After the election, part 2

The future of American power

This is the second installment in a post-election series on new “zones of political opportunity” and the ways civically-minded Christians may contribute to the debate over these issues in the coming years.

Last week, I focused on the future of the American family, natalist politics, and how Christians can think about the role of the family in public life.

This essay, on the future of American power, presents a unique challenge. The reason, simply put, is that the Bible does not speak directly on matters related to foreign policy like it does to the family.

Still, that does not render Christians silent on this issue. One of the guiding principles of The Public Theology Project is to be biblically informed without being biblicist. In other words, we may also ask if there is anything in our rich, theological heritage and its reflections on natural principles that might help us think Christianly about American power and geopolitics. And the answer to that question is a resounding, “Yes!”

Why is this a zone of political opportunity?

Throughout the campaign, President Trump touted his record on foreign policy. “I won’t start wars, I’ll stop them,” was a big part of Trump’s pitch to an American public tired from protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and increasingly skeptical of the establishment in charge of managing the situation in Ukraine and our “strategic ambivalence” toward Taiwan and China.

The President will try to keep his campaign promise despite a tenuous geological landscape. The turn from counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors to strategic concerns with sovereign nation-states like Iran, Russia, and China represents a new chapter in the history of American foreign policy—what some call “the return of great powers” and others “Cold War II.”

What does a just end to the Ukraine War look like? Does China represent a legitimate threat to U.S. interests? How should America respond if Iran obtains nuclear weapons? These are legitimate questions but ones best left to statesmen, not pastors. Scripture being relatively silent on these matters means prudence shall be our guide more so than biblical prescription. However, there are some theological resources for Christians to consider when thinking about the future of American power.

The chances of war

Presidential promises aside, we should be clear-eyed about the possibility of our nation finding itself in a large-scale conflict the likes of which we have not seen since Word War II.

Russia threatens nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. President Xi has directed the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for war, most likely with the goal of bringing Taiwan into closer union with mainland China. Though not inevitable, conflict with either of these powers would require levels of manpower and weaponry far beyond anything we saw in our recent fights in the Middle East. Though we pray for peace, and clearer heads to prevail, realists understand that escalation by any party, be it China, Russia, a NATO ally, or the United States itself, can trigger events that are hard to undo.¹

If Christians wait until the bullets are flying to develop theologies for war and suffering, they will be too late. They should be thinking now about the resources Christian theology offers both for the present strategic environment and the possibility of being at war with a near-peer rival. Moreover, Christians can ask in what ways their churches are ready to meet the needs of a nation at war if that be its future. Let us consider each question in turn.

Just war

One way Christians could shape the future of American power is by embracing and applying its just war tradition. Tracing its origins in the thought and work of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the just war tradition is a theological paradigm for determining the Christianly way to wage war.

To some believers, “the Christianly way to wage war” is nothing but a case of Orwellian double-speak. After all, they might say, one cannot possibly “love thy neighbor” and wage war against him at the same time. There is no such thing as just war because war, by definition, is un-Christian and therefore unjust.

Thus many Christian pacifists, to my question of what Christians may offer to this particular zone of political opportunity, would simply answer: Nothing! Or perhaps, Resistance!

While it is not my intention to make a comprehensive case for the just war tradition at this moment, two things may be said to quickly vindicate it on biblical and theological grounds.

Christians acknowledge we live in a broken world, corrupted by sin, in which people made in the image of God often unjustly attack, oppress, and do violence to other people made in the image of God. This is reality. What would God have us do?

While not all Protestants agree, the Reformed tradition has typically answered one way: you defend the innocent and, if necessary, with violence.

In his Institutes, Calvin writes:

We are accordingly commanded, if we find anything of use to us in saving our neighbors’ lives, to faithfully employ it; if there is anything that makes for their peace, to see to it; if anything harmful, to ward it off; if they are in danger, to lend a helping hand.²

Commenting on the passage by Calvin, Marc Livecche says, “This is not merely permission to employ force to protect the innocent, it is a mandate. To not come to the aid of the innocent is a violation of charity because it ignores the desecration of the imago Dei.”³

For Calvin, waging war in the defense of the innocent in no way contradicts Christian charity. In fact, it is a legitimate expression of neighborly love!

We find biblical warrant for such an idea in Jesus’s interaction with the Roman centurion (Matthew 8:5-13). Nowhere does Jesus urge the man to give up his military vocation. Instead, Christ calls the centurion to wield the state’s power of the sword justly in accordance with God’s law.

Clearly, the just war tradition is a sound theological resource for Christians to draw upon in shaping the future of American power. Should the United States go to war, our prayer would be that it do so on just grounds (jus ad bellum) and that we would wage it justly (jus ad bello).

Pastoral care

In this final section, I want to consider the pastoral responsibility of the church during war time.

Even during “the surge” of the Iraq War in 2007, most people did not personally know someone in the conflict. In all likelihood, the same would not be true of a conflict with a near-peer rival like China or Russia. Should that happen (and we pray it doesn’t!) congregations ought to consider the possibility of most (if not all) of their military-age friends, neighbors, and parishioners going to war. What could Christians do in that situation?

Firstly, Christians need to be equipped with a coherent theology of suffering. This is not just true for times of war. In times of great tragedy including car wrecks, school shootings, and cancer diagnoses, believers and nonbelievers alike often look to the church for answers.

The Sunday after 9/11, many New Yorkers flocked to Redeemer Presbyterian Church. That morning, they heard pastor Tim Keller deliver a powerful sermon on the Gospel’s answer to inexplicable evil and the horror of death based on John 11. Because of the meaningful answer to suffering, and Redeemer’s pastoral concern for their neighbors, many people returned week after week.

A sound theology of suffering is critical for those grieving violence after the fact. It is also vital for those preparing to wage war on the enemy.

Since the Vietnam War, many Americans have become familiar with post-combat stress diagnoses like PTSD. Further study with those who came home changed by war have expanded our understanding of what goes on in the human psyche when it is exposed to combat.

A particularly haunting field of study is what everyone from psychologists to philosophers and pastors now call moral injury. In short, moral injury is “soul wound” or “psychic trauma resulting from doing, allowing to do be done, or having done to you that which goes against deeply held normative beliefs.”⁴

For example, we are all taught early on that hurting others is wrong. Even those completely unfamiliar with the Bible know at least one of the Ten Commandments: Thou shall not murder.

But what do you do when you are suddenly handed a weapon and told by your leaders to kill a stranger? For many, the contradiction between their actions and what they know to be right and wrong is enough to tear their souls in half. I imagine the feeling is similar to Paul’s anguish in Romans 7:19-24:

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

How will we, as Christians, minister to those who may come home from war with crushing soul wounds?

Many may return with legitimate moral injury. They did things in combat that were wrong and they know it. The answer is the free gift of grace and the pardon of sins through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

However, others will have justly wielded the power of the sword but still feel spiritually crushed. In those cases, chaplains, pastors, and Christians need to be prepared to vindicate the righteousness of the soldierly vocation.⁵ Again, a sound understanding of just war is helpful since it will be a trustworthy guide in discerning what is and what is not truly morally injurious.⁶

Conclusion

These are just a couple ways Christians may contribute to the future of American power. It is no way exhaustive.

Believers should always pray for their civil authorities and that the Lord would give them wisdom and discernment to promote justice and punish evil in accordance with God’s moral law. Moreover, we should pray for peace in our communities and across the globe so that the Gospel may go forth unhindered and peoples may flourish.

1. For particularly chilling examples of what a nuclear exchange may look like in the present age, see Elliot Ackerman & James G. Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next Word War (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2021) and Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario (New York, NY: Dutton, 2024).

2. Calvin’s Institutes, III.8.39.

3. Marc LiVecche, “Just War,” in Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction (Davenant Press, 2022), 70.

4. Marc LiVecche, The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 3.

5. LiVecche, The Good Kill, 5.

6. Not all Christians agree with LiVecche’s “just war” approach to moral injury. For an alternative view see Brian S. Powers, Full Darkness: Original Sin, Moral Injury, and Wartime Violence (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019).