Benjamin Franklin knew a lot about kites and electricity. And he wrote enough pithy sayings to forever confuse them in the mind of the Biblical speed reader with Solomon’s opus. But he has come to occupy the comedian’s end of the Audubon spectrum for his promotion of the Turkey for National Bird. I still remember the almost testosterone thrill that went through the construction crew on my summer job a few decades ago each time the boss announced that the eagle was about to fly. Shakespeare aside, I don’t think a dollar by any other name would fly. What was Ben thinking of? Not F16s and the projection of power, I’ll warrant.
Gauging the national mood is always an inexact science. They say that elections do it well; but when only a minority of a population actually votes the result can be less than definitive. I’ll admit to gleaning some of my benchmark opinions about public mood from such things as supermarket checkout-counter publications, what people are watching on the TVs in auto sales showrooms, and what the callers are offering on talk radio. .” 
And let me tell you, the talons are out. This bird of pray(sic) is ready to stretch its wings a bit and do what eagles are supposed to do. After all, it’s the American way. The way God meant it to be!
Excuse my note of irony, but I have to inject some, since those same sentiments as I’ve been hearing them on talk radio don’t carry anything but certainty.
Every week Liberty hosts a one hour radio program aired on Sirius satellite radio. We call it Life Quest Liberty. The topics are varied. The response also varies with the topic. However things came alive last week when we discussed pacifism and the right to be a conscientious objector to war. I was surprised by two things. First and happily there was no particular animosity to conscientious objectors—mostly I fear because they have become invisible if not absent. The second surprise was the easy acceptance of the notion that any war we wage is just and is the natural right of a Christian nation. In fact it was said that we are fulfilling God’s will for our national destiny this way.
There is a naiveté in this that I find baffling. We are, after all, engaged in a very real struggle with an emergent form of Islamic radicalism which hold that decapitating civilians and blowing up men, women and children in various suicide attacks is the very will of God and absolutely justified because it will advance the cause of piety. We call this terrorism and right-thinking Muslims decry it as anything but the will of God.
Surely, for our good sons to be enlisting in any state-sponsored militarism—no matter how justified by legitimate national interest—with the idea that this is furthering God’s will is to tread into the mindscape of the current enemy. I am reminded of the old hymn, which called to piety with the line “not with sword’s loud clashing; but with deeds of love and mercy.”
A lifetime ago now, people of faith had to face the militarism which eventually engulfed all of Europe and most of the rest of the world in World War II. Historians know that most of our present moral certitude about its issues was absent or constantly shifting in the buildup to war. Americans forget that at times they were inclined in sympathy to Germany, that in spite of ongoing manipulation of public opinion by both Churchill and Roosevelt, it took Pearl Harbor to precipitate action—at which point warfare with Germany, the Axis partner, was automatic.
We forget that news of the Holocaust, while it began to filter out before war’s end, was not truly realized till occupying troops stumbled upon the camps. We also now know that for several “good reasons”—such as a desire to bottle up the refugees in Europe and complicate German logistical problems, America and England restricted Jewish emigration and public knowledge of the situation.
We forget, too, that dealing at first from the frustration of weakness but later from the arrogance of power the allies resorted to wholesale firebombing of civilian centers in both Germany and then Japan. Robert McNamara sadly recounts in a recent documentary discussions he and others had at that time; hearing that if they were to lose the war they would be convicted as war criminals. Thankfully we had Nuremburg and the end of Nazism. But my point is that the moral landscape of war is not clear-cut—and we do the devil’s business by claiming a mandate from God in its prosecution.
Abraham Lincoln remarked famously on the fact that in the civil war both sides prayed to the same God for help and felt they had His backing. They could not both be on the side of the Almighty. Maybe God and Heaven sighed equally at the horrors of both combatants.
I have long been inspired by the moral leadership shown by the Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer as his country underwent a moral inversion and followed the Nazi leadership into the horrors of National Socialism. But I was impressed again the other day as I viewed a documentary tracing how Bonhoeffer resisted to the point of imprisonment in a death camp and to his eventual execution. (The mistake I think he made as a Christian was to become somewhat complicit in an attempt to assassinate Hitler.) The documentary had actual footage of church leaders—Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and other major protestant denominations—giving the Nazi salute and swearing fealty to the Fuehrer. Churches integrated, literally, the swastika into the cross.
Leaders told the faithful that it was God’s will they support the state. They even decried the various plots against Hitler as against God. It was eerie to hear Hitler say that Christianity was the bedrock of the German state. And it is always salutary to remember how that nation rode toward the abyss on a false call to moral values—values that we well see now were wrested from both a sense of humanity and a true sense of the Divine.
It seems that the war in Iraq—regardless of its strategic necessity or political context—is destined to be as testing of the United State’s self image as Vietnam was. Vietnam took place in an era when a generation questioned the spectrum of values presented by their political leaders and all authority figures. The draft brought the debate quite literally into the conflict. With an all volunteer army the debate largely disappears. It seems we are to be spared this time the sad rejection of the soldiers by large segments of the population. But equally we have been spared the debate over the use of violence itself and a conscientious objection, whether the individual is relieved of moral responsibility, and of course the whole debate over how this comports with a view of God’s will. I am not so sure that a lack of debate is healthy.
The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins long ago painted a wonderful portrait of the moral landscape we inhabit—as well as the higher values we need to acknowledge—in “God’s Grandeur.”
I pray that somehow out of this time of trial we will reexamine our view of God and how we advance His cause in this era of shock and awe.
Lincoln E. Steed
Editor,
Liberty Magazine
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