"The war in the Gulf is not a Christian war, a Jewish war, or a Moslem war--it is a just war," President Bush recently told a group of conservative religious broadcasters, "and it is a war with which good will prevail." Only a portion of churches within the United States would support this assessment. The American Christian community has been divided over the morality of the Gulf War, with the split taking place along largely predictable lines.
The Spectrum
Conservative Protestant churches have been most supportive of the administration, with some fundamentalists choosing to view the war as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil. The parallels between Baghdad and Babylon are obvious for those who wish to see them, and Saddam Hussein fits nicely into the role of Antichrist. The majority of the evangelicals and moderate fundamentalists, however, have adopted a more balanced and restrained approach, arguing that American policy is defensible on traditional just war grounds. (The just war tradition, a Catholic doctrine by origin, holds that the use of force may be morally justified under certain conditions.) Yet, in light of their sympathy for traditional values such as duty, honor, obedience, and love of country, evangelical support for the war has been surprisingly tentative and conditional. An editorial in the leading evangelical journal, Christianity Today, held that any line in the sand should be drawn "only with tears"; the author then warned against the dangers of chauvinistic nationalism, ethnocentric pride, and the seductive euphoria of techno-war. Dr. Richard D. Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest conservative Protestant denomination, sounded a similar note of caution. Warning emphatically that jobs and oil are not a sufficient or legitimate cause for military action, he continued:
