War has captured our collective imagination. This is the first significant obstacle to a church that would proclaim that Christ has abolished war – we can hardly begin to picture a world without it. 

So, for us to even have this conversation, we must unveil the ways in which the narrative of war has permeated our language, our art, our history-writing, and our imagination. And then the church must offer an alternative to war that is as grand, as morally compelling.

A helpful voice in showing us our own addiction to the culture of war is former war correspondent Chris Hedges. Here is a brilliant, and disturbing, selection from his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

“I learned early on that war creates its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers – historians, war correspondents, film makers, novelists, and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it… The enduring attraction of war is this: even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us a resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.”

Until we realize how deeply war has ingrained itself into our imaginations, I fear that any talk of Christians being called to peace-making will be instinctively heard as utopian dreaming and inherently wrongheaded.

Over the weekend I was present for a discussion that perfectly illustrates my concern with how uncritically we assume that faith is compatible with war and nationalism.

An article was being passed around the living room during a family gathering, and as each person finished it they would, in turn, register their frustration and anger at the perceived injustice the article pointed out

That injustice?

Apparently the government vetoed some language that was going to be featured on new war memorials because it was overtly religious and, in the administration’s opinion, violated the separation of church and state.

Now I have my doubts about the ideological slant of the magazine, but the event in question probably did take place on at least something like those lines. But here is what worries me; what does it say about our understanding of faith, war, and nation that we would want to baptize war memorials with religious language in the first place?

Whether such language on our nation’s memorials would violate the sanctity of the secular state is not my concern – what about the possibility that placing religious language on monuments to mass killings and the exercise of violent state power violates the sanctity of the Bride of Christ?

Christ who called us to turn the other cheek, Christ who told Peter to lay down the sword, Christ who insisted that we go the second mile with the oppressor and not resist evil with evil.

How is it that the tension between the message of Christ and our embrace of war seems to be so easily ignored? Shouldn’t we at least see the necessity of asking the question, instead of somehow convincing ourselves that faith and war fit together so easily?

And that’s why I keep pressing this issue lately. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, far from it, but I do think we need to wake up to the tension.