The Wars of America:Christian Views

This blog is about the book The Wars of America: Christian Views edited by Ronald Wells.  Each war is analyzed by a professional historian, each an expert on a particular war.

In his Introduction, Wells makes the following observations:

"The way in which a nation wages war reveals a great deal about its basic values. . . .  That war should be as common to American history as to the history of other nations was a condition that many of the founding fathers did not anticipate.  It was their belief that the United States would be signally different from Europe in many ways, but especially in its elimination of war. . . . Jefferson wrote, "the nations of Europe . . .are nations of eternal war. . . .  never had a people so favorable a chance of trying the opposite system, of peace and fraternity with mankind and the direction of all our means and faculties to the purpose of improvement instead of destruction."

Why did these United States also become a nation of 'eternal war'?  In my opinion, this nation was driven by greed, by ethnocentrism and oppression, by the neglect of justice and the love of God to war after war after war.

George Marsden has a mind blowing chapter on The American Revolution.  Marsden writes:

"Christians in such countries . . .have characteristically been in the forefront in turning 'just wars' into such crusades.  These modern crusades, however, have not been ones in which the church dominates the world; rather the nation has set the agenda and the Christians have supplied the flags and crosses.."

"The American Revolution is a pivotal instance for understanding how modern nations have transformed supposed 'just wars' into secular crusades.  It is pivotal for considering other wars of America, since the patterns of nationalism and civil religion established at the time of the Revolution became important elements in the mythology that determined American's behavior in subsequent wars."  America's founding fathers claimed they were revolting against British tyrants; in reality, the founding fathers were already far worse tyrants---as slave holders and Indian killers---than the British tyrants ever were.  John Wesley recognized this fact and opposed the American Revolution.

Some final thoughts from Marsden:

"Yet the American revolutionaries had taken a good cause, the virtues of which they overestimated because of their partisanship and their political preconceptions, and they had vastly inflated its importance by sanctifying it with biblical imagery.  Thus the good cause, . . . became an idol."

"Perhaps the most important outcome of this process was that in it a new religion was born.  This new religion is the now-famous American civil religion in which the state is an object of worship, but the imagery used to describe its sacredness is borrowed from Christianity. . . .  Indeed it has been this close association of religion and politics that has been one of the greatest obstacles to a genuine Christian critique of the political order, specifically of its military ventures."

So in America, war is a national duty, a patriotic act; soldiers are our highest heroes, not community developers.

I highly recommend that you read this book two or three times; it is that important.