Does God take sides in conflicts between men?  If He does, how can we tell?  Is the side favored by God always victorious, or can a lost cause also have been blessed?

Bob Dylan mocked the very notion of God taking sides in human warfare:

Accept it with pride,

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side . . .

The Germans now too

Have God on their side . . .

 

You never ask questions

When God’s on your side . . .

He concludes that “If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war.”

Muslims believe that their own political and military interests are identical to those of Allah.  This is the boon of theocracy: With no separation of mosque and state, Allah cannot help but be on the side of an Islamic government, no matter which way it decides to jump.

At the other end of the spectrum lies traditional Christianity.  There was a time when the Christian God rode high, leading His soldiers into battle and onward to victory.  The stunning success of the Christian West in engulfing all the continents of the earth seemed proof that its God must be not only paramount but beaming genially upon the labors of His children.

Certainly, this was the lesson learned by those engulfed, from Hawaii, where “the greatness of your Christian god” was ritually acknowledged, to North America, where the European invaders’ fearsome weapons, immeasurable riches, and miraculous resistance to diseases that wiped out the natives were all seen as proofs of their god’s superiority.  In the great story of the European “encounter” with indigenous peoples the world over, there were a thousand tragic moments when the old gods faltered and fell silent, leaving their worshipers defenseless.  To most peoples, defeat meant either that their gods had deserted them or that the enemy’s god was a more powerful being, to whom they must now bow down.

Worship of the LORD Sabaoth, the God of victory in battle—He whose saving Arm avails us when the foe assails us, to quote “Rock of Ages”—remains in the anthems and official poetry of most nations.  Anthems are usually patriotic hymns; God is identified with the nation, and both are worshiped together.  Thus, England’s “God Save the King”:

O Lord our God, arise,

Scatter thine enemies

And make them fall.

Confound their politics,

 

Frustrate their knavish tricks:

On Thee our hopes we fix—

God save us all!

Likewise Russia’s national anthem:

And should dread war arise,

Stretch forth Thy Hand,

To guard from wicked foes

Our dear, dear land.

And Japan’s:

God of valor, God of war,

Let our arms forevermore

Vanquish foes—ever those

Who oppress the weak and poor!

RIGHT IS MIGHT!  FIGHT FOR RIGHT!

Hail, Japan!

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America,” and “America the Beautiful” are psalms to a land seen as divinely authored by virtue of its virtuous people and the beauty of its terrain.  These songs preserve the ancient belief that gods dwelt physically in one’s own territory—occupying particular caves, rivers, groves of trees, mountaintops.  Long ago, all gods were tribal, your own ethnos writ large and set dancing across the heavens.  Certain tribal gods, however, have managed to survive into the modern world.

By now, most Westerners have learned to distrust heady talk of divine inspiration and “God’s will.”  For many Christians, the revelations of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology have forever demystifed the workings of man’s religious “tic.”  They have studied too closely “comparative religion”; they see too clearly the “many faces of God.”

In any case, the God of Christianity is associated with peace and peacemakers.  Christ counseled love and forbearance in all things.  The source of conflict in earthly life is Satan, who thrives upon ire and vengeance, bloodlust and force.  The Christian doctrine of “just war” is thus purely defensive: If Satan has inspired your neighbor to transgress upon the God-given substance of your people, you are morally justified in using just enough force to resist the transgression.

Just-war doctrine imposes the moral imperative of finding a casus belli before declaring war.  “He hit me first!”—therefore I smite him back in righteousness.  “Interference with the full exercise of a nation’s rights or independence, an affront to its dignity, an unredressed injury, are instances of casus belli,” according to the quaint 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.

The right to defend oneself is still universally recognized and is enshrined in even the more self-abnegating religions (except Jainism).  But some religions do not abhor or abjure violence.  Allah relishes a good fight, as long as his adherents win.  The Koran is a standing order to make war upon the infidel.  Shiva the Destroyer, the Hindu god of creative destruction whose dancing sustains the cosmos, loves carnage and chaos, as does Kali, the Black One, drunk on the blood of her victims.

Sikhism was born of a desperate attempt to reconcile Hindu and Muslim precepts and has succeeded only in becoming another combatant on the killing fields of the subcontinent.  Shintoism, Japanese ancestor worship, incorporates the idea that the emperor is of divine origin, which removes all doubt as to whose side the gods are on once hostilities commence.  Confucianism is mainly an ethical system based on the Chinese social hierarchy, but it has many shrewd and practical things to say about the conduct of war.  Taoism and Zen Buddhism, teaching the great “way” of Heaven, are both highly adaptable to military strategy and the martial arts: “One who excels as a warrior does not appear formidable; One who excels in fighting is never roused in anger . . . ” (Lao-tse, Tao te Ching, Book Two, LXVIII).

Victory is often viewed as the criterion of which side God was on.  The Allied nations’ Nuremberg tribunal declared that “War is essentially an evil thing” and then proceeded to accuse the losers of waging a “war of aggression” which was still more evil.  The victors write not only history but theology: Our side stood for Good; their side, for Evil.  The greatest “war crime” of all is to have lost.

Is there never a case where God enjoins us to fight in His Name against a certain evil?  Are there some causes so holy that mere preaching, praying, and proselytizing are not enough and violence is called for?  Between peoples both professing Christianity, we need look no further than the Civil War for such a scenario.  The war was fanned to flame by religiously inspired antislavery agitators, beginning with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe and ending with John Brown and Lincoln himself.  “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, / While God is marching on.”

Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth’s “Sic semper tyrannis!” invoked not Christ but the ancient Roman republic; and the Lost Cause is revered even today not for religious but for familial, regional, sentimental, constitutional, and aesthetic reasons.

Some belief systems, then, are spoiling for a fight.  Nationalism, rooted in the instinctive preference for kin, became a quasireligious force in the course of the 18th century, a trend that only intensified in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Nations, self-deified and convinced of enemy perfidy, have hurled themselves at one another repeatedly, seeking that final, vindicating victory.

God as the instigator of war is hardly dead, however.  He has risen again in the current conflict between the United States and the Muslim world—on both sides.  Georgie Anne Geyer, in her column of March 9, reports that “the president of the United States of America sees himself as part of God’s divine plan.  For America, for the Middle East, for the world.”  Bush has become “gripped by the idea that he [is] the man chosen to liberate the Middle East.”  Evangelicals spout sentiments like those found in a Religious Freedom Coalition newspaper ad:

The very presence of evil gives the righteous the right and the responsibility to place their armies upon the field.  As the barbaric Taliban met defeat . . . so then will God bless the forces of the United States in freeing the world’s peoples from the fear of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that a satanically driven leader such as Saddam Hussein would indeed use.

Bush is surrounded, moreover, by people who openly speak and write of fulfilling Israel’s biblical destiny through the use of American force.  The messiah of Zion will be incarnated in the Holy Land in time for the End of Days, Armageddon, the final salvation of the Jewish people.  The Horsemen are assembling for their rendezvous with mankind; the Apocalypse draws nigh.  Orthodox Judaism is rivaled only by Islam in its vision of God standing astride the whole world.  As one follower of the extremist Israeli settler movement Gush Emunim rhapsodized, “When I saw the planes ram the World Trade Center, I praised God, I knew that the Redeemer’s coming was near!”

Whom to fight, when to fight and why—how simply these questions are answered in a fantasy like The Lord of the Rings.  There, in Middle-earth, Sauron bends his will to completely evil, inhumanly cruel ends.  Along with his satrap Saruman, he unleashes, in a hideous parody of Creation, two races of creature with not one shred of soul between them expressly to “destroy the world of men,” “rick, cot and tree,” “down to the last child.”  Self-defense against such forces is a sacred duty, not an agonizing choice.

So when William Murchison, a fine patriotic American full of right feeling, is moved to write that the Iraqis “are the Orcs” and “We are the elves and hobbits and dwarves and men of the West” (in a column of March 27), it is a sobering
moment.  War fever dehumanizes and demonizes the Enemy, and even Mr. Murchison has fallen prey to it.  Evidently, too many people have forgotten how the “relativism” and “fuzzy internationalism” they ridicule originally arose: in the sickening aftermath of World War I, when the frenzy had worn off and the shock and shame had set in.

That global morning after destroyed the joie de vivre of a generation.  For many, the purgative relativism progressed to nihilism and never could go home again.

The “clash of civilizations” is a clash of gods.  “Evil” has no meaning outside a religious context.  “Nations do not have friends, but interests,” and it may equally be said that nations pursue not evil but their own interests, which may well seem barbarously evil to those who do not share them.  We must pray that defeat never renders us “evil” and, thus, culpable for all the attentions we have visited upon the world.