How can Christians learn to stand against the emerging empire without becoming either cranks on the right, or closing ranks with the envious on the left — those who would have no problem with such immense power being wielded, just so long as it was not being wielded by America?
In virtually all political discourse, a good response to most simplistic claims would be, “It’s not as easy as that.” For example, whether the war in Iraq is a constitutional war is a completely different question than whether it is winnable. I don’t think it is constitutional, but I do think it is winnable — in about three weeks, if the political will to do it were there. “Getting the job done” is not a phrase that indicates automatic praise — a victory could be a moral travesty, or it could be just fine. My point here is that those who are against the war tend to be negative across the board, and those who are for it are positive across the board. But it is not as simple as that.
But on some issues it is as simple as that. When Caligula made his horse a senator, it did not take an astute political observer with three PhDs to tell that something foolish was afoot. In a similar way, rank and file Christians can simply look at who is advocating that kind of thing. The dismemberment of little ones in the womb is not a debateable matter, and the fact that it is being debated tells us more about our corruptions than it tells us about the need for a debate. The issue of homosexual marriage is the same kind of issue.
But some wars are just and some are not. In order to tell the difference, it is necessary to obtain a lot more information than most people can do, and so in many instances the average citizen simply has to trust God, and fulfill his civic duty. Should a veteran of the First World War come to discover years later that the cause for which he fought was not as cut-and-dried as he thought when he enlisted, this does not undo the heroism of what he did. Wars and rumors of wars are complicated things, and nations rising up against nations are the same.
But abortion mills are always unjust, and it takes virtually no investigation for a Christian to come to this conclusion — five minutes of honest reflection should do it. Homosexual marriage is appalling, and all that is necessary to understand this is simple biblical literacy, which every Christian ought to have. These things are the weightier matters of the law, and they are easy to ascertain. And Jesus explicitly taught that we should deal with our own big issues first (the beam in the eye) before tackling difficult eye surgery elsewhere.
Now I have written as a critic of the war in Iraq, and of the growing American empire. I will continue to do so. But I am doing this for constitutional reasons — reasons that can be established without getting those three PhDs. All you need is a copy of the Constitution, and half an hour to read it.
But as I try to make my case against the war, the fact that the shrillest critics of the war, and of President Bush, are those who also demand continued legalized abortion and the right of homosexuals to marry is no help at all. Their input is most unwelcome, even if they might say the same thing that I do in a particular instance. If we cannot trust them to see the claims of justice and righteousness in such easy instances, then why on earth would we trust their criticisms of the CIA’s behavior in Pakistan twenty years ago? These are people who clearly don’t know what justice is.
This is also why if a pro-war Republican candidate won the White House, but he was someone who would appoint one more Scalia and two more Thomases to the Supreme Court, I would thank the Lord for His graciousness to us, even though I would still oppose the rationale for the war, and the way it has been undertaken. We, greatly in need of national repentance, would at least be dealing with the first things first. We would be getting the beam out of our eye. Maybe after that we might come to understand the biblical requirements for our foreign policy in far away places. But if a pro-war, pro-abort candidate like Giuliani won, I would reason in the opposite direction. Since we clearly and emphatically had endorsed the slaughter of millions at home — and had done so by having both major political parties abandon the unborn — then the accusation that we are doing whatever we are doing overseas “because we obviously like killing a great deal” becomes far more plausible. Giuliani might conceivably win the “war on terror.” God’s ways are inscrutable. But if Giuliani were president, we most certainly would deserve to lose it, and would deserve the unstinted wrath of God upon us. If He withheld His hand, it would only be because the “iniquity of the Americans was not yet full.” The abortion mills take out about as many Americans each day as the 911 attackers did. The evangelical leaders who recently met in order to contemplate how they would walk away from the Republicans were most certainly right to do so.
In the coming campaign season, reason from the greater things to the lesser. Do it sensibly, slowly, and in the right order. It is more important to stop chopping babies up than it is to fix the Federal Reserve. It is more important to reject the sodomization of our public life than it is to keep the secularist idolaters from toppling the Muslim idolatry of Iran. It is more important for Christians to be explicit Christians — not right-wing cranks, and not fellow travelers with the leftists — than anything else.