Religion, war, peace, and March 2 event

If you’re in New York City on the evening of March 2, then you can come hear me and some other, much more inspiring folks. We taking part in a public discussion on the topic of Study War No More: Religion and the contemporary peace movement.
Daniel Berrigan will keynote it. Other speakers are Ibrahim Ramey, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, and Simon Harak. I shall be the “moderator”, but they’ve also asked me to say a couple of things. (“Read Just World News!” “Here’s the URL for it!” … What? You don’t think that would suffice?)
It’ll be at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Amsterdam & 112th), at 7 p.m. Come if you can. You can download a flier for it here.
And while I’m writing about religion, war, and peace, I wanted to make sure and get in link here to this fascinating article, which appeared in the NYT last week. It’s by Charlottesville home-boy Charles Marsh. Actually, he’s not a “boy”; he’s a Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia.
The piece is titled Wayward Christian Soldiers, and it documents an important series of utterances made by various prestigious US Christian-Evangelical leaders, between the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, about the prospect of the then-imminent war.
Here’s what Marsh found:

Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president’s war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.
Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. “We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible,” said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. “God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” In an article carried by the convention’s Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that “American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
… [B]oth Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular “Left Behind” series, spoke of Iraq as “a focal point of end-time events,” whose special role in the earth’s final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that “God is pro-war” in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.
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…

One of the major points Marsh made was that in hewing to this vigorously pro-war line these preachers were flouting not only all the injunctions of the Bible and 2,000 years of Christian doctrine, but also (most likely) the views of that majority of the world’s Evangelical Christians who are not US citizens.
Representing that body of non-US believers, Marsh chose Rev. John Stott, an apparently much-admired Evangelical Anglican. He quotes Stott as saying, “Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization. I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval.”
H’mm, well, from my perspective that’s not exactly the expression of a vigorously Christian-pacifist message… And it is kind of notable that in those days of the build-up to war, I for one never heard Rev. Stott say anything that might have been read as a criticism of it. Unlike, for example, the Pope.
I should note too that when I was doing my research in Rwanda in 2002 I met and talked with a lot of (indigenous) Evangelical believers there– and none of them were pro-war, at all.
But still, the quotes Marsh has in his piece from those US Evangelicals’ pre-war sermons are certainly worth noting… Now, how about a little repentance from you, guys?