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So are we left with a stalemate? Not necessarily. The pro-war evangelicals have a very hard task ahead of them, because their arguments for the war haven't held up. Those who argued that war was justified because it would lead to greater religious freedom in the country now need to answer whether the war was unjustified because it has brought less religious freedom to the country.

Others are in a greater bind. One Christian leader told Christianity Today in September 2002 that two requirements must be met to justify an attack on Iraq: irrefutable evidence connecting Hussein to the attacks of September 11 and proof that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are being prepared for imminent use.

"If you fulfill these, an attack is justified," this leader told Christianity Today. "The president has an obligation to communicate why he is asking our nation to sacrifice, as well as why he is willing to sacrifice combatants and innocents on the other side."

That person was Robert McGinnis, vice president of policy for Family Research Council, one of the most conservative religious groups in Washington. Other evangelical leaders also told us that proving connections with the 9/11 attacks was imperative to attacking Iraq. Many others in Christianity Today's survey of evangelical opinion before the war had much stricter standards.

"If all we do is blast out a regime and conditions of long-term civil war are all that's left, then the operation can hardly be justified," said the Center for Public Justice's Jim Skillen—whom no one would confuse with Jim Wallis. "Are the countries around Iraq prepared to work with us to make sure a better regime gets in, and not a worse one? Does the U.S. have the support of allies to do that while rebuilding Afghanistan? There has to be an agreement and not a presumption that the U.N. will pick up the work."

If he merely reads the paper he's writing for, it's little wonder that Marsh might think he's a lone evangelical voice speaking against the war. But he's far from it, and evangelical opposition to the war has been there from the earliest days of the debate.

The hidden story, though, is that John Stott really does represent the majority in this story. He's an evangelical who had his reservations about going to war with Iraq with so few allies, remained silent, and is speaking up now that the war isn't going well. A March 2003 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked those who attend church at least once per month whether their clergy had talked about the war. Only one in five said that their clergy had taken a position—7 percent in favor of the war, 14 percent against.

Weblog is sympathetic to Marsh's assertion that evangelicals' "Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world." But cherry picking quotes from pro-war evangelical leaders to prove that point at the cost of being factually inaccurate about actual evangelical beliefs about the war only further undermines evangelical credibility and witness.

War and terrorism:

1. Patriarch of Antioch accuses the USA of destroying interreligious peace in Iraq | The military intervention of the USA and their allies in the life of Iraq has destroyed the interreligious peace throughout the region, Patriarch Ignatios of Antioch and All the East believes (Interfax, Russia)
   
   
2. Praying for our colleague facing death in Iraq | I don't know Jill Carroll. In fact, I'd never seen her byline or read anything she'd written before last weekend. But she is my sister, my colleague, a fellow idealist who believes that what she writes might have the power to make the world a better place (Cathleen Falsani, Chicago Sun-Times)
   
   

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50