God and War After September 11
By Colman McCarthy
WASHINGTON--On Sept. 11 at American University, my class on nonviolence met at the usual time, 8:30 a.m. to 9:45. The topic was the connections between religious faith and government warmaking, with an essay on Biblical pacifism as the reading to be discussed. I brought to class a tape of “With God On Our Side,” sung by Joan Baez and written in the mid-60s by Bob Dylan.
Only a few students were familiar with it. The eight verses of the antiwar song trace pseudo-faith and militarism--the Indian wars, the Spanish American war, both world wars—and end with similar lines: “You never ask questions when God’s on your side.” “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” “Accept it all gravely with God on our side.”
None of us in class that morning knew of the death and chaos occurring five miles from campus at the Pentagon or in New York City. Nor did we suspect, when we did find out, that soon politicians in both Afghanistan and Washington, as though adding verses to the Dylan song, would claim that God is on their side.
Mohammed Hasan Aklund, the deputy Taliban leader, said: “If America attacks our homes, it is necessary for all Muslims, especially for Afghans, to wage a holy war. God is on our side, and if the world’s people set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”
Days later, an equally theistic President Bush ended his speech to a joint session of Congress with his slant on the Almighty’s current leanings: “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them…May God grant us wisdom and may He watch over the United States.”
Two Roman Catholic cardinals, a Methodist bishop, a rabbi and an imam rose to applaud Bush’s war talk. It wasn’t the God of Peace—the God of forgiveness, of mercy, of reconciliation, of love—who was invoked, but the God of War who blesses America and its military arsenal of Cobra attack helicopters, amphibious assault vehicles, F-22 Advanced Tactical fighter planes, B-2 bombers and nuclear missiles.
No clergyman from a peace church—Quaker, Mennonite, Church of the Brethren—was in the audience, nor were any summoned to the pulpit Sept. 14 at the national cathedral where Bush, his war planners and 3,000 invited guests prayed and sang five verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. None of the five men of the cloth who were at the pulpit delivered a call to embrace nonviolent responses to the Sept. 11 violence. As Christians Billy Graham and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prayed with fellow Christians Bush and Cheney in a Christian cathedral where am image of the crucified Christ hung high above the clerestory, I couldn’t help but remember an observation of the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ’s teachings as nonviolent are Christians.”
If piety and honesty were to be joined at the service, Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” should have been recited: “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; …blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, waste their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Sdource of love…Amen”
On Oct. 29, 1999, the National Cathedral hosted “The War Requiem” composed by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). A conscientious objector who refused, as a pacifist, to take up arms for the British military, Britten wrote: “Since I believe that there is in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy…human life, however strongly I may disapprove of the individual’s actions or thoughts. The whole of my life has been devoted to acts creation…and I cannot take part in acts of destruction.”
The National Cathedral, which erected a Peace Cross on its roof in 1898 to mark the end of the Spanish-American War, was the scene of Martin Luther King’s last Sunday sermon in 1968. It was an antiwar speech in which he called the U.S. government the world’s most violent. King began his ministry in 1957 in Montgomery with a sermon titled “Loving Your Enemies.” “We must recognize,” he said, “that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in your worst enemy…Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars…The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
King’s words have been echoed throughout the peace since his death. Jeanne Morin Buell, a longtime member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist and a former Catholic nun, wrote about the relationship between prayer, flags and war. Her essay, written in 1991 in “Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists”(Twayne, 1991) is uncannily relevant to the current blendings of supplication, pseudo-patriotism and militarism: “People have asked me, ‘what were you doing the day the bomb was dropped (in Hiroshima)?’ I just say, ‘I was absolutely oblivious of it.” It seemed to be part of the war. Christians through the centuries would pray that they would win the war, as though it were possible that you could win a war. When you wage a war and allow yourself to kill your enemy, how could you hope to be heard in prayer? This is one of the worst things that could ever have been perpetrated, the idea of praying for victory. There’s no way that praying to win a war could be a Christian thing. We began putting the American flags in from of the church; in a Catholic church it meant putting the papal flag on one side and the American flag on the other, like these were our two loyalties, not to God, mind you, not to our conscience, but the institution of the church and the country.”
Hours before his speech to congress, Bush invited members of the clergy to the White House for some pre-war fellowshipping. With so many reverends as willing court chaplains, folding hands in prayer one moment and clapping them to applaud war-preparing Bush the next, church and state came together once again. Instead of beating swords into plowshares, as the oft-quoted but ever-ignored Isaiah advised, the message now—with at least $20 billion instantly added to the war chest -- is beat the swords into bigger swords.
Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, teaches courses on nonviolence at Georgetown law school, American University, the University of Maryland and two high schools. His center has published two texts: “Solutions to Violence” and “Strength Through Peace.”