The Warrior Ethos
The first Christians would have something to say about Pete Hegseth's speech to the generals
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This morning, I watched Pete Hegseth’s speech to the generals gathered from around the world. It was a kind of sermonic pep talk on “the warrior ethos” of the Trump Pentagon. In what was nicknamed by FOX News a “Come to Jesus” meeting, Hegseth said that the newly-renamed Department of “War” would be purging itself of any and all vestiges of “woke.”
And, unsurprisingly, as Hegseth struck a derivative Patton-like pose before a screen-wide American flag, he brought Jesus into his speech. He proclaimed a new “War Department Golden Rule” — “Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit.”
Hegseth is probably the most openly Christian nationalist true believer in the entire Trump administration (Russell Vought may be tied with him). He always brings Jesus to the war party. Because, of course, in the theology of Christian nationalism Jesus is a Warrior. It may well be their central image of the Son of God — a bloodthirsty, revenge-seeker with a sword in hand.
They’ve clearly forgotten — or maybe never knew — what the first and earliest Christians believed about Jesus and war. You remember, don’t you? The Prince of Peace.
In just a few weeks, on November 11, the Christian calendar celebrates St. Martin of Tours, a Roman solider who converted to Christianity. In the Middle Ages (a period often celebrated by the new Christian nationalists), “Martinmas” was an important feast marking the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. And it remembered Martin’s life as a peacemaker — not a warrior.
It is more than a little odd how this ancient celebration was eventually smothered by militarism and is today marked in the United States by Veteran’s Day.
Because that’s not how it started. No early Christian — not one single church leader, pastor, or theologian — in those first decades after Jesus lived, taught, died, and rose again would have ever considered their God to be a warrior.
No early Christian
— not a single church leader, pastor, or theologian —
in those first decades after Jesus lived, taught, died, and rose again would have ever considered their God to be a warrior.
Except in the most metaphorical sense of being a warrior for Love.
Except, of course, in the most metaphorical sense of being a warrior for Love.
But no swords. No generals. No Department of War.
Read on below. I wrote about St. Martin in my book, A People’s History of the Christianity. As I listened to Pete Hegseth this morning, I remembered this story and my own words.
*****
(an excerpt from A People’s History of Christianity)
“That’s a beautiful window,” I said to my friend, an Episcopal priest, as he took me on a tour of the church building where he served, St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Philadelphia.
High on the wall, well above the entry doors in the neo-medieval building, a large round stained-glass window depicts a man, a soldier, sheltering another in his cloak. More than its execution, however, made it beautiful. The picture communicated caring, the two figures appeared to glow in the practice of hospitality.
“You know the story, I suppose,” the priest said. “That’s St. Martin. He converted to Christ while a soldier. One day, his regiment was guarding the city of Amiens and he met a naked beggar on the road. Martin, though only a catechumen and not yet a baptized Christian, took off his cloak, tore it in half, and covered the beggar. He literally followed Jesus’ teaching to give one’s coat to the poor.”
Looking up at the window, I remembered the rest of the legend as well. On the night of the cloak episode, Jesus appeared to Martin in a dream affirming the soldier’s act of hospitality, saying, “Martin, a simple catechumen covered me with this garment.”
The episode became stuff of gossip in the regiment, and the cape was rumored to have miraculous power. Eventually, Frankish kings turned the cloak into a relic claiming divine protection on their rule.
Martin of Tours (ca. 316-397) was born into a pagan family, but as a young man expressed interest in Christianity. His father, however, was appalled by the religion and forced Martin to join the Roman army. While serving as a soldier, Martin’s curiosity about Christianity grew, as did his strong sense of morality, until he became a catechumen, a “learner” of the Jesus way. While still an inquirer, the cloak episode supposedly occurred.
The cloak, of course, is most likely the stuff of pious legend, a story told to make a point. But the point was clear: Martin was devout, even before baptism, and followed the way of hospitality and sharing.
When he was baptized, Martin demonstrated yet another early Christian practice by asking to be released from the army. “I am Christ’s soldier,” he maintained, “I am not allowed to fight.”
Martin was not a conscientious objector in the modern sense, he was only stating early Christian practice. Before theologians Ambrose and Augustine made a case for just war, Christians were not allowed to fight. No record exists that Christians served in the Roman army before 170.
The strong consensus of the early church teachers was that war meant killing, killing was murder, and murder was wrong. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage noted: “The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse.” Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and Origen all specifically condemned participation in war. “The Christian fathers of the first three centuries,” states theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill, “were generally adamant that discipleship requires close adherence to the nonviolent and countercultural example of Jesus’ own life and his sayings about the nature of the kingdom.”
Related to their horror of killing was a second problem about warfare: soldiers were required to perform acts of worship to the state, the gods, and the Emperor, thus, from a Christian perspective, soldiering demanded idolatry. Because the empire murdered Christians (among others), Tertullian pointed out that even a soldier’s tokens of victory, especially the crown of laurel leaf, were symbols of death, hollow triumphs made at the expense of other human beings: “Is the laurel of the triumph made of leaves, or of corpses? Is it adorned with ribbons, or with tombs? Is it bedewed with ointments, or with the tears of wives and mothers?” Since the military practiced both violence and idolatry, Tertullian insisted that there was “no agreement” between serving God and the Emperor. To even wear the uniform of a soldier symbolized killing; as a result, the church did not let Christians enlist or converts to continue to serve after baptism.
While Tertullian emphasized the negative aspects of the military to Christian discipleship, Origen pointed out the positive vision of a life of Christian peacemaking. He criticized the army as a society of “professional violence,” pointing out that Jesus forbids any kind of violence or vengeance against another. “We will not raise arms against any other nation, we will not practice the art of war,” he wrote, “because through Jesus Christ we have become the children of peace.” To him, the spiritual life entailed a rejection of all forms of violence, an “absolute pacifism.”
In asking to leave the army, Martin followed the way of peacemaking, as taught, expected, and insisted upon by the early church. As soon as Martin was freed from military obligation, he studied theology with Hilary of Poitiers and became a monk. In 372, the city of Tours chose him as their bishop. Like John Chrysostom, he turned down the honor — only to be lured from hiding and forced into the office by popular acclaim.
He proved a popular bishop. He planted churches, converting many people throughout France, and founded the first Egyptian-style monastic community in the northern part of the Empire. Many people believed that the former soldier, once a member of the feared Roman army, possessed the gift of healing; they came to him for relief from illness and disease. And he served the poor, and outcasts, even on one occasion protesting the death penalty of a wrongly condemned man. Unlike so many of his peers, he died peacefully in bed, of old age, having dedicated himself to a nonviolent way.
A soldier for Christ.
INSPIRATION
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
— Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem: I lived in the first century of world wars”
A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its affirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
— Denise Levertov, “Making Peace”
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You watched it so we didn’t have to. I can’t.
Very well said - Jesus was a man of peace not war. God is a God of love not hate, forgiveness not revenge is at the heart of the gospel.