Onward, Christian Pacifists

EVEN WITH THE START of the war to unseat Saddam Hussein, religious leaders continue to oppose the use of force as unnecessary and unjust. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, laments the "failures of heart, mind and will that led to this war." The Church World Service, an association of mostly Protestant churches and relief agencies, sees only "horrendous humanitarian consequences" ahead.

The criticism carries a familiar ring. Liberal Protestants led the peace movement just prior to World War II--and sustained it even after the German blitzkrieg in Europe, when all rational hope of negotiations had collapsed. Finding endless reasons to oppose a military response, they became in effect apologists for Nazi aggression. And yet, their voices move among us still, animating marches, sermons, and proclamations. They almost make us forget that most of the churchmen of that earlier generation finally discarded their "sentimental illusions" about taming a tyrant.

Indeed, the most grievous flaw of the 1930s peace movement was its blindness to the gulf separating totalitarian regimes from Western democracies. War critics assumed the European conflict was merely a collision of selfish national interests. From 1938 to 1941, American Protestant groups issued no less than 50 statements about how to achieve a just and durable peace. But barely a handful argued that the defeat of Nazism was essential to international justice.

John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister in New York, decried the "fundamentally immoral clash of imperialisms" at work again in Europe. "If America goes into the war," he wrote in December 1940, "it will not be for idealistic reasons but to serve her own imperialistic interests." In a statement urging U.S. neutrality, the Methodist General Conference declared that "the mood of either victor or vanquished in war cannot aid peace."