Brad Pitt & Jim Wallis

Brad Pitt’s new WWII film Fury is violent, vulgar, maybe not entirely realistic, but also inspirational. He’s a veteran tank commander pushing against heavy German resistance during the war’s final days. Inflicted with a dangerously raw recruit for his experienced tank team, Pitt compels him to shoot a German prisoner caught wearing an American’s coat. Trying to harden the young clerk typist, at one point he points to a burning German village, and he explains that the reality of the world is violence. Later, having passed the corpses of German civilians, including children, hanged by the SS for refusing to resist the Allies, Pitt orders the shooting of a captured SS officer whom a civilian identifies as the culprit.

Amusingly, one of Pitt’s tank crew members who likes to quote Scripture (and use the F word) confronts the new recruit with, “Are you saved?” The young novice responds, “I am baptized,” provoking the Bible quoter accurately to surmise, “You’re a Mainline Protestant, aren’t you?” It turns out later that the Pitt character also knows the Bible, chapter and verse, which is likely true for the real Pitt, who hails from a Pentecostal background.

The day after watching Fury I sat at a luncheon next to a distinguished 91 year old retired U.S. Army general who as a young officer commanded an infantry platoon in France and Germany during the war’s final year. I told him about the movie scene in which Pitt compelled shooting a German prisoner. The old General recalled some of his men didn’t want to take prisoners but as an officer it was his duty to restrain him. I also asked if soldiers then used the F word like a machine gun as most modern movies like Fury portray. Absolutely not, he insisted, they sometimes cussed but not like that. I asked if he knew before the war’s end how evil the Nazis really were. He said no, they were just enemies who needed killing, until his unit came across one of the death camps.

At war’s end, the old General, who served until 1982 and became U.S. Army vice chief of staff, was only age 21, about the age of the raw recruit in Fury, but a lieutenant who commanded several dozen other young men. Brad Pitt, age 51, was expert in the role but is the age of most generals in WWII, not the average sergeant. The average age of U.S. soldiers in WWII was reputedly age 26, with many officers often younger. So the movie, like all movies, was not completely authentic. But Pitt’s declaration of the world’s intrinsic violence was apt.

WWII was America’s finest moment, when it emptied simultaneously into Europe and the Asia its unlimited riches for the cosmic struggle against murderous tyranny. Trucks and food for Russia, ships and tanks for Britain, planes and ammo for China. Over 16 million Americans served in WWII, about 12 percent of the population, equal to over 36 million today. And over 400,000 Americans died in less than 4 years, equal to about 1.2 million today. The stakes of that war were epic. Ultimately it was a spiritual struggle, in which Providence deployed America’s wealth and ideals to save humanity from a millennium of darkness.

A sinister force in today’s world is of course ISIS. It is murderous and demonic but doesn’t pose a global threat like the AXIS powers of WWII. ISIS more resembles other homicidal, messianic regional death cults like China’s Boxer Rebellion or Sudan’s Mahdi, both of which provoked Western intervention. Both were anti-Christian, and ultimately anti-human. ISIS too will ultimately be defeated, and murderers can only be defeated by lethal force.

Religious Left icon Jim Wallis, who is a pacifist although he doesn’t like to admit it, has a different view on responding to ISIS in his recent Sojourners blog:

If alienated and angry young people, even in our own country, are being attracted to such a perverted cause because of perceived grievances, wouldn’t it make sense to discuss those grievances instead of burying our collective head in the sand? Instead of circulating the endless rhetoric of defending our values, we need to ask the hard questions about how we have violated those values for so many years in the Middle East — and about the consequences of our past foreign policy mistakes so we don’t repeat history.

Hmmm, which of ISIS’s “grievances” does Wallis hope to “discuss?” He apparently believes that ISIS is primarily a reaction to American misdeeds, and it offers a teaching moment, for self reflection, and maybe American repentance. America may have inadvertently facilitated the rise of ISIS by creating a power vacuum after quitting Iraq prematurely or not helping less vicious alternative Syrian opposition forces. But Wallis clearly doesn’t have that kind of responsibility in mind.

Wallis in a Time article faults ISIS on the Iraq War and America’s “oil economy.” But ISIS arose in Syria, which has little oil, but does have a vicious anti-American dictatorship aligned with Iran. Yet Wallis explains:

It is the injustices of Rome and subsequent super-powers that create the grievances that help create barbarians. The early Christians certainly didn’t side with the barbarians, but neither did they side with Rome: the Christians offered another way, and other alternatives.

Actually, Rome, whatever its faults, didn’t “create” barbarians, whose tribes long pre-existed Rome and eventually conquered Rome, much to the regret of most Christians at the time. The Brad Pitt character in Fury, observing the battlefield from his tank, was a better theologian than Wallis when he cited the world’s intrinsically violent nature.

Christians must proclaim the Gospel of peace and reconciliation with God. But there’ll never be a time when everyone is Christian. And Americans should advocate regimes of tolerance and inclusion. But there will always be homocidal, messianic forces, like ISIS, the Boxers, Mahdists, and, writ large, Naziism, that attempt to rule through murder and terror. Ultimately they are demonic rebellions against God’s created order. Such savagery cannot be mollified by misplaced guilt but, if allowed to fester, can only be exterminated.