Gary Wills has written an interesting article in the New York Review of Books entitled “A Country Ruled by Faith”. Two paragraphs in particular struck a chord.

Charles Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote: “We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible… God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” Jerry Falwell put it succinctly in 2004: “God is pro-war.” For some evangelicals, this was a war against the enemies of Israel, who are by definition anti-God. The evangelical writer Tim LaHaye called it, therefore, “a focal point of end-time events.” For others, it was a chance to spread Christianity to the infidels. An article syndicated on the Southern Baptist Convention’s wire service said that “American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the inventor of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” agreed.

This has so many problems it’s hard to know what to ridicule first.

It certainly appears that this is the God of the Old Testament, since it’s difficult to imagine the New Testament God battling with people who oppose him. Earlier, Wills talked at length about General Boykin, famous for his confidence that the US will win the war against Islam because “I knew my God was bigger than his” (which doesn’t explain his failures in the “Black Hawk Down” clash and the 1980 attempted rescue of Iranian-held American hostages — or perhaps God battles Democratic Presidents as well). Boykin has also said that Bush is President despite having lost the vote because God put him in office.

But if Boykin’s God is so big, why does he have to battle human beings? And how stupid do you have to be to believe that bombing people opens their hearts to your Gospel? Stupid enough to support Bush, I suppose.

In any case, I was reminded of Gibbon’s description, in his inimitable quietly sarcastic tone, of holy wars.

So familiar, and as it were so natural, to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility. But the name and nature of an holy war demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe that the servants of the Prince of Peace would unsheath the sword of destruction, unless the motives were pure, the quarrel legitimate, and the necessity inevitable. The policy of an action may be determined from the tardy lessons of experience; but before we act, our conscience should be satisfied of the justice and propriety of our enterprise.

Apparently the right-wing so-called Christians have consciences that are easily satisfied, as long as Halliburton and Bechtel are making enormous war profits.

Still, one problem remains.

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at November 01, 2006 12:01 AM

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