Micaiah Moore

"I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets." -- 1 Kings 22:22

In a NYTimes op-ed titled "Wayward Christian Soldiers," Charles Marsh looks at the arguments many prominent evangelical spokesmen gave in support of the invasion of Iraq:

[Their] war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant. ...

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.

These Zedekiahs have some explaining to do.

Ted Olsen, of Christianity Today's blog, says these bloody court prophets are in a bind:

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.

This wasn't just true of evangelical war preachers -- it was also true of Senate Democrats, New Republic editors, and a whole lot of other people. They offered strict standards and criteria for advocating the invasion of Iraq. The invasion and ensuing occupation have not met those standards, but these advocates of the war remain advocates of the war. We can only conclude that their earlier claim to have standards was meaningless.

Olsen also points out that some prominent evangelicals did speak out strongly against the invasion of Iraq -- just not in this country. N.T. Wright, a respected evangelical scholar and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, said that support for the invasion seemed to be based on a "very strange distortion of Christianity" and accused President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of acting like "vigilantes."

Of course, perversely, people like N.T. Wright, whose arguments against the invasion have been proven true, are no longer allowed to comment because they were right in the first place. People like Robert McGinnis (or Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden) whose arguments for the invasion have been proven foolish and mistaken have the authority to speak now because they have been wrong all along. Or something like that, this dynamic still makes no sense to me.

There's a link above to the story of the prophet Micaiah, recounted in 1 Kings 22. When all the court prophets of King Ahab were, with one voice, prophesying war and easy victory, Micaiah alone opposed them. He warned Ahab against his planned war and foretold dire consequences.

"Didn't I tell you that he never prophesies anything good about me, but only bad?" Ahab says of the dissenting prophet. No point engaging the substance of Micaiah's claims, after all, he's just a Bush-Ahab-hater, a Micaiah Moore type.

Ahab listened to all the other prophets and ignored Micaiah and he went off to his war. It did not go well. It was, exactly as Micaiah had predicted, a disaster.

So, when Ahab returned from the war, who do you think he listened to in the future?

A. The multitude of lying prophets who had been wrong in all of their predictions; or

B. The one prophet who had been unforgiveably, insufferably right all along.

(That's actually a trick question. Ahab shot by an Aramean, he died and the dogs licked up his blood, so he didn't actually get to listen to anybody in the future.)

Comments

[Scott]

From the CT Weblog:

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.

OK....evangelical 'leaders' who opposed the war "remained silent", but listing a bunch of pro-war quotes is "cherry picking". To be quoted, don't you have to say something?

[Mike Timonin]

Note a text published between WWI and WWII - Preachers Go To War, or some variation of the title. It contended that preachers who, prior to WWI, had preached a "just war" theory were responsible for taking the US into WWI, and, in doing so, had violated their position as preachers. I haven't actually read the book - it's hard to find - but commentary about the book is available, and seems to indicate that it had a profound effect leading into WWII, where preachers tended to argue (until Pearl Harbor, for the most part) that America should stay out of the war.

[Scott]

Note a text published between WWI and WWII - Preachers Go To War, or some variation of the title. It contended that preachers who, prior to WWI, had preached a "just war" theory were responsible for taking the US into WWI,

I've plugged this book before:

The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation
In The War for Righteousness, Gamble reconstructs the inner world of the social gospel clergy, tracing the evolution of the clergy's interventionist ideology from its roots in earlier efforts to promote a modern, activist Christianity. He shows how these clergy eventually came to see their task as world evangelization for the new creed of democracy and internationalism, and ultimately for the redemption of civilization itself through the agency of total war. World War I thus became a transcendent moment of fulfillment. In the eyes of the progressive clergy, the years from 1914 to 1918 presented an unprecedented opportunity to achieve their vision of a world transformed--the ancient dream of a universal and everlasting kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness. American sacrifice was necessary not only to save the country, but to save the entire world.

Vividly narrating how the progressive clergy played a surprising role in molding the public consensus in favor of total war, Gamble engages the broader question of religion's role in shaping the modern American mind and the development, at the deepest levels, of the logic of messianic interventionism both at home and abroad. This timely book not only fills a significant gap in our collective memory of the Great War, it also helps demonstrate how and why that war heralded the advent of a different American self-understanding....

[Mike Timonin]

I'll have to look that up.

[bowlesy]

N.T. Wright is my current favourite Christian writer/clergyman/leader. His 'Christian Origins and the Question of God' series absolutely blows pre-millenial dispensationalism apart. And he hates the Iraq war, and manages to drop in a reference to third world debt cancellation into every article he writes. Does it get any better?

[Mabus]

Scott says: OK....evangelical 'leaders' who opposed the war "remained silent", but listing a bunch of pro-war quotes is "cherry picking". To be quoted, don't you have to say something?

Strictly speaking, you're right--but "remaining silent" seems to be a relative term here. That is, one may have opposed the war, and said so, but not projected that belief into the realm of public politics (for any number of reasons). In the early days of the war, I heard people in my church say they thought the war was a bad idea--but they were not activists, or newspaper authors, or prominent bloggers, and so their speech was not heard by many people. (Even many church officials fall into this category, especially in decentralized churches where no one has a great deal of authority.) I heard other people talk obliquely about "praying for peace to return quickly" who may have been against the war, and trying to suggest that, but who were not clear enough to be sure about.

Truthfully, there seems to be no clear, mainstream consensus on war in my church these days. There was a time when we had a large anarcho-pacifist minority (using libertarian arguments about force and politics, actually: see: http://www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/dlipscomb/civgov.html ; I'm not sure how to make links here), but they developed just prior to the Civil War, which seems to have crippled not only them but the development of a just-war theory as well. The concept of war that emerged fails to differentiate it clearly from law enforcement; I did not even realize this until I heard people argue for a law-enforcement model for stopping terrorists and found myself wondering what the difference was.

That's actually a trick question. Ahab shot by an Aramean, he died and the dogs licked up his blood, so he didn't actually get to listen to anybody in the future.

Oh for the times when leaders still had to lead their troops into battle!