Remembrance

Followers of the Barclay’s Premier League will be familiar with the red poppies which start appearing on uniforms and managers' lapels in early November. Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday, which is to the UK as Veterans Day is to the US. Our online church service therefore took on martial overtones: a soldier playing a bugle followed by a moment of silence; a reading of “In Flanders Field” by Anne, one of our congregants who rocks up in a jaunty uniform from time to time; a sermon evoking memories of fathers and grandfathers who were on the scene in Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun.

I am certainly down with honoring lost loved ones or the horrors of war. But I’m not sure if war commemoration is the role that the Christian church should be playing here. Yes, we did read from Isaiah 2 about beating swords into plowshares, but this was far overshadowed by glorification of men in uniform.  Our closing prayer cited, mistily, “the call to arms, the patriotic songs, the courage, the comradeship.” At the end of the sermon, we ran a short video from a WWII veteran saying that the men he served with were “real heroes,” and who am I to say they weren’t.  But is it the role of the church to glorify war heroes, or to ask why they were there to begin with?  What beliefs and actions of men put these pour souls in a foxhole somewhere, and how do we reconcile this with our idea of God?  What, indeed, would Jesus do?

I’m a fan of C.S. Lewis, but this speaks to something in his writings I’ve always had trouble swallowing. In Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out elegant and convincing arguments about right and wrong, and why those concepts are universal, and how we all know it deep down (i.e., because they come from God). Yet some of his examples – “there are situations in which it is the duty…of a soldier to encourage his fighting instinct,” or “if no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality” (whatever that might be) – give the impression that he conflates being a good Christian with being a good Englishman.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, as I’ve never been compelled to take up arms to defend my children while bombs rained over my hometown.  Compared to most of the people in my congregation, I’m a generation removed from World War II.  Also, as an American, my associations with war are less about fighting off the Nazis, and more about the neo-imperialist aggressions of my home country in the Middle East. In any case, my understanding of the gospel tells me that war is wrong and evil, full stop, and we should be extremely wary of myths and rituals that might lead us to believe otherwise.