, so far as our surviving Christian sources show, the moral witness of Christian writers leaned strongly against killing and war. In that moment at Bagshot Park, I realized that the Jesus I had come to know in the Gospels would never have taken the sign of the cross and turned it into a justification for lethal violence. The cross is not that. It is not a banner of conquest. It is the very opposite. It is a sign of suffering love.

That conviction has stayed with me ever since. For more than a quarter of a century I have taught war, terrorism, and philosophies of nonviolence at the university. When we became United States citizens in 2012, we did so as conscientious objectors for religious reasons. I say that only to make clear that these are not ideas of the moment. They are long-held convictions.

This week the U.S. Secretary of Defense prayed that every round would find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and the nation, and asked for overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy. That language is chilling. It is also familiar. Nations and leaders have long wrapped violence in the language of righteousness and divine favor. For Christians to speak that way, demonstrates how far much Christianity has traveled from the Jesus of the Gospels.

From my studies and teaching, I know more about war and terrorism than is good for anyone’s health and well-being. I know the strategic foolishness of war, the repeated misjudgments, the unintended consequences, and the suffering that spreads far beyond what anyone predicts. I’m thinking of recent misadventures: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Yet my deepest objection is not only that war fails strategically, though it often does. It is that war itself stands in contradiction to the way of Jesus.

Today is Palm Sunday. Jesus enters Jerusalem not on a war horse, not with the pageantry of empire, but humbly, on a donkey. He does not come as a conqueror. He comes in another spirit entirely. Palm Sunday reminds me of the humility and nonviolence of Jesus. I have spent much of my life trying, however imperfectly, to walk in that same direction.

+Ab. Andy