A Review of Jean
Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of
American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books,
2003)
By
Douglas Morgan
(November 8, 2004—From the fall
2004 issue of Spectrum)
In Just War Against Terror, Jean Bethke
Elshtain bases her appeal for American Christians to support
their government’s war against terrorism on the venerable
and honorable tradition of "just war" reasoning.
In a lively and succinct style, the book showcases the process
of appropriating that just war heritage, developed during
the medieval centuries to regulate the running of a Christian
empire, as an instrument for Christian moral perspective on
running the American republic. Serious reservations emerge
about the adequacy of that process when considered in the
light of the earliest sources of the Christian faith.
Elshtain’s polemic expands on (and includes
as an appendix) the statement "What We’re Fighting
For" (WWFF) signed in February 2002 by sixty scholars
and public policy experts and directed against critics of
the Bush administration’s militant approach to the struggle
against terrorism. WWFF affirms five foundational principles
about human rights and religious freedom, the last of which
states: "Killing in the name of God is contrary to faith
in God and is the greatest betrayal of the universality of
religious faith."
Elshtain and her cosignatories do not view the
military action they endorse as "killing in the name
of God," presumably because Western democracies have
secularized the state, freeing it from ecclesiastical control.
As a Christian interested in what it means to live in congruence
with the good news about the in-breaking of the kingdom of
God proclaimed in the New Testament, trying to sort out what
citizenship in heaven (Phil. 3:20) means for living on earth,
I don’t find the distinction between killing for God
and killing for American values finally persuasive.
It is unconvincing, first of all, because Christians
who support the project of American world hegemony retain
a profound moral and spiritual bond with the nation, notwithstanding
formal separation of church and state. WWFF expresses this
point quite explicitly, observing that though we have a secular
state, "we are by far the Western world’s most religious
society"—a society whose citizens pledge allegiance
to "’one nation under God.’" Separation
of church and state frees religion from state control, which
in turn causes "government itself to draw legitimacy
from, and operate under, a larger moral canopy that is not
of its own making" (187–88).
In view of the monstrous and insidious threat
posed by international terrorism, human freedom and dignity
need a powerful guarantor, says Elshtain, and only the United
States has "the power and (we hope) the will to play
this role" (167). To protect the values that matter most
from the evil that threatens most, American Christians must
rely upon and support American military power, thus providing
the legitimizing "moral canopy" (143–44; 166–73).
Elshtain’s approach moves beyond the model
of direct Christian empire symbolized by Constantine, and
also beyond the Reformation pattern of territorial rulers
establishing their choice among the various versions of the
faith in the now divided Christendom (neo-Constantinianism).
However, it manifests what John Howard Yoder called "neo-neo
Constantinianism." The rhetoric of the current administration
bears out more powerfully than ever Yoder’s observation
that "American patriotism remains highly religious.…Moral
identification of church with nation remains despite institutional
separation. In fact, forms of institutional interlocking develop
which partly deny the theory of separation (chaplaincies,
tax exemptions)" (The Priestly Kingdom, 142).
To declare a war "just" through a process of Christian
moral discernment confers upon it sacred legitimacy even if
fought in the name of democratic values rather than Christianity
as such.
Moreover, although she seeks to affirm moderate,
democracy-compatible Muslims, Elshtain’s call to arms
is on behalf of Western democratic institutions—built
on the Christian distinction between church and state—struggling
against the fusion of religion and sword she sees at the core
of the Islamic tradition. In other words, the war on terror
is a clash of civilizations. She quotes Andrew Sullivan’s
delineation of the stakes in the struggle. As with Nazism
and communism, writes Sullivan, we are faced with "yet
another battle against a religion that is succumbing to the
temptation Jesus refused in the desert—to rule by force."
How to take cognizance of this reality "without descending
into a religious war mentality" is a question Elshtain
raises but never clearly answers (139–40).
"Mohammed was his own Constantine,"
she observes disapprovingly (159). My question is, When Christians
bless the military crusade for liberal democracy/American
hegemony, have they not allied with a new Constantine?
Have they not succumbed to the temptation in the desert, thereby
surrendering one of the most crucial distinctions between
their faith and that of Islam?
Second, Elshtain’s use of the laudable
distinction between church and state that developed in Western
Christendom opens the way to fragmentation and constriction
of Christian identity and loyalty. She asserts that, in contrast
to the Islamic Shari’a, Christianity "never presented
a comprehensive, all-encompassing law good for all societies
and covering every aspect of human existence" (29).
Although partially true in some respects, the
statement is also seriously misleading. It implies that the
gospel is irrelevant to some aspects of human existence, in
which the guidance of Christians is ceded to an autonomous
realm of "civil law." The apostolic communities
glimpsed in the New Testament, along with Christian movements
throughout history inspired by the apostolic ideal, embodied
a wholistic faithfulness to the way of Christ determinative
of economic practices, juridical functions, and societal relationships
(see, for example, Acts 4:32–37; Acts 6:1–6, 1 Cor.
6:1–11; 11:17–22; Eph. 2:11–22; 2 Thess. 3:10–12).
Duke University scholar Richard Hays writes
that the New Testament presents the church as "a countercultural
community of discipleship … called to embody an alternative
order that stands as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes
in the world" and as such is a "concrete social
manifestation" (The Moral Vision of the New Testament,
196). Opting out of the system of empire building through
violence and coexisting with the dominant order rather than
trying to smash it did not make the church any less a concrete
political alternative or mean that it had no "law"
to guide members concerning participation in the empire’s
military agenda.
Wherever it ends up, it seems to me that Christian
moral reasoning has to start with and prioritize the question
of what it means to be the people of God constituted in accordance
with the New Testament witness and not with short-term calculations
about protection of American interests or even the lives of
the "innocent" (which usually involves protection
of only some innocents, selected along national, tribal, or
religious lines).
That conviction lies behind the third major
reason why I think Just War Against Terror fails to
offer satisfactory guidance to American Christians. It makes
inadequate use of the resources of the New Testament and the
pre-Constantinian Christian movement, instead drawing theological
light primarily from the wisdom of great thinkers from later
periods such as Saint Augustine, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold
Niebuhr.
For Elshtain, Jesus’ teachings aren’t
of much use to Christians facing the complex challenges of
today’s world. He "preached an ethic for the end
of time" that directed his disciples "away from
temporal pursuits." Not only that, "Christ’s
ethic seems unattainable in principle, save by the few saints
among us" (99–100). She also tells us that "Jesus
preached no doctrine of universal benevolence" (100).
Some distinction must exist to explain why "love your
neighbor as yourself" and "love your enemies"
do not add up to a doctrine of universal benevolence, but
we are not given it.
One gospel passage does receive considerable
weight in Elshtain’s reasoning: "Render unto Caesar
that which it Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s"
(Luke 20:24–25). However, she foregoes serious analysis
of this cryptic saying in historical and literary context,
instead simply invoking it repeatedly as proof that Jesus
affirmed a wide gulf between church and state (for instance,.
28–30, 159). Other resources—such as Augustine,
Luther, and liberal democratic theory—determine what
is to be placed on either side of the gulf.
Elshtain also has little use for pre-Constantinian
Christian voices in the second and third centuries, and badly
misleads the reader concerning the evidence from this era.
She contends that the claim that Christianity was a pacifist
movement during its first three centuries and subsequently
fell away from its nonviolent origins "does not bear
up under close scrutiny." In support of this contention,
she offers only a dismissal of Tertullian and Origen as "outside
the Christian mainstream," after which she immediately
points the reader to the more "powerful" and "more
mainstream" teachings of Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose,
and Saint Thomas Aquinas (51).
Of course, all of these teachers come after
the first three centuries of Christianity and the Constantinian
revolution—a fact that a reader uninformed or rusty on
church history would be forgiven for overlooking. Without
definite knowledge of when these men lived, the natural assumption
would be that the whole paragraph deals with the first three
centuries.
Although there is evidence of some scattered
Christian participation in the military beginning in the late
second century, prior to Constantine "all of the outstanding
writers of the East and West repudiated participation in warfare
for Christians" (Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes
Toward War and Peace, 68–73). In other words, Elshtain’s
"mainstream" did not exist before the Constantinian
revolution.
To be strong and credible, a Christian case
for adapting the just war heritage to American democracy must
address, much more effectively than Elshtain has, the issues
of sacred legitimization of democracy, the wholistic, communal
character of Christian ethics, and the pre-Constantinian witness.
I must leave to other respondents analysis of Elshtain’s
application of just war principles to the contemporary situation.
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