Author: Lee M.

James Kushiner and S. M. Hutchens at Mere Comments lay the smackdown on those Christians who deride single-issue voting and can’t bring themselves to support President Bush. (permanent links don’t seem to be working; the entry titles are “My Big Fat ‘Single-Issue’ Vote” and “The Smart Evangelical”) Unfortunately, neither one seriously addresses the issue of war, which should be as much an issue of concern for Christains as any in my view.

Does not exist! Not even close, according to this quiz designed to help you select your presidential candidate. Here are my results:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)

2. Cobb, David – Green Party (59%)

3. Nader, Ralph – Independent (59%)

4. Badnarik, Michael – Libertarian (52%)

5. Brown, Walt – Socialist Party (43%)

6. Kerry, Senator John, MA – Democrat (40%)

7. Peroutka, Michael – Constitution Party (37%)

8. Bush, President George W. – Republican (33%)

All these quizzes have their limitations of course. Still, it would account for my inability to get excited about any of the candidates.

If you click on “more info” for your ideal theoretical candidate you get this message:

Who is “Your ideal theoretical candidate”? This candidate adamantly endorses all of your political views. The problem is that they may not exist, unless you write-in your own name on your ballot.

Well, that’s an idea…

Just for the record, and current polls notwithstanding, I predict that President Bush will be re-elected on Tuesday (or whenever all the recounts and legal wrangling are finished – from which may God save us!). I think the Democrats in general and the far Left in particular have overplayed their hand with respect to the Bush-bashing. The fact that the likes of Michael Moore are now seen as mainstream Democrat spokesmen will, I think, turn off a lot of people who, even if they disagree with the President’s policies, don’t revile him. I also think that Kerry hasn’t made a case that will convince the necessary number of people that he’s the man to stand up to terrorism. Rightly or wrongly, I think the majority will go with the guy who’s perceived as “tougher.” Plus, Kerry just comes across as so darn unlikable! Even people who are planning on voting for him don’t like him!

I don’t say all this to make a partisan point. Though I voted for Bush in 2000, I won’t be voting for him this time around (nor will I be voting for Sen. Kerry). I just wanted to get this prediction on the record. Fortunately, there are no consequences to my being wrong!

Martin Peretz has some questions for John Kerry:

How would John Kerry have dealt with Saddam? He has told us Saddam needed to be “confronted.” But the word itself–which implies that the United States could have overthrown Saddam without using military force–tells us what we need to know. Had the United States and our allies not embarked on this war, the Iraqi mass murderer would still be in power. And, were international sanctions gone, as they soon would have been thanks to Russia and France, he would have been on his way back to having and deploying weapons of mass destruction. And the senator from Massachusetts would not have raised his voice.

Now, of course, the WMD rationale for war has dissolved like a mirage in the Mesopotamian desert. For Kerry and for Democrats, this has simply dissolved the case for the war. Finis. Which leaves us with the dilemma of how we deal with regimes that commit genocide. Saddam’s genocides seem not to have provoked Kerry at all, nor, for that matter, did the genocide in Rwanda. (When U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright finally tried to focus the Clinton administration on the government-sponsored massacres there, Kerry was not exactly an ally.) It is true that, during the first presidential debate, Kerry limply suggested that perhaps, as a last resort, some American troops should be sent to Darfur, Sudan. But I haven’t heard him mention it much since, which says something about his seriousness.

Kerry’s main problem is that the United Nations, the designated proctor for his “global test,” is an impediment to prompt and effective action against savage governments. The United Nations was set up largely to protect the territorial integrity of its member states. But, with a few exceptions, states no longer make war on their neighbors–they make war on segments of their own populations. (Of course, even in that rare case where one state did invade another, and the United Nations endorsed military action–Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait–Kerry did not. In that vote, and in others, he carries on a tradition of Massachusetts isolationism. Democratic politicians in the Commonwealth did not want to send aid to Great Britain before World War II, and Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father and FDR’s ambassador to the Court of Saint James, was a rank appeaser.)

The savagery of governments against their own people, usually against a defined ethnic or religious minority, has been a consistent feature of the postwar world. Not charged in its charter with dealing with such cases, the United Nations has simply looked the other way, or worse. In the 1960s, it sided with the Nigerian government against the Ibos of Biafra; with Kofi Annan in charge of the U.N. presence in Rwanda, genocide unfolded there; and, with Annan again in charge of the blue helmets in Yugoslavia, many massacres took place in Bosnia. Likewise, over decades, it did not see–because it did not want to see–what was going on in Iraq.

More here.

Deciding not to vote is not the same as not bothering to. It’s a conscious choice, made for a reason. And the reason is this: A vote is an endorsement. When you punch the circle next to a candidate’s name, you’re backing that candidate’s program. It’s like signing a petition, or writing a letter of recommendation. You’ve just vouched for someone. You’re now implicated in the decisions he’s made, and in the ones he will make.

But what if you don’t agree with those decisions? Then don’t do it. Refuse to sign the petition. Decline to send the recommendation. Don’t vote. Just because one of the candidates is going to win, doesn’t mean you have to help.

You have to wonder if Carlson, a conservative who has since turned against the Iraq war, is speaking of his own intentions.

Full article here.

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you. For, suppose that you had a great deal of some commodity, and felt bound to give it away to somebody who had none, and that it could not be given to more than one person; if two persons presented themselves, neither of whom had either from need or relationship a greater claim upon you than the other, you could do nothing fairer than choose by lot to which you would give what could not be given to both. Just so among men: since you cannot consult for the good of them all, you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.

–St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

From Jim Henley.

This is a deeply silly piece of writing. Slate asked its contributors to disclose the candidate for whom they’re voting and offer some reasons. Here’s the response from Steven Landsburg, the economic writer:

If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I’d have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry.

Duke thinks it’s imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it’s imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There’s not a dime’s worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.

Bush’s reckless spending and disregard for the truth had me almost ready to vote for Kerry—until Kerry picked his running mate. When the real David Duke ran against a corrupt felon for governor of Lousiana, the bumper stickers read, “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Well, I’m voting for the reckless spendthrift. It’s important again.

I can’t figure out if this is serious or some kind of parody of a libertarian homo economicus. Does Landsburg also think it’s morally wrong to feed one’s own children in preference to the children of strangers? Is taking my own wife out to dinner rather than my neighbor’s discriminating on the arbitrary basis of marital-relation-to-me?

Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart has a review of The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West by Alexander F. C. Webster and Darrell Cole in the November issue of Touchstone.

The book, according to Hart, is an attempt to show two things. First, that the Eastern and Western churches speak with one voice in commending just war thinking as opposed to either pacifism or the brand of “realism” associated with Reinhold Niebuhr. In this they succeed admirably:

The greatest virtue of this book is that it does not advance its case only over against Christian pacifism of the sort one associates with, say, John Howard Yoder, but also over against the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr and his disciples. It has long been one of the more irksome oddities of American Christian ethics that—in matters pertaining to war—the pacifist and realist positions have been treated as the only available options for Christian moralists.

And yet pacifism and realism are mere inversions of one another, inasmuch as they share more or less the same view of what warfare is. Both accept the premise that war is by its nature evil, while only peace is an unqualified good. The pacifist may believe that peace (understood simply as the absence of strife) is best achieved by refusing to participate in war, and the realist that peace (understood as a secure and just social order) is best achieved by answering violence with violence, but both then accept that the Christian never has any choice in times of war but to collaborate with evil: He must either allow the violence of an aggressor to prevail or employ inherently wicked methods to assure that it does not.

Webster and Cole will have none of this. The bracingly unsentimental argument that they want to make is that war in fact is not intrinsically evil, however tragic it may be, but is a neutral instrument that may be used towards ends either moral or immoral; and, when it is waged on behalf of justice and by just means, it is a positive good, a work of virtue, and an act of charity. Simply said, for Christians, to go to war should never be a tragic choice of the lesser of two evils, for we are forbidden as Christians to do evil at all.

The second claim advanced by Webster and Cole is that the churches can and should support America’s “war on terror” as substantially in accord with just war principles. This, Hart says, is considerably more problematic:

[T]he greatest problem with this book is that it never succeeds in providing truly compelling arguments regarding how just war principles can be applied by Christians in the age of the secular state. Christians ought not to support or participate in any unjust war, says Cole; but then, also, Christians must not make war except under the authority of a state’s duly constituted military. But, surely, if there is no established Church, there is no way of knowing whether any given government will make even a show of limiting its belligerences to causes or practices condoned by Christian moral law….

…It seems to me to be a difficulty that is inescapable whenever one attempts to use a moral grammar suited to an age of Christian princes and Christian cultures as a guide to our relations with the post-Christian political order. Webster is almost strident in his assertion that we can credit ourselves with virtuous warmaking in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and pray God he is right. But I cannot imagine anyone not disposed to approve of the invasion of Iraq (in particular) being convinced by any argument this book advances.

What exactly, he might ask, are we fighting for? Democracy? Freedom of religion? But these are not demonstrably biblical values. Did Iraq constitute a threat to us? Perhaps, but not a threat that can ever definitively be shown to have been more than suppositious. And even if this were not so, is this a war waged to defend the people of God? Is ours really a Christian culture—our culture of abortion, pornography, and polymorphous perversity—worthy of defending?

The issue here, for Hart, is the Christian’s relation to the essentially non-Christian modern secular state (a preoccupation of this blog as you may have noticed). If the state doesn’t see itself as under the authority of Christian morality, can Christians support the wars it carries out?

Hart offers a qualified answer:

I am not urging any particular view of the matter, as it happens; I am only calling attention to how complicated the issue becomes when the Christian just war theorist can no longer claim that we are fighting to defend or restore a Christian order. It may well be that the only Christian argument for the war in Iraq that will not inevitably become at best equivocal when subjected to a sufficiently unyielding moral skepticism is that the suffering of the Iraqis under Saddam’s regime was sufficiently monstrous that no Christian conscience could possibly be content to leave that regime in place.

But if this is so, we may have to draw a firm demarcation between the aims of Christians in this conflict and the aims of the secular state. Perhaps we should cease to imagine that we can simply translate the principles of just war from the age of Christendom to the age of “the rights of man.” If we make war justly as Christians, we do so “alongside” the state perhaps, but surely not under its moral or (God forbid) spiritual authority.

Christianity Today asks.