[ Saturday, January 21, 2006 (5:19 PM) ] ( link )
Religious war: Sometimes I'll read articles days apart that have eerie parallels to one another. Take, for instance, a much-circulated op-ed by Charles Marsh in yesterday's New York Times, which essentially argued that evangelical Christians are betraying their own faith by supporting the Iraqi war for religious reasons. The op-ed ends with this pessimistic note:
What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.
Interestingly, just two days earlier, I read a book review in, of all places, The New York Sun, in which Adam Kirsch has this to say about Henry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation, which discusses the role of the clergy in the American Civil War:
The key insight of Mr. Stout's innovative study is that the very cost of such battles, far from provoking civilian scrutiny of military strategy, only increased both sides' reliance on thoughtless religious and patriotic rhetoric. As befits a religious historian, Mr. Stout is especially interested, and especially disappointed, in the way the clergy fell into lockstep with the government and the military. Abolitionists and white supremacists were equally ferocious in their certainty that God smiled on their cause. . . .
This kind of passivity, Stout shows, did not just stop the clergy from criticizing the conduct of the war; it positively encouraged both sides to become more absolute in their claims, more unconstrained in their tactics. If the Civil War was dictated by providence, after all, then no method of winning it could be considered unholy. And while the South committed its share of atrocities - the burning of Chambersburg, the concentration-camp-like prison at Andersonville - it is the North that bears the brunt of Mr.Stout's criticism. Exactly because he knows the North's cause was just, he is pained by its cruel tactics, which fell far outside the boundaries of jus in bello.
The two essays don't make quite the same points, but you can easily see how they could have.