Nations have enlisted God, or gods, in war since ancient times

As a rule, I try to refrain from writing about the Middle East. The conflicts in that region are mostly geopolitical, not religious. But every now and then religion leaps to the forefront and can’t be ignored.

That’s what happened during the so-called “12-day war” between Israel, the U.S. and Iran, when leaders of all three countries invoked God and their respective religions to justify their actions.

It started with Benjamin Netanyahu, who justified his attack on Iran by saying: “When enemies build weapons of mass death, stop them. As the Bible teaches us, when someone comes to kill you, rise and act first. This is exactly what Israel has done today.”

The verse he was referring to is from Bamidbar 25:17-18 (what Christians know as the book of Numbers). That’s where God told the Jewish people to treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them because they had “treated you as enemies when they deceived you.”

Israel’s attack on Iran was called Operation Rising Lion, which was also taken from the book of Numbers, chapter 23 verse 24: “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: He shall not lie down until he eat of the prey and drink the blood of the slain.”

Enlisting religion in the cause of war continued with U.S. President Donald Trump, who thanked God when he announced America’s strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military,” he said. “Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also got involved. “The battle begins in the name of God,” he said, adding that “by God’s grace, the powerful arm of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces won’t let them go unpunished.”

This kind of God talk raises all sorts of questions, starting with this one: If, as these monotheistic religions claim, there is only one God, who does that God listen to when asked to bless the wars of one country or another?

Then there is the matter of whether these three leaders thought at all about their co-religionists in the countries they were attacking. There are Jews and Christians who live in Iran and Muslims who live in Israel, all of them being bombed by their “home” countries. How do they feel about those prayers for military success while huddling in bomb shelters?

In fact, this is an old problem. Countries have enlisted God or gods on their side in conflicts since ancient times. One egregious example was the First World War, when politicians and clergy on both sides claimed God was on their side.

In his book, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, Philip Jenkins wrote that “each nation saw itself as playing a predestined role that was divinely inspired.” The Russians, he wrote, viewed Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm as the Antichrist. The Germans equated Britain with the great whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation. The English bishops preached that their country was God’s “predestined instrument to save the Christian civilization of Europe.”

Clergy on all sides baptized the struggle, Jenkins said, becoming “vocal, even fanatical, advocates … for holy warfare.” This included the chaplain at the British House of Commons, who proclaimed that “to kill Germans is a divine service in the fullest acceptance of the word.”

Mark Twain also took this on, in his sardonic way, in 1904. That’s when he wrote “The War Prayer,” a cautionary tale about allowing religion to be conscripted into service on behalf of any country. Written during the Philippine American war, it is a scathing indictment of using religion to justify war.

In the story, a minister is preaching devotion to flag and country and praying to the “God of Battles” to aid the U.S. in its good and noble war. Partway into his sermon, an old man walks into the church dressed in a long white robe. The man ascended the pulpit, motioned the preacher out of the way, and said he was a messenger from God.

“Ponder this — keep it in mind,” the old man said. “If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time … When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it.”

Those results, the old man said, were the deaths of people on the other side, their bodies torn into “bloody shreds with our shells” and “the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain,” plus the cries of widows and orphaned children.

The old man asked the congregation; is that what you really want? “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!” Hearing no response, he left the church.

Twain concluded his story by saying that, after the church service was over, the congregation decided “the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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