Many countries have special days to celebrate their armed forces, and the patriotism of those who sacrificed for their country with bravery and honor. The most prominent of these days in the United States are:
- Memorial Day (last Monday of May)
- Veterans Day (November 11)
- Independence Day (July 4)
- Armed Forces Day (third Saturday in May)
- Flag Day (June 14)
The full degree of sacrifice by those who participated in military or combat operations (and those who sacrificed in support of them) likely will never be fully appreciated or understood. We live in a deceitful world full of bad actors, and the Just War theory is well founded—as is the UN Charter provision affirming self-defense, whether individual or collective. Few would argue that these are not among the essential foundations of national existence.
However, there is a difference between legitimate, honorable, sacrifice for the common good and chest thumping militarism that is not necessarily combined with patriotic devotion. Authoritarian governments of the past 100 years provide ready historical examples of the tragedy this spawns. During my lifetime, the winds of militarism masquerading as patriotism have blown strong at times—they still do, and far too often.
Militarism and authoritarian nationalism also rear their heads in places where they should be the most alien—such as in Christian churches. This is not a new phenomenon. In Constantine’s Rome, there is a noted occasion in which the soldiers in full armor rode their horses into a river to be baptized. While in the river they deliberately held their swords out of the water to prevent their weapons from being baptized with them—apparently to prevent the swords from being made worthless for combat by that same holy sacrament by which they joined the Kingdom of God. Their actions could have been a rejection on practical grounds of the strains of pacifism expressed by some prominent Christian leaders of their era. If that was the case, those soldiers’ perspectives were different from the uses of military action in subsequent centuries, in which temporal force of arms was considered an extension of God’s righteousness—the religious wars that grew out of the Reformation provide ready examples from both Protestant and Catholic viewpoints.
With the clear presence of soldiers in Christian scripture (in which John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, and Paul all have contact with military persons, but none expresses objections to things military or even warfare itself), church approval of the military appears to have firm grounding. But military participation in pre-Constantine Rome did not imply that the soldier was fighting in God’s army—the soldier was merely being a good temporal citizen.
This appears to become muddled after Constantine made Christianity an official part of the Roman Empire. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36-37). But as the church and civil government began to merge, those in temporal authority began to assert that they were also executing God’s heavenly will. The earliest of these assertions could go back to Paul’s declaring (in Romans 13, which is cleverly distorted today in my opinion) that there is no earthly authority except from God. There is also the account in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells Peter what you bind on earth is bound in heaven (Matthew 18:18). In the Great Schism of 1054 that separated the church in to East and West, matters are so merged that it is difficult to separate religious issues from secular issues.
Our faith is deeply rich in substance, spanning the practical application of spirituality in the Book of James to the extended cosmology of the Revelation to John. Our proper posture toward military service is informed by identification of our true enemies as not other humans, but instead powers and principalities that are external to our temporal existence (Ephesians 6:11-12). You can’t pierce, and thus harm, a “power” or “principality” with a physical spear or any other weapon within the realm of physics. We are indeed in a spiritual war, but we are non-combatants in that war—we as mortal humans have no means of spiritual operations to prosecute such a war.
Are military forces (including those of our nation) necessary? Unfortunately, yes—we live, after all, in a fallen world (for now). But for those temporal military forces to have effect in truly protecting the nation, we must ensure that we worship the God of Heaven and not the military things themselves.