Christian Intellectuals, Embedded and Otherwise
by Eugene McCarraher
riting in opposition to American entry into the First World War, Randolph Bourne reminded his fellow dissenters of the impending vituperation. “In an age of faith,” he mused, “skepticism is the most intolerable of insults.” As we witness, in the invasion of Iraq, an extension of the American Empire that is unprecedented in its arrogance and hypocrisy, we should recall that skepticism can also be the most indispensable of virtues. With our own terms of skepticism, and with a harsh and dreadful love, Christians must openly disparage the martial and pecuniary faith which animates history’s richest, most well-armed, and appallingly parochial superpower.
But we can’t shout with any force or effect until we take the measure of the Empire we inhabit. Two years ago, Ari Fleischer, the Bush Administration’s bland and haughty press secretary, anointed the culture of American capitalism “our blessed way of life.” Combined with the President’s frequent references to the providential character of American power, Fleischer’s assertion now appears as much more than the eloquence of an apparatchik. It’s time to realize that the American Empire is a sacral order, a newer, bolder, more beguiling and more frightful incarnation of the earthly city described by Augustine in the City of God.
I mention Augustine with some hesitation, for it’s been depressing to watch the bishop of Hippo yet again conscripted into the intellectual battalions of Empire. He’s been drafted by a group of Christian intellectuals who are as “embedded” in imperial culture as the “journalists” accompanying the invaders. A few weeks ago, on ABC’s Nightline, Michael Novak—always a reliable shill for corporate and imperial ambition—had a ten-second spot as the “Catholic voice” on the “just war” tradition. After Novak came Jean Bethke Elshtain, Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor at the University of Chicago, who has apparently applied for the position once held by an earlier embedded intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr: Unofficial Conscience of the State. Both Novak and Elshtain interpreted Augustine in a manner siren-sweet to the ears of the Pentagon. Neither one questioned American motives; neither one displayed the slightest concern with the sordid history of U.S.-Iraqi relations; neither one presented “just war” thinking as anything other than an easily-filled checklist of conditions. Speaking with that wizened gravitas symptomatic of imaginative paralysis, they confirmed what my friend and colleague Michael Hanby has long contended: that “just war” rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Augustine’s purpose. While certainly culpable in the Constantinian conversion of the Church, Augustine’s thinking on “just war” was not, Mike maintains, a “theory” or even a set of criteria. Rather, Augustine’s remarks on war constitute a reflection on the nature of war in general, as well as a meditation on the sort of character required so as to fight “justly.” In short, here’s what you have to be like to fight a just war—now try waging one.
With all due deference to theologians—the question begged being, of course, how much deference is due—I write as a historian convinced that just war thinking has been far too elastic and accommodating to make any Christian difference in deliberation about conflict. Exactly which wars have been avoided thanks to its counsel? Exactly how has violence been restrained because of its power? Which theologians did the Bush regime consult on the niceties of ad bello and in bello? (Stalin may have had a more pertinent point than we acknowledge when he asked how many divisions the Pope had. Certainly the current Holy Father has no control over American troops such as George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, embedded intellectuals who otherwise make flamboyant displays of their devotion to the pontiff.) My answers to these questions would not be reassuring, and I suspect that the just war tradition’s primary historical significance has been to provide rulers with theological camouflage, and prelates with tickets to prayer breakfasts.
