Do We Worship God or America?

This weekend is the annual protest against the Western HemisphereInstitute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, Georgia. This military institute has been known to train Latin American general in brutal tactics that have been used to silence the opposition in numerous ways. Some of the victims have been Catholic priests and nuns working alongside the poor.

Photo by Patrick Mulvaney of 2004 SOA Protest Funeral Procession
Read his recount here

The vigil is held the weekend before Thanksgiving annually to commemorate the anniversary of the deaths of 6 priests, theirhousekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador on November 16, 1989, just eight people of the thousands killed by the graduates of SOA. About 15,000-20,000 people will attend this vigil. School groups, college groups, peace activists, Catholics, and Protestants from the US and Latin America comes to peacefully protest this institute. I went twice with fellow classmates from Earlham College. Every year the vigil ends in a giant funeral procession remembering all the people who have been killed by the graduates of the School of the Americas.

Yet, outside of a handful of Catholic and Protestant churches, will this protest get any attention this Sunday in our churches? How many churches will remember the victims of our military actions in their prayers of the people? Will there be any special services to commemorate this ongoing suffering tragedy?


I want to contrast this with what I saw earlier this month all over social media, in the news and with my own eyes. On the Sunday before Veterans Day, there were special services, invitations to military families, and prayers for our troops. Here is just one of many examples: Rick Warren's Saddleback Church had a special invitation to military families.

If you're a veteran or currently serving, we'll honor you today at all USA campuses.Invite veterans! pic.twitter.com/XqPuzwVVoB
— Rick Warren (@RickWarren) November 10, 2013

When will Saddleback Church make a special invitation to peacemakers and their families? Or any church for that matter?

When will churches give prayers for the victims of war in the Prayers of the People? When will we remember the deaths of our fellow Christians or even humans affected by our extremely large military? Even more, when will we recognize that we are all complicit with the military industrial complex that feed off a patriotic Christianity in the United States? This is one of our sins that we need to recognize!

I have seen pastors who are worried about saying anything to disrupt their congregants on Veterans Day weekend. If they didn't want to glorify war, most of them stay silent and did not mention their real beliefs. Veterans Day weekend in the Church should have been one of mourning. Yes, mourning that the War to End All Wars did not do accomplish that. Instead it continued a brutal and violent history. We should mourn how we so eagerly send off young people to fight to keep the Defense Industry wealthy, while we ignore veterans on the streets?

Sadly American Christianity is currently more interested in upholding American Exceptionalism rather than having a prophetic voice. When will we recognize that God does not just love us but the whole world? Until that point, American Christianity will continue to worship America more than God.  

Lets Stop Glorifying War in Church

This weekend, we are celebrating Memorial Day. In the last week, as I have passed churches on the road and seen their Facebook updates, I have seen a lot of messages that says something about honoring our heroes. Each time I read or see that, I cringe. It is further evidence of the combining Christianity and patriotism in this country. The Early Church gathered in secret to worship a Savior that was executed by the most powerful military at the time, but now we worship the most powerful country and its military strength along with Christ. There are a lot of dangers in this continued Idol worship.

The influential German theologian Karl Barth was perturbed as a young man when his clergy mentors and other prominent Germans signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in 1914. This manifesto offered unequivocal support of the actions of the German military. This had a major effect on Barth's theology about the separation of the church and the government. When a professor talked about this pivotal moment in Barth's life and theology last semester during a class on Karl Barth, he did not even attempt to make the connection between Barth's crisis to the current dilemma that we face in this country. Tomorrow, thousands, perhaps millions of US Christians will walk into their churches and not be surprised to see the American flag near the altar.

I have been thinking about this dilemma for a while. Growing up, I attended anti-death penalty vigils outside of my state's Governor Mansion. In reading about the cases, I sometimes learned that the death row inmates have served in the armed forces at some point before their crime. Often I reflected on this double standard, we teach people how to kill people and then praise them, but then we will also put to death the same people if they kill other people. How does any of this fits in Christ's admonishment that we should love our neighbors?

Last May I took a short intensive class on Young Adult Ministries. As part of this class, we talked about ministries in university settings, prisons, and the military. To talk about military chaplainships, the class traveled down to Washington DC and talked to chaplains currently serving in different parts of the armed forces. Several of us asked most of the chaplains how they dealt with the command from Christ to love our neighbors. All but one chaplain did not answer this question. Usually they responded with that they are just following orders or altogether avoid the question. The one chaplain who actually answered the question said that it was a hard question and one that some soldiers had a hard time wrestling with.

As a Christian, when I am in church, my allegiance is only towards Christ. I do not believe that God only blesses the USA, instead I believe God loves the whole world. I do not buy into a philosophy that is the outgrowth of the Manifest Destiny that led to the unnecessary slaughter, slavery and death of millions of Native people. I do not buy into a philosophy that was used to justify slavery in this country and around the world. I believed that we are called to love our neighbors period.

By writing this, I do not want Christians to abandon our troops. We should dialogue about what it means to support our troops and how to support these men and women after they return home, changed forever. We should also hold up the people who go to the same regions to do purely humanitarian work, often unarmed and with less support, in an effort to bring about peace in other ways. But at the same time lets not glorify the world's richest military within our church doors. We already do that enough the other six days of week.

Instead, on this Memorial Day weekend and after, let's keep Church as a place to remember the human costs of the war (including all casualties of war) and our own implicitness in this industry that keeps us at war. Let's pray that God will keep giving us strength to work towards an eternal peace that will only exist when God's Kingdom come into being.