I posted earlier on StreetProphets.com about this good op/ed piece in the New York Times about American evangelicals and the Iraq War. Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, examines the motivations that led many (most?) evangelical Christians to throw their support behind a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq:
The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.
Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.
SInce the president is a "real brother in Christ", those who criticize the president - in Congress or in the press - are evil. I've noticed how none of these evangelicals has come forward to speak out about the president's program of warrantless spying on American citizens. Nor does it seem to bother them that the FBI has used its resources to monitor the activities of pacifist Christian organizations such as the Catholic Workers Movement.
I do get angry when I see American evangelicals attempting to appropriate Dietrich Bonhoeffer - especially during Bonhoeffer Year. Recently the evangelical leader Pat Robertson - whose "ministry" celebrates war and torture for the glory of God and nation - invoked Bonhoeffer when he called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez:
Bonhoeffer decided to lend his support to those in Germany who had joined together in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and killed by the Nazis, but his example deserves our respect and consideration today.
The claim that Bonhoeffer through his theological writing supported assasination or the doctrine of "Just War" is false. Bonhoeffer was always clear that pacifism was the true expression of Christian faith. In 1932, Bonhoeffer attended at a World Youth Peace Conference in Czechoslolvakia and spoke these words:
»Weil wir aber den Krieg keineswegs als Erhaltungsordnung Gottes und somit als Gebot Gottes verstehen können,... muss der nächste Krieg der Ächtung durch die Kirchen verfallen. Wir sollen uns hier auch nicht vor dem Wort Pazifismus scheuen.«
The Christian writer and thinker Stanley Hauerwas examines Bonhoeffer's commitment to non-violence in his book Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. American evangelicals cannot point to Bonhoeffer's involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler as an indication of his support for violence or a "Just War" - he knew that all wars had terrible consequences. But Bonhoeffer's concepts of Christian discipleship and "costly grace" brought him to an understanding that doing nothing to rid the world of Hitler was worse than doing what he did, however ambiguous the moral issues. That is what peacemaking demanded of him at that time and place. He realized that his only recourse was to "sin boldly" and cast himself on the grace of God.
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