DAYS AFTER 9/11, a just war philosopher and I were interviewed on Christian radio. I’m a pacifist who served on peace teams in Nicaragua and Iraq. My co-interviewee called for waging war on “terrorists” because we must kill our enemies while loving them. My plea to listen to Jesus and victims of war was scorned.
Two compelling recent challenges to Christian justifications for war are Robert Emmet Meagher’s Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War and Stan Goff’s Borderline: Reflections on War, Sex, and Church.
Meagher, a humanities scholar, incorporates listening to veterans of war into his work. Goff writes as someone who was a soldier before being transformed by Jesus.
Three issues in both books—just war, masculine sexual violence, and moral injury—resonate with my peace team encounters with war. Through very different approaches, Meagher and Goff offer the best reflection on these concerns that I’ve seen; both rightly implicate the church.
First, just war has a sordid rather than sanctifying history. Meagher’s survey of ancient literature, scripture, and Christian history reveals its legacy as antithetical to Jesus’ teaching: “Since the time of Constantine...just war doctrine has served to license and legitimize state and ecclesiastical violence and to draw a convenient, if imaginary, line between killing and murder.”
Meagher documents the church’s role in envisioning and biblically supporting just war. He rightly calls just war a “deadly lie” that deludes us with the “possibility of war without sin.”
Goff confesses that, in his experience, waging war was not about defending or loving anyone, but about “martial manhood, a death cult, I’ve come to see, was my religion.” Speaking out of his current faith Goff proclaims, “Violence and domination characterize a world in rebellion. Yet we can embody the kingdom of heaven as the body of Christ—the peaceable kingdom—here and now, as testimony to the redemptive lordship of Christ to a broken world. That is where I start.”
Second, war is shaped by and shapes masculinity that perpetuates sexual violence and the domination of women consistent with domination of the enemy.
Drawing on history, culture, theology, feminism, and his combat experience, Goff unveils the perverse masculinity of war, declaring, “We cannot separate war and the contempt for and subjugation of women.” He names two questions as the themes of his book: “First, why have Christians been so warlike? Second, why do Christian men still caricature, dominate, misrepresent, condescend to, and dismiss women?” Goff beautifully counters the masculine war on women with Jesus’ way with women. His best biblical insight takes us to Jesus eating dinner with men (Luke 7:36-50) who were scandalized when a woman entered and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair. Jesus confronts them with the question: “Do you see this woman?” Goff confronts men now with this same question throughout his book.
Meagher helps us “come face to face with the sexuality of war and conquest” in ancient literature and church history. I longed for him to explore what it means to confront sexual violence in war today, but I understand that his task is writing an obituary for just war doctrine.
Third, in addition to the death and destruction suffered by victims of war, combatants are also wounded by war.
Meagher exposes the wounds of war known today as moral injury—“the violation, by oneself or another, of a personally embedded moral code or value resulting in deep injury to the psyche or soul.”
My experience listening to a mother’s heartbreaking story of her Iraq war veteran son who took his own life confirms Meagher’s claim: “Military suicide today is not some undecipherable, modern, or even postmodern aberration...it is the lamentable legacy of a long tradition of justified war and inevitable moral injury.”
Goff laments that “war, as a practice, does not inculcate honor as often as hatred, hostility, cruelty, and the fragmentation of the soldier’s personality. Bad soldiers do not make war a bad thing. War invariably makes soldiers do bad things, and we become what we do.”
Meagher and Goff both make clear that there can be no just war. Jesus calls us to become who we are in Christ, not what we do in war or because of war.
Weldon Nisly is a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, serving primarily in Iraqi Kurdistan.
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