I'm really going to have to turn to CS Lewis on this matter. He and Chesterton as well as Tolkien are the most accessible writers on matters of Christian ethics and war. But here is briefly where I am.
I look at religion in the same way I look at philosophy. I am of the considered opinion that Christianity is reconciled with human morality and philosophy by dint of its rational works. I am thinking specifically of the way with which Christianity is continually rationalized, that it evolves its theology towards a Deist minimalism as human knowledge advances. The axioms of faith remain - the only serious question Christianity has to answer is whether or not Christ himself were Socialist. Another time perhaps...
I cannot imagine that Christianity's theological locus can be morally wrong, it can merely make errors of interpretation. That is because within and without I am satisfied with the essential axiom that the morality of God and man are identical - ie, we human beings do fundamentally have the same capacity of God to discern good and evil in the world. We can merely say that God is always right and we are mostly right, and only our own failings make us wrong.
If it is our duty to protect our own souls, and indeed we have the capacity to understand good and evil, then it is certainly our duty to protect the souls of others and we can be right about it. It follows then, from this that we should meet evil with superior force if good is to triumph. We are thus morally obligated to defend Christendom itself, rather in the way that the Pope assisted Poland against the godless commies.
I think that it is inevitable in a democracy, even with the separation of Church and State, that religious moral impulses to combat evil will operate through the apparatus of state armies, but they will be unable to make such actions pure. These will be deals with the polis but not with the devil. Wars have, of course, their own logic and their own rules and rationales, but you cannot separate the moral impulse to support a war (or to withdraw support from a war) from the inevitable duty of religious injunctions.
Therefore Christians and people of all beliefs are faced with the inevitable choice of fighting (or proxy fighting) and their own destruction at the hands of the enemy. A church is wise to make alliances with a state, and it ever has been such, if only for the most expedient understanding that so many will be faced with profound questions of the meaning of life during wartime. War is good for religion in that crass way.
It seems to me that a pacifist religion may be equally effective in matters of war and peace. War could be good for pacifist as well as bellicose faiths. The message to submit to one's mortal enemy in order to transcend them in martyrdom, it is one that is well understood in all societies - all the way to Obi Wan Kenobi.
Let us discuss this.
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