Wayward Christian Soldiers

In a sorely needed critique from within Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia, the author of "The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today," and an American Evangelical, takes that movement to task in the New York Times op-ed pages. But Marsh measures Evangelicalism against its own standards instead of the faux-neutral, secular-humanist values typically deployed by the mainstream press.

Marsh gestures towards the wider moral ambiguities of the recent Evangelical political ascendancy but then zooms in tightly on their behaviour in the lead up to the Iraq war. With searing 20/20 hindsight he dissects Evangelical support for the invasion. His focus is not on the Robertson and Falwell carny show, but rather the mainstream pastors, missionaries and evangelists who publicly endorsed one of the least justifiable wars in US history.

Unlike the shrill secular voices whose critiques tend to broadly object to religion itself (the "religion is tolerable when practiced in private and between consenting adults" school), Marsh is able to highlight touchstones of Evangelical orthodoxy like the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 or the rich tradition of just-war theology or the nearest thing to an Evangelical pope, John Stott, and show how each speaks devastatingly powerfully against the invasion of Iraq.

Some of what he brings to light reminds one of the positive message that brought Evangelicals to prominence in the first place (and in spite of a persistently hostile media). The Lausanne Covenant proclaimed that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology." For its part, just-war theology demands that war always be the absolute last resort. John Stott referred Marsh to his writings in 1999, in which he said:

the Christian community's primary mission must be "to hunger for righteousness, to pursue peace, to forbear revenge, to love enemies, in other words, to be marked by the cross."

All in all it's a thoroughgoing demolition of the American Evangelical fevour for the Iraq war.

Moreover, Marsh can adroitly explain why Evangelicals got so far off base:

there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world.

Closely intertwined with that, the Evangelical slavishness to in-group/out-group thinking that let them down:

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.

There have been a number of pomo/New Age attacks on Evangelical hyper-sensitivity to group boundaries, but most centered on leftist omni-inclusive doctrines with a naively absolutist renunciation of boundaries of any kind that essentially demanded that all Christians convert to Unitarianism.

With contrasting groundedness and almost in passing, Marsh makes a compelling case for Evangelicals to rethink their culture of simplistic in/out litmus tests and does so on their own presuppositions. His reason: because it led them straight into heresy. The President talked the talk, passed the litmus tests and then ordered an illegal war of aggression that butchered 100,000 people in clear violation of everything the Church stands for, and Evangelicals jumped right on the bandwagon.

What Marsh's three year late op-ed implicitly critiques is the poverty of cultural-empathy in the mainstream press. After three years of ink spilt on the Iraq invasion and Evangelical support for it and for the President, it takes a guest opinion writer and an Evangelical himself to notice that, no, Evangelicals weren't founded around support for bloodshed, war, corruption and the status quo. In fact many pillars of Evangelical faith strongly contradict the Iraq war and always have!

The clarity, to an Evangelical, of Marsh's argument leaves one to wonder whether the mainstream media has overlooked such opinions for so long because they wanted Evangelicals to believe that supporting the Iraq war was "the Evangelical thing to do", perhaps in order to discredit them, or because of their fetish for controversial sound bites from "mooonbats" like Pat Robertson. Perhaps it was just the result of a secular press incapable of being in touch with half of the United States (and now reaping the Fox/Iraq whirlwind), but whatever the reason can we dispense in future with "we dislike your beliefs" articles and focus instead on "we think your politics are wrong and here's why" articles?

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