Are Evangelical Christians Warmongers?

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The answer to the question is yes. Evangelicals have a strong love for war. Of course I must make the obligatory concession that not all are like that. But evangelical protestantism seems to suffer particularly from this. The mainline denominations who as a rule dont care much for the moral commands of God do care about peace. The evangelicals seems to care about all moral commands but peace. This love for war was on display in many churches two Sundays ago when many churches remembered the few thousand US dead on Sept. 11, 2001 while ignoring the hundred thousand killed at the hands of the US military in Iraq alone.

The political philsophy of these evangelicals is bizzare. In general they are rightly distrustful of government and properly understand it to be incompetent and inefficiently. They are upset when the government wants to engage in social progams at home. But whenever the issue is foreign wars these same people have complete trust in the government, its proclomations and its goals. The programs they rightly reject at home which will be accomplished by wasteful spending they applaud abroad that will be accomplished by wasteful spending and the blood of many.
anp1215 said:
I agree as well. Even though I don’t live in the “deep” south, I still have a very, for lack of a better word, red neck-ish family that would not be out of place in the deep south. Most of my family (and I’m referring to my mom’s side) is Pentecostal or evangelical, and have very inconsistent values.
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I object to the idea that the South is the place where recnecks fit in. As you point out rednecks exist everywhere. If the same people where suddenly transferred into the inner city most folks would have infinite compassion for them as their ignorance would suddenly be caused by their poverty. But so long as they are poor White people living in rural America they are responsible for their condition and not deserving of sympathy but certainly deserving of ridicule and maybe even hate.
 
waxwing said:
Guess we all have different reactions, mine was yep must those loud Evangelicals/GOP’ers…re the other party making the Republicans look bad…so many ways to go with this…lets just say they don’t need help in this regard.🙂

Care for a cup of tea
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Only if it is Sweet tea!😃
 
What is a warmonger? The majority of comments here say evangelicals are warmongers.
A warmonger is a person who advocates, wants or tries to preciptate war. Sorry evangelicals do not fit this definition.

I am simple amazed at the level of ignorance of evangelicals on this thread. Only topped by wholesale whoppers of mis-information.

Before I was Anglican, I was an evanglical. Now I am Catholic.

What I am seeing here is a sterotype of misinformation about a group that is definitely not understood by too many catholics and protestants posting on this thread though they seem to act as if they know something.

All I am seeing are accusations, terrible accusations against fellow Christians without the least bit of fact to back it up. The OP brought up a fringe, at best, protestant who made wild accusations about evangelicals, without proof mind you, and it is like chumming for sharks! A feeding frenzy of anti-protestant and anti-evangelical attacks that if the words were interchanged, meaning place catholic in place of evangelical, the mods would have shut this thread down for the anti-catholic stero-types and mis-information.

I expect to see this on CARM and other anti-catholic sites. I expect better of this forum.

And to be fair, there have been catholics post on this thread fairly about this topic.

Now I am sure, some are going to search the internet to find that fringe group to support their assumptions. I would suggest looking at the SBC, Assembly of God and other mainstream evangelicals to see if the widle accusations made are supported. Sorry. Westboro Baptist is not a source.

We Catholics do not like it when others accuse us of incorrectly. Let us not become like those that do.

Mark
 
MarkBrown said:
What is a warmonger? The majority of comments here say evangelicals are warmongers.
A warmonger is a person who advocates, wants or tries to preciptate war. Sorry evangelicals do not fit this definition.

I am simple amazed at the level of ignorance of evangelicals on this thread. Only topped by wholesale whoppers of mis-information.

Before I was Anglican, I was an evanglical. Now I am Catholic.

What I am seeing here is a sterotype of misinformation about a group that is definitely not understood by too many catholics and protestants posting on this thread though they seem to act as if they know something.

All I am seeing are accusations, terrible accusations against fellow Christians without the least bit of fact to back it up. The OP brought up a fringe, at best, protestant who made wild accusations about evangelicals, without proof mind you, and it is like chumming for sharks! A feeding frenzy of anti-protestant and anti-evangelical attacks that if the words were interchanged, meaning place catholic in place of evangelical, the mods would have shut this thread down for the anti-catholic stero-types and mis-information.

I expect to see this on CARM and other anti-catholic sites. I expect better of this forum.

And to be fair, there have been catholics post on this thread fairly about this topic.

Now I am sure, some are going to search the internet to find that fringe group to support their assumptions. I would suggest looking at the SBC, Assembly of God and other mainstream evangelicals to see if the widle accusations made are supported. Sorry. Westboro Baptist is not a source.

We Catholics do not like it when others accuse us of incorrectly. Let us not become like those that do.

Mark
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I wrote about what I know. Most of my family is evangelical, I was too. I don’t know if they’re “war mongers” but they have fervent support for any U.S. initiated war, and seem to think that when it comes to war and invasion of other countries, the U.S. is always right, because well, it’s the U.S., and God is on “our” side. They’re also racist and pro-death penalty. That is my personal experience with evangelicals. I’m sure they’re not all like that, but I wrote about my experience with them. I understand the OP’s point.
 
I think perhaps some has to do their end times and rapture theology.
 
Chuck Baldwin is fundamentalist fringe to be sure.
However, what is revealed in his piece is a problem evangelicals cannot dodge. And is an issue much bigger than him.
Evangelicals are chained to an end-times prophecy that worships the state of Israel, nearly salivates over the prospect of a ‘Tribulation’ (that they watch from Heaven after they are ‘raptured’). This colors much of their world view. The evangelical church in America is primarily and AMERICAN phenominon and doesn’t fit very well outside of our borders.
When it comes to the issue of war, evangelicals seem to be right-wing Americans first and Christians second. At least that is the way it appears to Christians outside of this country.
Talk to Christians in Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Libya, ect. They have a different take on war than evangelicals.
I was evangelical/fundamentalist once, and I was just as much a hawk.
 
anp1215 said:
I wrote about what I know. Most of my family is evangelical, I was too. I don’t know if they’re “war mongers” but they have fervent support for any U.S. initiated war, and seem to think that when it comes to war and invasion of other countries, the U.S. is always right, because well, it’s the U.S., and God is on “our” side. They’re also racist and pro-death penalty. That is my personal experience with evangelicals. I’m sure they’re not all like that, but I wrote about my experience with them. I understand the OP’s point.
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I echo some of these comments as well, being a Canadian the racial issue was a non issue as far I could tell within various multicultural Evangelical Churches I attended - not being a minority I obviously can’t speak for them on this issue. As for the rest, anecdotal of course, but I would venture to say that 75 to 85 percent of evangelicals I knew and discussed politics with were Conservative. I found them to be Pro Big Business - Anti Union, for Capital Punishment, don’t believe in Climate Change, seemed to err on the side of war rather than peace or more negotiations … of course on these message boards people tend to generalize - we’re not writing thesis papers here, just sharing our thoughts and experiences.
 
waxwing said:
I echo some of these comments as well, being a Canadian the racial issue was a non issue as far I could tell within various multicultural Evangelical Churches I attended - not being a minority I obviously can’t speak for them on this issue. As for the rest, anecdotal of course, but I would venture to say that 75 to 85 percent of evangelicals I knew and discussed politics with were Conservative. I found them to be Pro Big Business - Anti Union, for Capital Punishment, don’t believe in Climate Change, seemed to err on the side of war rather than peace or more negotiations … of course on these message boards people tend to generalize - we’re not writing thesis papers here, just sharing our thoughts and experiences.
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It is a simple challenge: produce the evangelical and an example of his “war-mongering”.

“Conservative, Anti-Union, Pro-Business, Pro-capital punushment, don’t believe in climate change” is simply a list of liberal shibboleths, and none of them mean the same thing as “war-monger”.

I’m starting to think the thread should be: “Are liberals bigots, because they sure argue like one?”
 
GEddie said:
In all fairness, the Bible itself is harsh on homosexuality (both OT and NT) and so if oneis a fundamentalist, it’s very hard not to be oneself. Fundamentalist take pride in following the letter of the law when it comes to scripture, hence also their enthusiasm for the death penalty, etc.

ICXC NIKA
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You have a good point. I can see how they could get their views on the death penalty and on homosexuality from the scriptures; however their views towards illegal immigrants and foreigners and their views on war are very much contrary to the attitudes of Jesus in the New Testament.
 
CompSciGuy said:
You have a good point. I can see how they could get their views on the death penalty and on homosexuality from the scriptures; however their views towards illegal immigrants and foreigners and their views on war are very much contrary to the attitudes of Jesus in the New Testament.
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Well, as an ex-fundamentalist myself, I’ve always seen this as a form of “Amero-Israelism:” ie, the USA in Biblical Israel’s place in the covenant. This is AFAICT a holdover from Puritan times, from whence all the Biblical town names on the American map.

On this interpretation, Americans would be the chosen people, and everything it’s government does is right, and every war it gets into is “Godly.”. In fact, they use our LORD’s words about swords to argue that opposition to war is wrong (that happened to me many times.). They never address why HE never let the swords be used.

I never saw the antagonism to foreigners, since I lived in a university town where foreign students were numerous and welcomed. But I’d imagine that such might have derived from foreign opposition to US war efforts in the past decade.

I reconverted to the RCC long before illegal immigration became a popular issue.

God Bless and ICXC NIKA.
 
There’s a couple of things in the article that aren’t factually accurate, and the predictions at the end of it are hyperbolic. There is some basis for what he’s saying, but there’s also some things I can’t agree with.

The biggest inaccuracy that jumped out at me was the blanket statement about how Christians have historically adhered to the Natural Law principle of self-defense and that conscientious pacifism was always the exception and not the rule. This has been true for most of Christianity’s history, but it hasn’t always been true, and it’s changed depending on how different governments have operated and how Christians have interacted with them. Going back to the first four-plus centuries of Christianity, it wasn’t a legalized religion in the Roman Empire. Christianity was marginalized; Christians were the outliers. For that portion of Christianity’s history, conscientious pacifism was very much the rule rather than the exception. Christians were near-universal in abstaining from serving as Roman soldiers- that was one of the biggest things that made Christians different from everyone else. They were citizens of the Kingdom, and that meant more to them than Roman citizenship- especially in an empire where Christianity was illegal and its military operations were seldom, if ever, in the best interest of Christianity. It was a matter of trust- Christians didn’t trust the Roman empire to the extent that they could be in the military and take orders from that military’s leadership without compromising their religious beliefs.

Of course, that all changed when Christianity became legal- and in relatively short order, it became the only legal religion. That’s when Christians in the empire (and then what was formerly the Western part of the empire) generally became ok with military service, albeit in somewhat different ways depending on the place and time. The way it worked out in the Byzantine Empire was always a bit different from how it was in the West, and depending on the place and time, the line between a country’s war and the Church’s war might get blurred to one extent or another. A lot of that variation had to do with the changing nature and role of the papacy and the rest of the Magisterium, along with its changing relationships with different types of governments.

This is more specific to American Evangelicals of the 21st century, though. Some of what this man says is true, albeit overstated. Evangelical Christians in America do tend to lean more to the hawkish side (although the true mongers are a vocal few) and they do tend to associate patriotism with being pro-war while we’re at war (although that does make sense, in a way). He’s also right when he says Evangelical Americans generally aren’t fazed by bombings, targeted killings, puppet dictatorships, or even the secret black ops that civilians don’t know anything about. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s not quite as sinister as Chuck Baldwin makes it out to be. It is worthy of some raised eyebrows, but it’s not…what does he call it…a devilish new world order that is of Satan. It’s certainly not that.

It’s a matter of trust. Evangelicals trust the US military to do make consistently good decisions, both from a more objective standpoint and from a specifically Evangelical perspective. That trust is necessary and good in some sense, although I doubt that Chuck and I can agree on that. It can also go a little too far, but again, it seems that I see a flaw that may be corrected in time while Baldwin sees something that looks entirely un-Christian and in need of fundamental, comprehensive, far-reaching alteration. I don’t see that.

In a challenging era of war and diplomacy that involves a rapidly changing landscape of players and challenges, the US government and the US military are always hard at work and they’re always making decisions that can be either good or bad- but far more often, they’re difficult to assess without the benefit of hindsight. And the truth is, Evangelicals in the US tend to trust these efforts a little too much. We do have to trust our leaders to carry these things out, and military/intelligence operations often can’t be completely transparent. But Evangelicals in the US do have a tendency to think that all, or nearly all, of these major decisions are good ones. At times, they may also be too optimistic with regard to how those decisions and actions will be judged in the future.

If I can quote Pres. Obama for a moment here, though, let me be clear. I completely disagree with the overly pessimistic assessment of the US military as a tool of Satan and its Evangelical supporters as the facilitators of the ruination of our country. The truth is, we do need to trust our leaders (elected and otherwise) to make really tough decisions all the time, and they will usually make them with the benefit of expertise and intel that we don’t have. I don’t think Chuck Baldwin sees that.

Often, US Evangelicals too readily assume that these major military decisions over the past 10 years have been very good ones. And even more often, they’re liable to demonize anyone who calls that into question. My proposed solution is that US Evangelicals continue to support the US military and be appreciative of it, but also be better educated on some of the intricacies of foreign affairs and be prepared to interact with them in ways that try to assess whether a course of action is good, bad, or mixed in some way. We need to be open to the possibility that such an assessment might yield mixed results, and we need to demonstrate more of a tendency to go through this kind of process in the first place. Transparency is not always a realistic goal in these kinds of situations, but accountability is something that can realistically be improved. We still need to trust these leaders…quite a lot, actually. And they are worthy of that trust. But we’d be better off if that trust was a little less blind.
 
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MarkBrown said:
What is a warmonger? The majority of comments here say evangelicals are warmongers.
A warmonger is a person who advocates, wants or tries to preciptate war. Sorry evangelicals do not fit this definition.

I am simple amazed at the level of ignorance of evangelicals on this thread. Only topped by wholesale whoppers of mis-information.
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🤷 I am sorry Mark… I am just commenting on what I have observed here. People are very mighty scared and whitey… and fear often begets anger which begets hatred. I have been ostracized my entire life here, for being Catholic, because I am an “unsaved heathen”. It really is that bad where I live, and where I grew up… I wish I had different experiences to base my opinions on. 😊 I would love to meet some nice Evangelical Christians who were more kind and understanding about humanity. Perhaps I am just in the wrong part of the country. I really don’t like generalizing… when it comes to Evangelicals,** I have a definite bias that I need to overcome**.
 
ltwin said:
Liberal churches like the Episcopal do tend to wear the “inclusive” label more openly than do evangelical churches. However, the problem is that those liberal churches (at least where I’m from) are nearly empty, nearly retirement homes, and lily white. In my experience its the non-denominational churches that tend to be more accepting of interracial couples and less desirables in society like the ex-convicts. We due tend to be overly patriotic in my opinion though.
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You know, I hear that the mainline denominations are declining in membership and attendance, but I haven’t noticed it around here. In the next area over, there is a Methodist mega-church (it is HUGE) that has a large weekly attendance, book store, coffee shop, and even a separate church on campus that has services aimed towards younger people. I attended another Methodist church on Mother’s Day and it was full (but that might have to do with it being Mother’s Day). Now, I sometimes attend an ACNA church (Anglican Church in North America, conservative Anglican denomination that split from the Episcopal church) and their attendance seems a bit low, but that may be because it’s a relatively new denomination.

The Catholic churches and evangelical churches around here all seem to be packed as well. The Catholic parish I used to attend was usually standing room only at the 11 am Mass.

I think there’s just so many darn people around here, they fill up all the churches! haha
 
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