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Evangelical scholar looks at old war sermons
Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia and author of The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today and God's Long Summer, has an op-ed in today's New York Times, in which he says American evangelicals "have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?"

To illustrate how evangelicals sold out to the man, he "reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war."

"As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points," evangelicals—he names Franklin Graham, Marvin Olasky, Charles Stanley, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry Falwell—claimed "the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. … The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: Our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply."

This view, Marsh says, is in marked contrast to the perspective of John Stott. The theologian and minister did not speak for or against the war, but told Marsh recently, "Privately, in the days preceding the invasion, I had hoped that no action would be taken without United Nations authorization. I believed then and now that the American and British governments erred in proceeding without United Nations approval."

Marsh longs for the evangelical unity of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, mostly written by Stott.

"The signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that 'the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology.'" Marsh wrote. Now, he says, we American evangelicals "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."

"No denying" may be a bit strong—one imagines that those named by Marsh would deny his statement. But is Lausanne's unity and message really the best touchstone here? After all, the Lausanne Covenant was a statement about general principles. It had nothing specific to say about American involvement in Vietnam (the war had ended just one year earlier) or about the U.S. president breaking trust with the American people in the Watergate scandal.

It's also worth noting that several prominent evangelical leaders from the global church (including Peru's Samuel Escobar and Argentina's René Padilla) criticized the Lausanne Covenant for not saying enough about Christian social responsibility and the need for the church to preach liberation from political captivity. They sounded an awful lot like Marsh, in fact.

And is Stott the best evangelical to promote in contrast to "liberation (of Iraq) theologians" like Falwell and LaHaye? After all, silence in the face of what one perceives as injustice is hardly laudable. John Stott's fellow evangelical Anglican theologian/pastor Tom Wright, by contrast, spoke directly against the war in very strong terms.

Marsh is unlikely to change many minds with this piece. As he himself notes, "The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness."

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50