In contrast with the United Methodist Board of Church and Society’s usual pacifist platitudes, two United Methodist bishops have made relatively thoughtful, careful statements on the Syria War.
Bishop Grant Hagiya of the Greater Northwest Conference urged joining Pope Francis’s call for fasting and prayer. And Hagiya avoided making a specific political recommendation. Instead, he said:
It is up to our government, and other foreign governments, to decide whether to intervene to stop these acts of violence by the Syrian leadership. This will most likely involve military intervention. Although we have the power of the prophetic voice, our main mission as a church is to seek peace, not war or violence. Our most important response at this time is to pray and ask for peace.
Bishop Elaine Stanovsky of the Mountain Sky Area (Denver, Colorado) made a similar call, saying:
Our political leaders will guide the actions of the nation as wisely as they are able. As Christian disciples are called unfailingly to pray and hope and work for peaceful solutions to human conflict.
Unlike the bishops, the Board of Church and Society was politically more specific, telling Congress: “Vote against an authorization of military force against Syria.” The board made no mention of the war’s impact on Syria’s Christians or any other substantive arguments.
The Syrian conflict, pitting a sadistic dictatorship backed by Iran and Hezbollah against an opposition inclusive of al Qaeda aligned jihadists, recalls another unsavory conflict that offered no clear moral choice. The U.S. and the other Western powers officially embargoed both sides in Spain’s 1930’s civil war, which foreshadowed World War II. Spain’s elected “Republican” regime included left-wing parties, including Communists, and was backed by Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. It also persecuted the Catholic Church. In opposition, General Francisco Franco led parts of the army in a National Front uprising against the government, backed by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
Methodism and much of official Mainline Protestantism, largely for pacifist reasons, backed the U.S. embargo against both sides in Spain. But more left-wing church elements sympathized with the Spanish Republicans and urged lifting the embargo, which they complained effectively favored the Nationalists. Methodist Bishop Francis McConnell, long affiliated with the Methodist Federation for Social Action, complained in 1937 to President Roosevelt that the embargo against Spain was “clearly discriminatory against the Spanish people and in favor of the Fascist powers.”
Methodists and Mainline Protestants seemed not to have said very much about Spanish Republican persecution of Catholics. In 1937 New York Methodism noted that the Spanish Church was reaping the “whirlwind” of a global militaristic spirit. A New York Times story at the time noted that Spain’s few Protestants had relative freedom under the Republican government and were spared the “excesses” waged against Catholics. “Loyalist Spain is certainly not anti-God but it certainly is anti-clerical,” it reported.
In 1939 seven Methodist and Episcopal bishops, joined by other religious officials, urged President Roosevelt to lift the Spanish embargo on behalf of the Americans Friends of Spanish Democracy, declaring: “By denying arms to the legitimate government of Spain we have assisted materially in prolonging the indefensible invasion of the Spanish peninsula.” They warned that if Franco won “we shall carry in our hearts a profound feeling of shame and sorrow for America’s share in the guilt of bringing about that victory.”
That same year 41 Methodist and Episcopal bishops implored the Pope to intervene with Franco, an “avowedly Christian and Catholic general” on whom the Pope had recently “invoked divine assistance,” against Franco’s threats of “un-Christian” reprisals against Republican prisoners. They warned of a “savage persecution by a cause that has been proclaimed a Christian crusade” And they said the “feelings of American Catholics must be especially painful when that persecution is in the name of their own religion.”
Franco’s Nationalists of course defeated the Republicans. His dictatorship sent “volunteers” to help Germany invade the Soviet Union but otherwise abstained from joining World War II, preventing Hitler from crossing Spain to reach British Gibraltar. Franco was a U.S. ally during the Cold War, and Spain became democratic after his death. Had the Republicans won the civil war, Spain possibly would have aligned with the Soviet Union, following a far different course.
As with Spain 75 years ago, nobody truly knows what Providence has in store for Syria. And church leaders are wise to abstain from dogmatic stances about the right U.S. policy towards Syria. Seemingly no likely path offers serious peace or freedom to the Syrian people. But we can pray God’s plan for the Syrians, especially the Christian minority, will be revealed graciously and soon.
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