Wayward Christian Soldiers - New York Times
A powerful column in today's New York Times calls the political evangelical community to task for its inquestioning support for the war in Iraq. Charles Marsh, a professor of religion at UVA makes the case, unequivocally in my view, that those Christian leaders who supported the war did so in contradiction to the teachings of Jesus Christ. His concluding paragraph follows:
What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.
"People utterly convinced of their own righteousness." Who does that make you think of?
1 comment:
I remember sitting in church at the beginning of the war as my rector railed about it to a congregation full of many members who disagreed or who, like me, didn't agree with the war, but were not so vehemently in opposition. I thought to myself, "gee maybe he should back off a little bit" and I was uncomfortable. At the time people were denouncing french fries to protest France daring to question the rightness of the war.
I now know that he was displaying the kind of moral courage and righteous outrage that all Christians should have had. I should have been less worried about his popularity and more worried about exploring what he was trying to teach us.
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