1. It begins at creation: We are made to be children of God—in Semitic thought, to be a child is to bear the characteristics of the thing signified…From Genesis to the Sermon on the Mount, we see within this a mandate — to exercise dominion over the earth.
2. Dominion is not domination. Dominion is responsible stewardship — we will see this mirrored in the political sovereign’s responsibility to provide for the justice and order — collectively, the peace — of their people.
3. A portion of dominion is seen in Adam naming each creature according to their kind. This can be seen to be an example of the responsibility to call things what they are — to be a truth-teller who accurately represents reality.
4. Human beings are sinners. We tend toward turning away from a love of God manifest by our willingness to exercise dominion for the good of creation and we turn instead toward a lust to dominate others for the good of ourselves.
5. God, in His grace, did not leave us without recourse: we have the divine law and the natural ability to know right from wrong. Because of our sinfulness, we do not always know right from wrong perfectly. Sin has damaged our ability to know it, but it has also damaged our perfect willingness to admit right from wrong. We sometimes lie even to ourselves about the nature of reality and our responsibility in it.
6. In addition to divine and natural law, God has also given us the sword — the sovereign’s right use of coercive, sometimes lethal force to protect the innocent and to restrain and resist evil. Among much else, the bible teaches us that the right to life is the first right, and the freedom of worship is the first freedom (canticle of Zechariah). The government has a positive duty to protect such rights and freedoms. Without the goods of justice and order, no other good — like life or freedom to worship — can be guaranteed.
7. War is a last resort—this requirement means that prudent soft and hard power short of war should always be employed toward the goal of peace. We see this in Paul’s injunction to “be a peacemaker in so far as it depends on you.” But “as it depends on you” is a both a demand and a limit. “Depends on you” includes the idea of “being who you are.” We are, remember, children of God. This means we must abhor evil and love goodness. This requires that we admit that sometimes peace is not up to us. Our enemies have a vote.
8. America is uniquely positioned to exercise leadership in the world. There is no silly binary choice to be made between “bread” or “bombs.” With great power comes great responsibility. But, more than that, it is a Christian truism to cultivate our gifts and natural talents. To not do so is to hold them in contempt. America has been given an enormous capacity to cultivate power. We have a responsibility to cultivate that power — governed by the responsibility to not jeopardize our other duties by doing so. Power is not an evil. It is a good that can be perverted, like all other goods. American power need not mean a zero sum game between humanitarian concern and national security interests. We can — and often have — do both.
9. When we fight, we have to exercise fidelity to a triad of goods: force protection, mission effectiveness, and noncombatant immunity. Given the reality of moral injury, force protection might include accepting greater physical risks in order to fight with greater margins of concern for the innocent — and thereby, increasing our warfighters’ spiritual safety.
10. Prudence and wisdom must prevail, with sobriety of intent; human history shows the horror of trying to achieve the ideal, God is finally in charge of history and He alone has the final responsibility and prerogative to rescue.
11. (sorry, a freebie) Moral decision making is not simply a matter of absolute rules that we can pursue as if moral life was a matter of following a checklist. We are moral agents, not bureaucrats. Context, intent, and consequence all matter.
Marc LiVecche, PhD is a Stockdale Fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy and Executive Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & Amercan Foreign Policy. He is also a McDonald Research Scholar at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, & Public Life; Christ Church, University of Oxford (in residence 2018-2020)
Comment by Lee Cary on August 19, 2020 at 1:38 pm
A very fine piece. Thank you.
“9. When we fight, we have to exercise fidelity to a triad of goods: force protection, mission effectiveness, and noncombatant immunity.”
The first of the “triad of goods” to be compromised is “noncombatant immunity”.
When the British and Canadian forces eventually captured the city of Caen, France from the German Army after the Normandy Invasion, they left 30,000 dead French men, women and children citizens among the rubble, largely from allied bombing. The hideous term today is “collateral damage”. Today, the skeleton of a large cathedral sits inside a fence in downtown Caen as a reminder of the carnage that war delivered upon noncombatants.
WWII wasn’t the last war that failed to assure noncombatant immunity. All other wars since have likewise failed.
Noncombatant immunity is the highest ideal associated with warfare. But it’s not been achieved in the past, and, sadly, is not likely to be achieved in the future.
American Civil War Union General William T. Sherman knew; he said “War is hell.”