The Church and the Viet Nam-Bound Soldier

In their debate over Viet Nam, are churchmen ignoring the most crucial concern?

Seldom has the Church been confronted with such wide demands on so many important fronts as it is today: civil rights, hard-core poverty, the growing needs of the inner city, the rise of a new class of highly intelligent, questioning young “unreachables,” the development of a “new theology” to meet the needs of a modern scientific world—and a war in Southeast Asia.

Viet Nam has posed a number of urgent problems. Churchmen have wrestled with the moral implications of our involvement in what some prefer to call a civil war and have debated the ethical questions inherent in all war, the dangers of possible extension of the war, and the threat of a nuclear confrontation between the world’s great powers.

Amid the clamoring social issues in our society and the general debate over the morality of our position in Asia, one segment of our church populace is in danger of being forgotten and neglected at a most critical time. This is the young men between eighteen and twenty-five. The Church must seriously concern itself with the stark realities confronting those who are called to fight in the rice paddies and jungles of Viet Nam.

Most men called into military service drift off one by one, hardly noticed by a prosperous society, leaving few discernible vacancies in the local church programs, and missed only by their families and close friends. Yet the number of those entering military service in one year is more than half a million. And the Church dare not forget the total of more than 3,000,000 now in uniform who, together with their families, compose a sizable minority in our nation.

Some who are drafted have no opinions about the morality of our position in Viet Nam; they go because they must. A growing number, however, come to feel that they are contributing to human welfare by helping to contain a militant Communism. This feeling is often intensified by what they witness in the villages attacked by the Viet Cong, where women and children are among the victims.

Yet regardless of their attitudes, all young church members facing military service are entitled to some specific help. Critical moral decisions, the questioning of religious convictions, the need to find meaning for a life that may end before the twentieth birthday—these are the personal crises that may face them in Viet Nam. The Church sends chaplains to minister in the battle areas. But the chaplains cannot begin to provide all young men with all the spiritual guidance they need in the midst of war.

The Church—more particularly, every parish clergyman—is obligated to speak of the problems involved in military service in Viet Nam. A minister’s doubts about the validity of our country’s position will be of no spiritual help to the young man with a letter from his draft board. The minister dare not let his personal beliefs keep him from his ministry.

These men want to hear about how “Thou shalt not kill” can be reconciled with what they will be asked to do in Viet Nam. They want to know whether it is immoral for a man to shoot at someone who intends to kill him. And if what some within the Church say about our participation in Viet Nam is true, these young men need to know whether they are compromising Christianity by not choosing prison as an alternative to military service.

Men who will face the possibility of death on any day of their stay in Viet-Nam—sudden death, perhaps, from ambush, a land mine, or a grenade thrown by a seemingly innocent child or woman—want also to be able to find meaning for a life that may end very prematurely. They will not have had time to make much of a contribution to society beyond faithful service to their country. They want to know whether the Church regards this service as worthwhile. If the Church fails to tell them that it does, and if all these young men hear is condemnation of America’s role in Viet Nam, they will feel that the Church considers them a failure.

Intertwined with this concern for the meaning of life and for their role as loyal members of the armed forces is a concern for the continuity of life itself in an eternity with a loving God. For these young men, such matters are exceedingly personal. They are very personal also to the family members who watch their loved ones go off to war, not knowing whether they will return. And if they do not return, the Church must have a message of comfort about an eternity where personality survives.

A final concern of these young men in uniform is whether God will be with them in Southeast Asia. They do not want to try to use God as a magic amulet, but they do want to know about him as a vital presence in their own lives. If the Church must speak out on the revealed principles of social justice, it must also retain the message of a personal God who never forsakes those who believe in him.

The Church is rightly concerned about retaining the highly intelligent, socially conscious young generation of the mid-sixties. But to be wholly faithful, it must reach those who will face ultimate reality in a lonely confrontation with God and eternity in battle. These men want to know the God they may face because of the war in Viet Nam.

The average American has shown little concern for those who are fighting this most difficult war. The Church dare never be guilty of this indifference. If it is, those who go off to fight will stand in judgment on it. Churchmen may hold differing opinions on Viet Nam and on war itself. But personal opinions must not affect the spiritual ministry of the Church to those who face hardship and peril in Viet Nam.

New Use For The Bomb?

Last year the Rev. Kenneth Slack resigned after ten years’ service as general secretary of the British Council of Churches to become minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Cheam. Last month his church was host to the biannual meeting of the BCC, and he distributed copies of the congregation’s magazine to his distinguished guests. On the front page began an editorial entitled “The Inconvenience of Moral Issues,” written by the editor in a semi-facetious vein. Near the end, he mentions the problem confronting the church of whether its tennis club should allow Sunday play.

The editorial continues by attributing to the paper’s tennis correspondent “an idle thought about Sundays.” Suppose, it says, “suppose that—well, you know who—were to receive, at 10.55 one morning, a note saying that at 11 on the dot a large bomb would despatch the Lord’s Day Observance Society to their reward.…” Whatever the St. Andrew’s congregation thought about this, it seems incredible that that kind of jibe should have been thought suitable for sharing on an ecumenical occasion.

The Church In Politics

In discussing theological guidelines for the churches’ involvement in international affairs, Bishop James K. Mathews of the Boston Area of The Methodist Church told the United States Committee of the World Council of Churches that “evangelical obedience” requires direct political involvement because (1) religion is the guardian of human values, (2) the doctrine of creation implies the unity of the human race, and (3) the Church’s duty to the world includes criticism of the social order.

But why do these theological premises require the institutional church to be in the vanguard of legislative activity or to commit itself to specific political measures or military tactics, as in Viet Nam? Beyond preaching the Gospel, the Church should make its great contribution to international affairs by intensively studying what social justice is in the light of the scriptural criteria and then haunting the consciences of churchgoers until they cannot live either with lovelessness for neighbor or with social injustice. A church in which a few professionals try to do it all—either through evangelism or through legislation—will surely be deluged by unregeneracy or secularism.

In interpreting international events, moreover, why do the ecumenists so little reflect the views of experienced statesmen and churchmen like Dr. Charles Malik, former President Dwight Eisenhower, or, for that matter, Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara? In past years some of us shared the faulty fundamentalist notion that men in public life necessarily become spiritually insensitive. But are men like Rusk and McNamara to be distrusted as Christians? And if such specialists do not possess information that even distinguished churchmen lack in reaching their judgments, ought they not to be turned out of office?

Bishop Mathews contends that those who would have the Church remain silent on controversial issues “forget this is exactly what is imposed upon her under totalitarian regimes, so detested by these same persons.” But where is the Church today directly confronting and challenging totalitarian dictators? While there may indeed be emergency situations in which the Church must confront the inhumanity of tyrannical forces that place themselves above law (as did the Nazis in their slaughter of six million Jews), the possibility of this kind of emergency confrontation hardly justifies the corporate church’s day-by-day political involvement, for which it lacks a biblical mandate, divine authority, and technical competence.

Love That Driver

As a class, clergymen are notoriously poor drivers. On lists that rank different groups of automobile drivers by their safety records, clergymen are far from the top.

One clergyman recently called upon the nation to halt the staggering and shameful loss of human life on our highways. In a radio broadcast from Greenville, South Carolina, Billy Graham devoted an entire sermon to this tragic social problem. He contended that the deepest cause of automobile accidents is moral and spiritual. Drunkenness, carelessness, the desire to show off, and selfishness contribute heavily to death and injury, the evangelist said, and this irresponsible behavior reflects the driver’s underlying attitudes toward Cod and toward his neighbor. Graham urged that we are “our brother’s keeper,” and that “the Bible says that no man lives unto himself and that we are all members one of another.”

Christian people—including clergymen—should surely be responsible drivers, sensitive to the high value of human life. Many lives could be spared, and many people saved from lifelong injury, if every Christian driver in America would love that moving neighbor in the next car—or even show him a measure of common courtesy.

Some Social Consequences Of Evangelism

Programs of social action do not always succeed. Worthy objectives are blunted and the best intentions of high-minded men frustrated. Sometimes the plight of the people worsens despite the most progressive social action. Not infrequently one of the primary causes for worsening conditions lies in false religions that bind men oppressively until they are delivered from their superstitions.

India is a case in point. Starvation hangs over millions of its people, while millions of sacred cows roam the streets of cities and villages and forage in the fields. Religious restrictions forbid killing or eating these animals, who themselves must eat to live. And the Jains, though a small minority of the population, add to the already burdensome problem. Their religion forbids the taking of any life including that of rats, which cause the loss of untold quantities of food human beings could have consumed.

In Muslim Pakistan, the president, fearing the population explosion, has decreed that a man can have only one wife, despite Islamic approval of polygamy. But many Muslims defy the decree.

Religion is inescapably related to economic and social life. Christianity delivers men from bondage, and this freedom is genuinely helpful in the solution of economic and social problems. Evangelism has vast social consequences. The best way to improve world conditions is to bring men to Christ and deliver them from the bondage of false religions.

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