The Faith Knot of Nationalism vs. Peace: The Militarization of our Youth as Opposition to the Message of Christ

When my daughter was a senior, I received a handout from the school stating that if I didn’t wish for military recruiters to contact my daughter, I would need to sign the paper, otherwise it would be assumed to happen. I immediately thought it should be the other way around. (Sign only *if* you want your child to be contacted.) But, it’s just one more easy way to depend on the odds a parent will forget, or a child would lose the paper, or that parents would read the letter and recognize it as an unusual, or less common response to make the extra effort to sign it. It wasn’t included in the beginning of the year electronic documents; how convenient. But here it was, the casual first glance into how to move into our young people’s developing minds and begin the psy-ops of recruitment. And make no doubt about it, it is a sophisticated psychological operation that begins outside the realm of the actual training, and it starts with our youth, newly on the threshold of becoming who they will be in the world…

My partner and I have and will discourage our children to enlist in the military. We have one adult child, and one new high schooler. As adults, they will make more of their own choices, but as l long as I have the obligation as a parent of deep faith to raise them, I refuse to encourage or allow space for my own children, let alone another generation of young people, to be sent off to kill and die in bloodbaths of unending, hopeless wars and battles around the globe. I don’t want them to play any role in the military, direct or indirect, in such an endeavor. The ongoing wars we have currently are perpetual, and for no reason that is rooted in love and goodness, but rather by interests benefiting power. We have to teach our children how to say no, but we don’t often think that would be relevant when it comes to military recruiters. Indeed, it does. I will teach my children to say no to the well organized military recruitment (propaganda) machine preying upon vulnerable, malleable minds, waving the stars and stripes, calling it a patriotic duty to fight only to be pawns in the military industrial congressional complex. I remain unconvinced that it is worth one dime of benefit for even an ounce of risk of trauma. No, not in a country that has billions of dollars for bombers, but people with no financial means to pay burdening hospital bills. It is not a free ticket to college, or a job training program alone. It is, as it boils down to its bottomline, and fundamental mission, a job to fight and win wars…to train to kill and risk being killed, and injured for that matter, physically or psychologically. No matter what the MOS, no matter what the path, the bottom line is the ultimate point. So, yes, I have, and will sign the documents my children receive from their schools refusing recruiters from contacting my children, knowing they may covertly guilt trip them into “being independent” rather than relying on the money we saved specifically for their post secondary education plans. I will stand against the militarization and intrusion of recruitment when there are many more peaceful, viable ways to succeed in life without it, than to take on a role of a system bent on power, might, and othering. Our youth, no matter how well they are convinced, do not need the military to succeed in life.

I am married to a veteran who spent 10+ years in the Army and Army National Guard on top of three years and counting in volunteer service with the Civil Air Patrol, and has spent his career in law enforcement. He has talked with me about the painful reality of knowing his role individually, as honorable as it may be, and the role of the agencies as entireties he struggles to reconcile his life calling with. I pray daily for his heart, and his health, all of which have been damaged by such experiences and turmoil, even as he sees the benefits he had to make the best of…even as he has strived to be a light in dark places. He knows he has my support. I am a Christian who believes deeply in the message of peace, and that living into the not yet involves a clinging to the hope that one day, we will fulfill the prophecy, so impossible to see, of Is. 2:4. I believe we must be able and willing to criticize the systems (and see beyond their promises) that perpetuate war and violence, even as we love and support those who are in it (and one could argue we all are in one way or another). So many have made sacrifices with their lives and health to serve in the military. I even pondered myself at one time how I might follow a calling in chaplaincy with the Air Force, as a way to provide presence for the struggles our soldiers indeed endure in the complexity of the government they are accountable too, as well as what they witness. I have friends, family, as we all do, whom we love, hold dear, and honor for their service and sacrifice. But we should not be blind to the larger complexity that is this nation’s military complex. The entanglement of realities within these realities are part of what makes being human such a challenge. But, God is with us, soldier or not. Might I have felt differently in the 1940’s? Perhaps. But Dwight D. Eisenhower was correct when he stated in 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Indeed it has. Eisenhower also said formerly, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

I have become aware, partly because of the very nature of my identity as a follower of Christ, of the dangers of American nationalism, militarism, and imperialism that hold us captive to a patriotism of loyalty to country over others, loyalty to country above faith- when that faith is blended into a false loyalty to God through American Glory, fooling groups of Christians into thinking their patriotism of nationalism is somehow ordained by God. (Think 4th of July celebrations in churches.) Such a justification is often noted by a misinterpretation of Romans 13. Context would help us more wisely discern that it is not the case. God does not insist upon our complete obedience to government. A deeper understanding reveals that it is rather the case that no government is ever given a moral endorsement by God, and that in reality, governments as independent agencies, do indeed waver from their calling. Context in Romans 12 reminds us of the call to not be conformed to the ways of the world. It is not in suffering of war that we triumph over evil, but it is suffering by Love that we do. (See John Howard Yoder’s book, “The Politics of Jesus”.) Jesus was a visionary. His vision was social, and political, resistant, but it was not violent. Jesus taught about and embodied one of the most sacred words and actions ever spoken and implemented: mercy.

This is how we try, and fail, as humans to live into Christ’s calling to give up our own desires. It is only human to be drawn into the deception of a winning culture and power through what’s rationalized as “acceptable” violence in the name of country, or in the name of what will benefit “me”. But Jesus has another vision. I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a Christian soldier, and other soldiers of faith in war, to hold the tension of recognizing individuals as human, beloved in God’s eyes, while also opposing, possibly, a system of evil those individuals represent. Yet, it would behoove us, and them, to look in the mirror at the evil atrocities the U.S. has perpetrated under the guise of “discovery” and “freedom”. How does a soldier also recognize that they, too, just might be an agent of something rooted in evil and conquest, even if they have been ingrained to think otherwise. (And that’s the point- to be sure they don’t recognize it.) How are we, too, even as civilians, complicit? It’s a complex, messy endeavor that ultimately, I do not want my children to be part of as members of the military. But we should continue to question, reevaluate, and seek better ways of peace. Impossible? Unrealistic? Again, I note that Jesus was a visionary. Visionaries, as I have heard quoted, see what’s not here yet. A visionary strives to look beyond the myopic field of vision which systems of oppression, power, and violence depend upon.

The great Martin Luther King Jr. opposed war from a Christian perspective. His colleague, Dr. Vincent Harding who helped draft King’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam” revealed this about the speech, “I feel very strongly that the speech and his unflinching role in expressing and organizing opposition to the war—and to the foreign and domestic policy it represented—as well as his ineluctable movement toward the call for nonviolent revolution in the U.S., were among the major reasons for his assassination…” Harding also asked the imperative questions, “What does it mean to take seriously this whole idea that our national identity is secondary to our spiritual identity, and has to come under the scrutiny of our spiritual identity? What does it do to the Christian faith when we recognize that our community began in a setting where most [early believers] were outcasts from the empire’s power? What does it mean when the Christian community now identifies itself with the empire, apologizes for the empire, and goes to war along with the empire?”

What will the “sword of the spirit” clear away to reveal how we should endeavor to live into the process of peace and bringing about the Beloved Community? How will we act to live into the far off biblical prophecy in Isaiah of “neither will they learn war no more”? Dr. Vincent Harding called upon us to enter the process. Soldiers need our support, and they deserve our respect. But we can, and should, be mindful of, aware of, and critical of the complexities and motives of the systems within they/we operate. Agencies of war, especially as a system that depends on the pliability of youth, do not fall very cleanly into entering the process of peace, wholeness, and essentially, what it means to be free.