Christians & Wars

19th Jan 22:

Rev dear Rev: Why does our own western island society hold to the view that public and social Christians should do much to avoid the initiation of wars?

As the learned Archbishops say around the old Casa del Clero, "Chance would be a fine thing." Or rather maybe they wanted to say, "Youth is wasted on the young." Or possibly the meritorious remark of many SAS warriors, "Chance favours the prepared mind." Whichever it was, well do I recall from my own youth in deep snowy British winters, when fresh from unloading my Christmas stocking at the end of the mantelpiece, but that there was nothing nicer that Day than settling down to a nice video of some action movie for young Christian altar boys about rogue commanders such as “Crimson Tide”, “Red October”, “Boys from Brazil”, and so on, or better still in the afternoon, after the Queen's Speech and Christmas roast turkey and goose dinner, than gathering round the front room floor and playing a Board Game. There on these Board Games we as children slowly learnt the Arts of War as enemies raided Command and Control Centers, games such as Risk, Campaign, Diplomacy, Battleships, Kingmaker, and so on. Not one of us in our little apostolic troupe ever imagined that would have to deploy our newfound skills in the Arts of War from those maps of faraway cities, mythic to us, to real cities in real time maybe one day, such as Graz, Vienna, Smolensk and yes even Kiev. But yes, the solemn injunction of the messiah makes it abundantly clear that, well, "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (NB The 7th Beatitude in Matthew, at Mt 5:9). So western nations have grown used to the image of Christians, pale and wand, protesting outside bases such as Greenham Common or even Brightlingsea cattle market. That was the public image of Christians thru the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s. Few ever thought.