Anti-war clergy should ponder their predecessors

Comparisons between different historical situations are tricky. But Joseph Loconte of the conservative Heritage Foundation sees a parallel between clergy who denounce military action against today's Islamic terrorists or tyrants, and their predecessors who opposed America's entry into World War II.

Loconte collects writings by clergy doves and hawks from 1938-1941 in "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm" (Rowman & Littlefield). It's fascinating material, whether or not one buys Loconte's belief that today's "threat of radical Islam is global, relentless and potentially horrific" and may justify military response.

Loconte's heroes include the "neo-orthodox" Karl Barth (1886-1968), a refugee from Nazi Germany who was generally considered Europe's leading Protestant theologian, and "Christian realist" Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), widely seen as America's top Protestant theologian.

Today it's hard to find a Protestant thinker with the stature of either man.

Barth opposed pacifism because the New Testament depicts the state as God's instrument to control evil and promote social peace (Romans 13:1-5, 1 Timothy 2:1-3). Since appeasement had failed, he wrote, Christians shouldn't just fight Hitler as a "necessary evil" but "approve it as a righteous war, which God does not simply allow but which he commands us to wage."

Niebuhr was especially interesting because he was a one-time pacifist and had to quit his longtime political home, the Socialist Party, after it decided American "imperialism" was so bad that no important principle was involved in challenging Hitler.

To Niebuhr, naive liberals saw no right or duty to defend their own civilization - which he acknowledged was morally flawed - to prevent "worse alternatives." In the Bible, he wrote, "human evil is recognized as a much more stubborn fact than is realized in some modern versions of the Christian faith" that obscure what Scripture says about fostering justice.

On the opposite side, moral opposition to war against Hitler was pursued by some of U.S. Protestantism's best and brightest. Today this is seen as folly. It required over-emphasisis on the evils of America and Western capitalism while ignoring Nazi conquest, oppression and deadly threats against Jews.

The doves were reacting against the devastation and apparent pointlessness of World War I. More basically, they had an idealistic, sentimental belief in human perfectibility that ignored the theology of human sin. Unlike those who advocated "isolationism," such clergy were internationalists but opposed American military engagement.

Among the prominent voices were Harry Emerson Fosdick of New York's Riverside Church, Federal Council of Churches leaders and The Christian Century, then as now an influential liberal Protestant weekly.

Century editor Charles Clayton Morrison wrote two weeks before Pearl Harbor pooh-poohing those who claimed Hitler was "such a megalomaniacal threat to the peace of the whole world that only his destruction would insure our national safety." Morrison said a U.S.-Britain military alliance would produce "the most ambitious imperialism ever projected" and a "program of world domination."

Though most of Loconte's selections come from Protestants, there's a remarkable editorial from 1940 in America, which remains an important Roman Catholic weekly. The magazine opposed aid to Britain since that would justify war against Germany and Italy, for which it saw no moral duty because America couldn't help Europe. Instead, it said, America should prepare to defend against the unlikely event of direct attack upon itself.

More notably, the Catholic magazine joined certain Protestants in asserting that if the country went to war "the guarantees of the American Constitution will be swept aside by a dictatorship.... Government under the Constitution, the American government of our fathers, would have ceased to be."

And in 1938, America acknowledged the Nazis' "frightful cruelty" against Jews as well as Catholics but said "that is no reason for going to war with Germany."

On the Net:

Loconte bio: http://www.heritage.org/About/Staff/JoeLoconte.cfm