Christianity has always had an ambivalent attitude towards war, unlike Islam which is unambiguously a religion of peace… once all that is non-Islamic has been obliterated or subjugated by brute force, including the wrong kind of Muslims like the peace-loving Ahmadiyya and any daring to apostasize.
Jesus, of course, said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and the early Church seems to have discouraged military service, though that may have been because of the pagan religious requirements for Roman soldiers. The Gospel is an appeal to conscience, and is never coercive without losing its gospel-character.
But since Augustine clear principles of Christian just war theory proved necessary, pacificism being in practice untenable, and indeed contrary to the NT teaching that political leaders are appointed by God to punish evildoers, which clearly implies criminals at home and enemies abroad. The permanent loss of 75% of Christian lands to militant Islam in just a century after Muhammad’s (supposed) death, and its halting, and in limited cases reversal, only by concerted military means, grounds that sad truth in history.
We may assume that persecuted Christians in, for example, Nigeria witness to passive endurance only by prayer. But in fact their desperate attempts to organise armed self-defence, in the absence of an effective response from the Muslim-dominated authorities, have been punished by those same authorities that give free rein to the jihadists. Hence they appeal to Donald Trump, who seems an outlier in accepting the New Testament role of the magistrate punishing evildoers. I don’t hear anyone here praying that Christians in will be permitted to fight back – or even that someone will fight back on their behalf and pacify the murderers.
In the days of the 1662 prayer book, each Sunday we prayed for peace:
O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: Defend us, thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Peace is desirable – yet enemies are a fact of daily life. But later in the book, in the section of prayers for special seasons, we read:
In the time of War and Tumults.
O ALMIGHTY God, King of all kings, and Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to those who truly repent; Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices; that we, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify thee, who art the only giver of all victory; through the merits of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
This prayer is scarcely bellicose, but violent military action is implied both in “justly punish sinners,” and “giver of all victory.” There is even more specific acceptance of this reality in the section of prayers for use at sea, likely prompted by the predominance of naval warfare at the time of publication:
To Be Said Before a Fight at Sea against Any Enemy
O most powerful and glorious Lord God, the Lord of hosts, who rulest and commandest all things: Thou sittest on the throne judging right, and therefore we make our address to thy Divine Majesty in this our necessity, that thou wouldest take the cause into thine own hand, and judge between us and our enemies. Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come and help us, for thou givest not always the battle to the strong, but canst save by many or by few. O let not our sins now cry against us for vengeance, but hear us thy poor servants begging mercy and imploring thy help, and that thou wouldest be a defence unto us against the face of the enemy. Make it appear that thou art our saviour and mighty deliverer, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In case we’re troubled by what we’ve been taught about every army trying to enlist God on its side, consider the caveats in the above prayer: it treats battle as a necessary evil amongst sinful men. If it seems light on weighing the justice of the cause, remember that according to the 39 Articles, that judgement is a matter for the “magistrate,” whose right to enlist men to arms is undisputed. This prayer is not jingoistic: war is an evil, but if we don’t believe our cause to be just, there’s no point in having a navy… which in those days, we did. And the boys who prayed this prayer were likely to die fighting that day, so their prayer needed to address reality.
In our lifetimes, we’ve been involved in a number of questionable wars. But when our parents or grandparents were fighting Hitler, was it not right for them to plead with God for victory, as the very means of restoring genuine peace and preventing the extermination of the Jews?
I say all this because I find today’s prayers for peace to reflect liberal delusions of universal “niceness” rather than the reality of the struggle against actual evildoers. One senses a rather Quaker mentality that whoever stops fighting first is the one on God’s side, even if that means a ceasefire that perpetuates the evil. Conversely if Trump, or Israel, or whoever, see continued conflict as an unpleasant necessity, then the prayer is, at least implicitly, that God will bring them to their senses (Zelenskyy or Hamas somehow seem not to figure in such thinking). “Justice” means lack of war simpliciter, not resolution of political evils. Nigerian Christians appealing to the US President, and English Christians praying against him, is a weird paradox.
This kumbayah optimism, that God will bring world peace miraculously while we sleep, may be seen in the 2019 Anglican prayer book, contrasted with that of 1662. Its prayers for the peace of the world say that “in God’s kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness,” which is an eschatological truth but rather implies Christian pacifism is mandatory in this age. Tell that to King Alfred the Great in his struggle against the pagan Danes.
They ask God to give all people, and especially “all who take counsel for the nations of the earth,” the fullness of his peace, so that the kingdom of God will advance in tranquillity until the earth is filled with knowledge of God’s love. That postmillennial optimism in the U.N. blithely ignores both Satan’s deceptive role in the world and the prophecies of Armageddon.
Prayers for those in the armed forces speak of their “trials and temptations,” and their “perils,” but somehow do not even mention their enemies, their success in their deadly job of fighting, or the prospect of actually winning. I suspect that in a war-zone in Afghanistan, euphemistic prayers composed in Lambeth committee-rooms are cold comfort.
As for the prayers for enemies, they don’t seem prayers for the repentance of those who “despitefully use us” under Satan’s dominion, but convey more a feeling that if we all sit down over a nice halal meal, we (for we are all to blame) can learn from each other and common sense will prevail:
O God, the Creator of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you in Jesus Christ; in whose Name we pray. Amen.
Now, we can certainly rejoice that in his grace, God can lead the genocidal jihadi or the Antifa fanatic to the truth. But these prayers seems to ignore the reality that delusional murderers, committed to the destruction of God’s truth in principle, exist at all. Let alone that they exist in millions and are armed to the teeth. We are all to blame, always – there are no just causes whatsoever.
There is also a prayer in this book for “times of social conflict or distress,” which asks for “the spirit of neighbourliness,” apparently oblivious to the very existence of ideologically-motivated rape-gangs or child-beheaders. This seems very much in line with the kind of “spirit of community cohesion” beloved of our institutions, which denies justice to the oppressed, punishes the whistle-blowers, and turns our cities into low-trust powder-kegs on the point of open conflict. “Imagine all the people living for today…” Yes, imagination reigns.
I cite the Anglican Prayer Book only as a convenient source – Nonconformist churches seem equally to live in a humanistic Guardian world in which there are no real enemies, but just good people waiting to emerge, if only America or Russia (ie Mad Trump or Dictator Putin) would leave them alone. Yet this is even a denial of national reality.
Our government studiously rejects involvement in global conflicts. But in reality we have poured most of our military hardware and many “special” forces into the colonial war in Ukraine, we have supplied intelligence and weapons in the Gaza conflict, and we are still bombing rocket launchers in Iran, whilst pretending not to, to placate Muslim voters (and gullible Christians?). We may disagree on the justness of those causes, but since our sons and daughters are dying in them, and our taxes are going up in smoke in them, would it not make sense to be praying that our enemies will be quickly defeated, and our cause victorious (despite our many unrepented sins)?
Maybe I can sum up what I feel about this by suggesting that, before we pray for peace, we spend more time praying for truth to inform those prayers.
