(Following are remarks in a Syria discussion with Just War theorist Father John Langan of Georgetown University on September 18 at St John the Baptist Catholic Church in Silver Spring, MD. Part of these remarks were published yesterday in Patheos.)
It’s a privilege speak here this evening, my first time to speak in a Catholic church. I confess I am a Protestant, specifically a United Methodist, and almost certainly I lack Father Langan’s exponentially larger expertise on Just War teaching especially from a Catholic perspective. But I I have been greatly involved with U.S. church approaches to war and peace across much of the last 25 years.
My own organization, the Institute on Religion & Democracy, was founded in 1981 during the Cold War partly to address these issues. We were and are ecumenical, and our founders and long time board members have included notable Catholic thinkers like Michael Novak, Richard Neuhaus, George Weigel and Robert George. IRD was initially a reaction to U.S. church bodies, mostly but not exclusively Mainline Protestant, that had aggressively adopted Liberation Theology to the extent that they funded and backed Marxist revolution in some countries while remaining silent about the persecution of Christians and other dissidents of conscience under totalitarian regimes. IRD countered that the church is not foremost a political body but when it does address society it should affirm human rights, especially religious freedom for all, which are typically best guaranteed under a constitutional democracy.
The Cold War, and most of those regimes, are thankfully gone. Yet there remains too much silence about global religious persecution. IRD from the start was and is concerned about how churches address war and peace. The Mainline Protestant world, which is really now demographically oldline or sideline, has been in its public witness functionally pacifist, having all opposed nearly all U.S. military action for the last 45 years since the Vietnam War, although pacifism is not the teaching tradition of these denominations. We continue to challenge these church officials on this point, especially as functional pacifism is now increasingly popular also among evangelical elites.
The prospect of U.S. military action against Syria’s dictatorship has unusually united in opposition nearly all U.S. church and major Christian voices who have publicly spoken to the issue. Such uniformity is very unusual, and this episode may be a first in modern U.S. church history.
Unlike liberal Protestants, evangelical groups and officials don’t routinely address foreign and military policy, instead focusing mostly on social issues. But polls have long shown that typically evangelicals have supported an assertive U.S. foreign and military policy.
Long-time Southern Baptist political spokesman Richard Land supported the U.S. led overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Iraq War critics commonly alleged that President George W. Bush’s bedrock core of evangelical supporters were the key constituency for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But this time, newly appointed Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore has declared that a proposed Syria military action does not meet Just War criteria. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, which does not ordinarily address foreign policy, has publicly agreed. So too has California megachurch pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren. The much less conservative National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) released a poll of its 100 member board showing a strong majority opposing Syria military action.
Representing America’s third largest religious body, Moore, an ethicist and theologian who previously was dean at one of the world’s largest seminaries, readily agreed that Syria’s dictatorship is “lawless and tyrannical,” so action against it would be just. But other Just War criteria have not been met, such as a likelihood of prevailing: “Right now, it seems the Administration is giving an altar call for limited war, without having preached the sermon to make the case.” He also cited “al-Qaeda sympathizers” in the opposition and their impact on Syrian Christians if they were further empowered.
Moore did not echo Libertarian critiques of U.S. military action, instead saying: “I agree with the President on the moral urgency of Syria, and I morally reject the crypto-isolationist voices that tell us, in every era, to tend to ‘America First’ and leave defenseless people around the world on their own.”
Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd, himself a conservative Southern Baptist, explained several reasons for evangelicals opposing U.S. military action in Syria: opposition to President Obama, war-weariness, and concern for Syrian Christians. Interestingly, Kidd also cites waning evangelical Dispensationalist beliefs about Israel’s role in the end times that has persuaded many evangelicals to strongly support U.S. policies helpful to Israel.
Maybe so. But concerns about Syrian Christians seem especially important among evangelicals. Typically U.S. evangelicals have not identified with or paid serious heed to the plight of Middle East Christians, who are mostly Orthodox, Oriental or Catholic. Recent turmoil in Egypt and Syria, as well as the earlier mass exodus of Iraqi Christians escaping from sectarian war, has ignited expanded interest in previously what were deemed exotic Christian communities. Under assault by Islamist violence, and with few remaining refuges, Middle East Christians are gaining new found interest and sympathy from U.S. evangelicals whose religious persecution interest in past decades focused on mostly communist countries.
Such new compassion in the U.S. for previously mostly ignored persecuted Christians is one of the very few upsides of recent Middle East strife. So too is a possibly more serious examination by evangelicals of Just War teaching. Fairly or not, evangelicals have been accused of reflexive support for U.S. military action. With Syria, evangelicals are defying the stereotype.
Yet reactions to Syria raise new questions for evangelicals especially about how to address U.S. foreign and military policy within a serious Christian Just War perspective. Many have cited statements by Middle East Christians leaders opposing U.S. strikes, opposition that no doubt is deeply sincere. But as a besieged and small minority, Middle East Christians can only speak in ways that don’t further undermine their position. Public opposition by them to U.S. and Israel is common. To do otherwise would be dangerous.
Political counsel from local church leaders in any region will reflect varying degrees of self-interest, coercion, limited wisdom and access to information as well as nationalist loyalties. Overseas Christians are no less fallible than U.S. Christians.
More complicated is whether U.S. Christians should prioritize U.S. interests, or even global security, over local Christians. German Christians during World War II, even if anti-Nazi, did not welcome the U.S. Eighth Air Force or U.S. troops crossing the Rhine. Russian Christians in the Cold War era Soviet Union officially denounced the U.S. and supported their regime. They had little choice, of course, but their statements may at times have been sincere. The U.S. could not easily if at all have defeated Nazi Germany without alliance with the Soviet, Union, likely the most murderous persecutor of Christians in history. Later in the Cold War the U.S. effectively aligned with communist China as a strategic ally against the Soviets, a regime that had tried, we now know unsuccesesfully, to expunge Christianity from China.
U.S. Christians, evangelical or otherwise, probably need to rethink and update the Just War tradition in an era of non-state terrorism, failed states, and proliferating weapons of mass destruction. Pacifist and pseudo pacifist church voices, some espousing “just peacemaking,” are increasingly popular but largely irrelevant to actual statecraft. Security is a moral imperative, and Christians are obliged to offer practical counsel in situations, like Syria, where there are no blatantly clear moral answers.
Recently our IRD emeritus board member Robert George of Princeton University channeled in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL the spirit of the recently deceased Just War expert Jean Bethke Elstain, a Lutheran turned Catholic at the University of Chicago, on what she would say about U.S. military force and Syria. She was aggressively supportive of U.S. military actions against terror states and groups, insisting that such action against terrorism was not a police action but war.
As George quoted her: “With our great power comes an even greater responsibility. One of our ongoing responsibilities is to respond to the cries of the aggrieved. Victims of genocide, for example, have a reasonable expectation that powerful nations devoted to human rights will attempt to stay the hand of the murderers.”
George surmises that Elshtain “would not have accepted the isolationist idea that the use of poison gas or other means to murder innocents is none of America’s business. She recognized that a powerful and prosperous nation bears great moral responsibilities that transcend its borders.” Elshtain recognized that Just War insists on not only just cause but also the likelihood of improving the situation. George didn’t identify exactly what Elshtain would urge on Syria. But separately on Facebook, George explained that that the full battery of Just War qualifications seem not to justify U.S. military action at this time, with jihadists now more prominent in the opposition, and with the Administration unwilling to declare a clear purpose for such action beyond symbolic disapproval of chemical weapons.
In a similar vein, another emeritus IRD board member George Weigel recently wrote in NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE:
Some scholars and analysts with extensive knowledge of the tradition and of international politics would say yes, given the gravity of Assad’s crimes; those mounting this argument are often far more serious in their reasoning and argumentation than the administration. Others, myself included, would say no, because of a thoroughgoing skepticism about the administration’s current ability to connect such an action (deserving of retribution as the Assad regime is) to a morally and strategically defensible goal. Reasonable people, well versed in the just-war way of thinking and in a sober analysis of international realities, can and will disagree on this specific question of prudential judgment. But those same reasonable people can also agree that a fundamental recalibration of U.S. and allied goals in Syria is the absolute prerequisite to prudent policy in the future — including the future that is next week, and next month.
Weigel goes on to warn that the Just War tradition is “not a matter of moral algebra, providing clear and obvious answers to questions plugged into moral equations” but a “tradition of moral reasoning is more like calculus: in this instance, a calculus aimed at illuminating prudential judgment.” So there’s no promise of “indisputable moral answers to the conundrums of statecraft, save on the rarest occasions.” He writes that “statecraft, and especially international statecraft, is not a matter of theoretical reason and its clarities, but of practical reason.”
Many citations of Just War deploy it abstractly as a clutch on any conceivable use of force, since perfect situations exactly matching all criteria never exist. Weigel insists that Just War is concerned not just about principles but also the practical. He says:
A measure of clarity about the morally and politically appropriate end being sought by those who legitimately bear responsibility for the common good — those who have what we might call moral compétence de guerre — is thus the absolute prerequisite to considering appropriate means intelligently.
The Assad regime is one of the most brutal and despotic in the world, perhaps exceeded only by North Korea and a few others in absolute terror. Across over 40 years it has combined the worst of fascism, nationalism and Islamistism (its reputed secularism is relative to neighboring regimes). It’s repressed its own people, occupied parts of Lebanon for decades, assassinated Lebanese leaders among other acts of terror beyond its own borders, aligned with Hezbollah and Iran, and facilitated the passage of jidhadist fighters into Iraq to kill Ameicans and Iraqis during the worst of the sectarian violence. It has chemical weapons, which it has murderously deployed, and it had a nuclear program, that an Israeli strike seems to have neutralized. The Assad dictatorship deserves to be defeated and overthrown.
But does the U.S. have the effective power, will and vision to achieve Assad’s removal with at least the promise that a successor regime will be at least slightly better? And should the U.S. seek his overthrow through direct military action or through primarily covert help for opposition forces? At what point could some aspect or combination of U.S. pressure facilitate a negotiated departure for Assad? And if the U.S. remains completely non-interventionist, effectively inviting both sides to kill each other indefinitely, who will benefit, if anybody, and who will lose the most?
The Just War teaching offers no clear answers for these questions but it does offer counsel that aims to guide prudent judgments by policy makers. We can pray that counsel is heeded wisely while also anticipating in our fallen world the remedies for war and horrors are only partial and never satisfactorily complete.
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