Muslims, Christians and War 3

Lee Camp has a courageous new book called Who Is My Enemy?: Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam–and Themselves, and it stakes some major claims, claims that we need to discuss. Claims that might make us uncomfortable.

The big picture of Lee Camp’s direct and courageous book is two-fold: that the founding narratives of the Jesus Story and the Muhammad Story are fundamentally different; and that the stories have both departed from the founding stories and have since both become narratives in which violence is justifiable. Camp is not saying they are the same story, but similar stories.

What he is perhaps saying loudest is that the Just War Tradition and the Muslim justification of war are not as far apart as many think. I can only hope that many will listen to this sharp-thinking and courageous proposal. Perhaps the just war approach by religious communities, and Camp is concerned with America only in so far as it is supported by Christians, are two variants of one major theory: war is justified, and religious people can use violence in order to gain their larger goals. In America’s case, it is freedom and liberal policies and free enterprise; in Islam’s case it is more of a religious, Koran-shaped just society. Both, however, are concerned with establishing what is believed to be the best just society.

How do you explain (1) America’s own violations of just war theory? and (2) Christian participation in violations of just war theory? Or, perhaps I should ask this in a different way: Do Christians really care about this issue today?

In a visit to the Cowboy Museum Camp is reminded of America’s story: the stripping of land from native Americans under the clear justification of God’s will and the plan of God in history. Put directly, Puritans slaughtered native Americans in the name of Jesus. And what of what happened in China by the Japanese, who used America’s WWII logic? And what about what Americans did to Filipinos (250,000 killed) in the name of bringing Christianity?

What matters is the stories we are telling: out of these stories we find a history and a memory and a course for the future? Our story, is it the story of a God-fearing nation triumphing over the forces of evil through military might? Camp says so (p. 91).

Another big issue here is the rise of “total war” in the Civil War with William Tecumseh Sherman’s invasion of the South, where – he said – the more cruel the sooner the war will end. This is called “total war,” and it means to tell with the just war theory as long as we win. WWII: both USA and England bombed incessantly German villages and German citizens, and this to defeat a diabolical Hitler. No need to play “moral equivalency” but anyone who thinks we acted justly in war – just war theorists say entering the war was just – is simply wrong. WWII tactics were nothing short of terroristic demoralization of the populace.

“This is about move toward ‘total war,’ in which we are told we must wage merciless war on behalf of the good news of democracy and free-market economies and political liberalism so we might be free to worship the Lord who in Jesus taught us to love our enemies” (96). The problem is that Christians are in full support of the war machines and military strategies, and most seemingly don’t even care to examine either the original Jesus Story (which Camp [and I] think was pacifist but not passivism; it was the formation of alternative shalom reality in this world) or even what Just War Theory teaches.

He’s right: “Good God, have mercy on us.”