U.S. War Conduct Will Make
Peace Elusive in Future
Sinfulness, Memory Denied; Rhetoric Heightened

The path toward peace and forgiveness in Iraq has been made more difficult by the conduct of the United States , say theologians from four Christian traditions.

Among the factors they cited are prisoner abuse, failure to acknowledge Iraqi deaths, denial of guilt, inadequate apologies, fusing of Christian faith with public policy, failure to remove the U.S. military as an obstacle to peace, colonialism and a hidden agenda to obtain oil.

Shriver: Admit Sin

“It is impossible to go to war without sharing in the sinfulness of war and without stirring up more evils that will someday, one hopes, be capable of being forgiven,” said Donald W. Shriver Jr., president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in New York and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. “I think the United States has now set an agenda of judgment and search for forgiveness that is going to take quite a long time, especially in relation to the Muslim world.”

Abuses in Abu Ghraib prison are only one illustration for which Americans will eventually have to confess that the nation has sinned as much as its enemy, said Shriver.

“Our Pentagon has refused to even count the number of deaths of Iraqis in this war, and that means the media have every excuse not to give those deaths very much prominence,” he said. “But Christians have to believe that God's children are numerous and the death of Iraqis is as important a reason for grief as the death of Americans.

“If we Christians can't somehow keep that truth prominent in our witness, I think we are falling short of the ethic that Jesus taught us, and we may be in a situation, as with almost all politics, where forgiveness and repentance have to be on both sides.”

America loves to portray itself as an innocent nation and the events of 9/11 and the war on terrorism have made this abundantly clear, he said.

“We have a president who is so vocal about the evil of others that he is not very expert in confessing the possibility that we have our own evils to account for,” said Shriver. “In a way, this awful treatment of these prisoners is an in-your-face announcement that Americans can do evil also.”

The gruesome, videotaped death of American Nicholas Berg is no reason for U.S. citizens to justify the prisoner abuses, he said.

“One thing to be avoided like the plague is to add up the evils on both sides and see which are greater, and thereby build up a case for condemning others more than we condemn ourselves,” he said.

“Certainly the legal and media publicity for these most recent atrocious crimes in the present is compatible with some social repentance and that is much to be applauded. We should not underestimate the importance of the freedom to acknowledge our sins … But I think that process is going to take a right long time and certainly in the middle of a war, few politicians have the bravery to convince their constituents that there is sin on both sides.”

The reaction of the disciples at the Last Supper illustrates how Christians should think about the prisoner abuse in Iraq , he said. When Jesus told the disciples that one of them would betray him, each of them asked, “Lord, is it I”?

“I have always been very encouraged by that little story because it suggests that they had been with Jesus long enough to know that when it comes to confession, the most important confession is our confession and not the confession of other people's sins,” said Shriver. “They at least learned enough from Jesus to question themselves and that was a lot better than leaping to the question, ‘Who is it Lord? Who is it we should gang up against in this room?'”

Christians in America should not condemn the young soldiers who have been charged, said Shriver. Instead, they should acknowledge how easily they might be tempted into the same thing.

When Christians pray “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” they are talking about themselves and are not able to project temptation and evil onto others. “This is a distinctively religious point of view,” Shriver said. “There are people who are sure that Americans would never do such things. That is the trouble with the kind of defense President Bush issued when he said , ‘You must realize that this is not the real America .'

“Far better that he draw upon his own supposedly Christian tradition and say something like ‘We all fall below our own high standards, and in this case that is what happened. We Americans grieve for that and hope that it will not be done again.' That would be a political statement far closer to the spirit of Christian ethics than what he said.”

Malcolm: Avoid Fusing Faith with Policy

Lois E. Malcolm, associate professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary, said the president's overall approach to the war fits within a classic just-war understanding. The first test of a just-war stance is whether it is working toward the greater good, she said, and the U.S. strategy in Iraq is vulnerable on the question of whether its resources would have been better spent on education, community development or other measures.

Because the treatment of prisoners is not in line with international law, an apology is called for, even without consideration of a particularly Christian perspective, she said.

“Bush has upped the ante by the use of Christian rhetoric and by the explicit wearing of his faith on his sleeve,” she said. “He has … raised the standards for himself and I think that the kind of public apology that both he and (Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld enacted could have been stronger.”

Both from a pragmatic point of view and from a Christian position, where the call for reconciliation is paramount, “the response of revenge with regard to the beheading of an American is simply going to escalate the violence,” said Malcolm.

“One of the confusions . . . that's come about in the current administration is that there has been a tendency to fuse Christian faith with large public policy,” she said.

“It's not that your Christian faith doesn't have an impact on public policy, but one needs to recognize that in a society that has both Christians and non-Christians, you need to appeal to more broad, universal standards of justice and truth, rather than specifically Christian standards.”

Classical Christianity does not point to that kind of fusing, she said. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther and John Wesley saw a clear distinction between the natural world and those things that pertain to the world of grace.

It is dangerous in any conflict to heighten the rhetoric, said Malcolm, who faults congressional leaders and the president on this point.

Grimsrud: Remove Military from Iraq

As a Christian pacifist, Theodore G. Grimsrud, of Eastern Mennonite University , has believed from the start that the United States was wrong to attack Iraq , regardless of the validity of the rationale given by the federal government.

Events since the invasion have made the speciousness of that rationale increasingly clear, he claimed. Those items, he said, include: no weapons of mass destruction were found, no connection has been made between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, the abuse of Iraqi prisoners that imitates Saddam's use of torture, a lack of planning to transform Iraq into a functioning society, and an unwillingness to allow Iraq genuine self-determination.

“Since the presence of the United States military in Iraq is now so much of the problem, it is very difficult to imagine how peace can be possible so long as we remain,” said Grimsrud, associate professor theology and peace studies. “As I understand the talk now about ‘giving Iraq back to the Iraqis' on June 30, it is still assumed that the U.S. military presence would remain very strong for the indefinite future. We need to understand that the U.S. military is not a force for peace in Iraq . As the current source of much of the disorder, violence, and alienation, the U.S. military does not have the capability of making peace. Therefore, I believe that people who genuinely desire authentic peace in Iraq should strongly advocate for the more-or-less immediate withdrawal of the U.S. military.”

While there is no obvious replacement for the military, the longer American forces remain in Iraq , the longer and deeper the conflict will be, he said.

“American Christians (pacifist and non-pacifist) should, I believe, see our present situation with regard to Iraq as a challenge to voice our opposition to the ever-growing militarization of our society in general,” he said. “Our democratic traditions are under fire perhaps as never before, and—in a world with millions living in dire poverty—for the richest nation in the history of the world to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into our own weapons of mass destruction surely reflects a moral atheism of the worst sort.”

Battle : Practice Memory

Michael Battle, an Episcopal priest and assistant professor at Duke University Divinity School , said memory is a crucial practice for peacemaking and one that the United States appears to be ignoring in three key areas:

· It is lapsing into the “greedy, colonizing” habits of the Roman Empire and British Empire .

· It forgets that the Middle East has ancient cultures and is naively acting as if these cultures are “infantile and need to be enlightened.” The United States will not win the hearts and minds of Iraqis until Iraq is treated with mutual respect, he said.

· U.S. actions in Iraq are driven by the desire to obtain oil and “until that's confessed, no real solutions are going to come about.” Meanwhile, “those clandestine, so-called terrorist forces will only be able to build on their own morality of retaliation if we are there for selfish reasons.”

Theologically, Christians practice memory in the Eucharist of amnesis , the recalling of the presence of Christ in the bread and wine, said Battle . “Perhaps we can offer that to political forces to practice memory a little better.”

Christians reinforce the practice of memory by being among all people of the world and knowing “that our primary identity is not as a U.S. citizen, or as a black person, or even as a woman or a man. Our primary identity is in our baptism and we do that by remembering that.”

Battle , who is vice-chair of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, said the missions movement is an additional way to influence peace. While documented abuses have occurred among Christian missions, many of those are “really just an abuse of nation-states trying to use the term Christianity,” said Battle . “Most people can identify the true people trying to practice giving to other cultures and seeing them as mutual. There are quite a few heroes and heroines who we can point to in that regard.”

Another powerful witness that churches can make is in ministering to those who are so marginalized that all they can do is resort to violence. Black Muslims have made this a primary witness in their faith and churches can and should do the same, he said.

Donald W. Shriver Jr. is the author of An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics . His book Honest Patriotism: Loving a Country Enough to Forgive Its Misdeeds is scheduled for publication in early 2005.

Lois E. Malcolm is the author of the forthcoming book The Wisdom and Power of the Cross and co-author of a forthcoming book on forgiveness.

Theodore G. Grimsrud is co-editor of Peace and Justice Shall Embrace: Power and Theopolitics in the Bible .

Michael Battle's most recent book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: A Christian Spirituality of Nonviolence, was released this month.