on war and religion
What I'd like to consider today is if religion starts war and war returns the favor by eradicating religion.
Admittedly, this is a divisive thought to some, but I couldn't help thinking about it just this past Sunday. Simon Schama was on the radio talking about his recently published book The American Future: A History. I had been fortunate enough to catch the book when it was a four-part documentary on BBC America earlier this year.
Schama is a historian and professor at Columbia University. British by birth, he offers a particularly objective take on American history that is at times understanding verging on sympathetic. Each part of the documentary series corresponds to a chapter in his book, and, by the radio interview, contains much of the same information. Schama has chosen to frame the American narrative around four central themes, loosely (and varyingly) codified as American abundance, war, religion and immigration.
The interview was intriguing and Schama's easy-speaking academia is pleasant enough to listen to while heading to church, but he said one line when speaking of religion that distinctly caught my attention.Schama notes the British tendency to caricaturize Americans as rabid about their religion. As an aside he rightly notes that the British were equally devout in their own religious habits before World War II.
As a Southern evangelical, I can remember hearing sermons decrying the advance of religious antipathy (and its fraternal twin apathy) in England. It was a cautionary tale, often quoting dubious sources and futurists who saw America on a similar pattern of decline in the area of Christian zeal. It was, as some have said, "true enough" to find an audience. It was no secret that the clergy who once played prominent roles in British literature and popular culture were usurped for James Bond and other men of intellect and valor--the Christian religion was relegated to a minor character in the public sphere.
Admittedly, religious liberty and the separation of church and state prevent this from being an equal comparison, but what struck me most in Schama's cursory remark was the question of whether or not war erodes civil understandings of religion.
This of course, is not merely limited to Britain. Only two weeks ago the "men's magazine" GQ claimed to have obtained classified military documents from none-other than Donald Rumsfeld that showed various scenes of soldiers, tanks and battle, all with handpicked Scriptures to add a sense of divine legitimacy to the Iraq War.
Religion has long been channeled as a justification for war, be it on the basic truth claims of one particular religion, or merely through an appeal to the moral and ethical responsibility of its adherents.
"War is hell" is the refrain across any number of ages, though precious few have reasonably considered "war AS hell".
In a "Suffering and Evil" class my last semester of seminary, we spent the better part of the semester languishing between competing theodicies. Though natural disasters and other "acts of God" seriously undermine most popular thought, the predominant metaphor for evil on a global scale was and is always war.
It would only follow that if war represents not only the abiding presence of evil in the world, but the gravitational force that pulls all parties to partake, on some level, in shared evil--it can only, naturally, erode the work of the Kingdom of God in the world.
At it's most basic level, war is destruction--as Mark in the musical Rent so resolutely affirms "The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation."
I'm no historian, but I know enough to know that the US, though it encountered many losses, never knew the full horror of bombs being dropped across the mainland landscape. London knew quite a different story. I'm not convinced that those two things aren't somehow related.
The horrors of war erode not only our belief in a benevolent God but our most basic belief in progress--that things can and will actually be better. It unmasks our heavenly perceptions of what could be as what is is slowly bombed out and destroyed before our eyes.
When I was in seminary our Mission and Evangelism class took an immersion trip to Belgium and a side-trip to Coventry Cathedral in England. the roofless ruins above show the reality many of my friends beheld--a literal shell of what once was a glorious cathedral, rent apart by the metal and powder of German bombs.
What stands here literally may well also stand metaphorically--what remains of British Christianity is a shell of what once was--less because of secularization and apostasy, more that the realities of war make it all the more difficult to look heavenward.
On American soil, at least in my generation, the vulnerability suddenly felt in the wake of 9/11 was but a taste of that kind of conflict, and yet it was enough to shake the faith of any of us.
It may well be that the work of the Church in our time is not crusades for souls but tending the wounded psyches of men and women who bear the wounds of all manner of wars.
It may be that our task is once again to commit to the dream of the Kingdom
It may be time to commit to creation and growth, not contraction and ideology.
It may be the last, best, and only hope we have.
