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.)