I have a book on Protestantism and the United States military coming out with the Davenant Institute Press early next year. It intersects history, political philosophy, and religion. It focuses on the United States, but the question of militaries and the Christian religion is an ancient one. Why should armies—who fulfill a natural function and not a spiritual one—have anything to do with something so sublimely pure as the Gospel?
The easy answer is that war kills men, and dead men confront eternity. Shouldn’t men on the cusp of meeting their maker have the Gospel presented to them? Yes, that’s true but the American regime has left the presentation of the Gospel to non-state actors, disestablished churches. Yet Christians before the 20th century understood that Christianity served more than a “gospel” function. Society ordered around something that was sublimely true—the Christian Gospel—gave society a telos that led to what St. Luke called peace on earth to men of goodwill. This was not a promise of utopia—the kingdom was not fulfilled the instant Christ was born. Christ’s coming meant that there was a new particular type of peace that came with the Incarnation.
St. Augustine in The City of God wrote that while earth was not heaven, but the tie between the two was not obliterated. At the first Advent, to quote Steven Curtis Chapman—“God heard creation crying, and he sent heaven to earth.” St. Augustine wrote—even in the political and social collapse of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 5th century—that the peace of heaven availed itself of the peace of earth. Something about the earthly order—hardly capable of saving humanity’s souls—nonetheless lent a hand to the heavenly order.
The Christian Fathers believed that humans could be—and should be—motivated by law and society to think about higher things. With their Greek forebears, they understood that human reason was evidence of some sort of divine connection, what Christians came to call the imago Dei. The state—in the person of the emperor—had the right to order society so that humans would think about higher things, and not be governed by mere natural law. Every society had ordering principles built on top of natural law; no one believed in a naked public square in the late Roman Empire. Rome would either be pagan or Christian. Constantine, with what Eusebius called a “transcription” of Christ’s authority, answered the question for Rome, and for the West: it would be Christian.
What does any of this have to do with the military of a republic that does not have a state church? We should consider two questions:
- Do soldiers, by virtue of their vocation, not participate in the peace of earth that heaven avails itself of?
- Is the peace of heaven’s only instrument the Christian church?
The answer to the first question is a simple one. Yes, soldiers do participate in the peace of earth that is somehow connected to heaven. Tertullian made it clear that Christians could and did serve in the Roman military. The medievals made the connection between the military and Christian explicit—too explicit—to the point that the church and army were synonymous at times. The Reformation’s first and in many ways primary aim was separating politics and warfighting from the church. The American republic stands in light of the Reformers’ very real restoration of separating church and state. The state reasserted its right to do some of the work of earth that Augustine saw as useful to heaven: bringing about peace on earth. That peace, of course, was and is an imperfect one, but everyone believes that peace on some level can be had, which is why armies exist.
Christianity is perhaps still the primary moral organizing force in the American republic, and for the men and women that comprise its military. Christianity informs the peace of earth organized and implemented by the American military abroad and domestically, and American soldiers, sailors, and airmen implement that same peace. That peace does not rely on a state church, an explicitly Constantinian order, even as it fulfills the Constantinian political vocation. The American religious order, Ian Speir noted at Mere Orthodoxy, removed certain types of state-sponsored ecclesiastical power precisely so that citizens—including soldiers—might be bound by alternate forms of power: the socio-cultural influence of the local church and Christian society. “Religious liberty,” Speir notes, “is never self-referential—it is never liberty for its own sake. It has a telos. Being bound to a higher sovereign (religio) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (libertas). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of a more ultimate allegiance.” Religious liberty, as it were, binds the American warrior not merely to his natural duty, but to his greater duty to make sure his vocation helps build the peace of earth, which orders American society toward heaven.