Tread lightly on the things of earth

I like straight-talking, no-nonsense theologian Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School. Here’s what he says about the impending preemptive war with Iraq in Time, in No, This War Would Not Be Moral (italics mine):

I am an advocate of Christian nonviolence … I believe that Christians, of all people, should worry when the President of the United States uses the word evil to justify war…

Bush’s use of the word evil comes close to being evil — to the extent that it gives this war a religious justification (which Christians should resist). For Christians, the proper home for the language of evil is the liturgy: it is God who deals with evil, and it’s presumptuous for humans to assume that our task is to do what only God can do. …

As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has rightly observed, any attempt to sustain truthful speech was lost as soon as the word war was used to describe the events of Sept. 11. What happened on that day was not war; it was murder.

G.K. Chesterton once observed that America is a nation with the soul of a church. Bush’s use of religious rhetoric seems to confirm this view. None of this is good news for Christians, however, because it tempts us to confuse Christianity with America. As a result, Christians fail to be what God has called us to be: agents of truthful speech in a world of mendacity. The identification of cross and flag after Sept. 11 needs to be called what it is: idolatry. We are often told that America is a great country and that Americans are a good people. I am willing to believe that Americans want to be good, but goodness requires that we refuse to lie to ourselves and our neighbors about the assumed righteousness of our cause.

Andrew Sullivan is billed as providing a rebuttal to Hauerwas in the same issue: Yes, a War Would Be Moral. But Sullivan’s argument is built around a conspicuous untruth: “We are not initiating a war. We are not the aggressor. We are still in a long process of defense.” I am hard-pressed to believe that anyone who says this really means it. To believe we are not aggressors in this matter is to be deeply enmeshed in “lying to ourselves and our neighbors.”