To Sorrow at War
Remixing superhero movie clips and bomb strike footage makes for terrible moral formation
By Alex Arnold
“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”
Thus said General William Tecumseh Sherman during an 1880 speech in Columbus, Ohio to an audience of 10,000 people. And General Sherman would know, having led the “March to the Sea” campaign through the heart of the Confederacy during the waning months of the Civil War, a campaign calculated to break the Confederacy’s capacity for war by destroying infrastructure, seizing foodstuffs, and crushing morale.
But the truth of Sherman’s statement seems lost on some supporters of the current war by the US and its allies against Iran. As of this writing, a fragile ceasefire is in effect—but the emotional register hasn't shifted from celebration to sober reflection. It has simply moved from celebrating airstrikes to celebrating the “win.” The White House has used playful, fun video memes to celebrate US military successes, interspersing clips from superhero movies and video games with grainy footage of bomb and missile strikes on targets in Iran. Some in the Trump administration seem to revel in displays of American military prowess.
Even as the bombs cease falling, temporarily at least, the emotional backdrop remains celebratory. The administration calls it a “total and complete victory”; Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says Iran “begged for this ceasefire.” How much of this is bravado to shore up support for a war that lacks support among the American public, and how much of this is genuine enthusiasm for the war itself is hard to say. But Christian teaching on what a warfighting civic leader’s attitude toward war should be is crystal clear: One should not glory in war, but sorrow at it.
Certainly Christians in the pacifist traditions will think so. Their position is that all war (indeed, all violence) is incompatible with obedience to Jesus, and so should be eschewed; it’s a short jump from here to thinking that the correct attitude toward war is one of sorrow. But even established Christian moral traditions that think war is sometimes permissible are united with Christian pacifists in thinking that civic leaders should lament wars they fight.
The tradition of just war theory that grows from St. Augustine’s thought, while defending the necessity of war in some circumstances, is still remarkably negative about how civic leaders should feel about war. In his magisterial work The City of God, St. Augustine says:
But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong-doing. Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.
St. Augustine is clear that the wise man’s attitude toward war—even a just one—is to lament it and the underlying evils that move him to wage war. Note also the emphasis he places not just on the evil of the just warrior’s enemy, but on the enemy’s humanity—“it would still be a matter of grief to a man because it is man’s wrong-doing” (emphasis added). Finally, St. Augustine castigates the civic leader who “either endures or thinks [on the horrors of war] without mental pain” as “[thinking] himself happy because he has lost human feeling.” In St. Augustine’s eyes, the person who fails to sorrow at war has become less than human.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the prime exponent of the “Christian realist” moral tradition, also argues that civic leaders should sorrow at war. One clear statement of Niebuhr’s position comes in his essay, “Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist.”
We who allow ourselves to become engaged in war need this testimony of the [opponents of war] against us, lest we accept the warfare of the world as normative, lest we become callous to the horror of war, and lest we forget the ambiguity of our own actions and motives and the risk we run of achieving no permanent good from this momentary anarchy in which we are involved. (emphasis added)
The whole thrust of Niebuhr’s realism is that the world is a tragic place. Humanity is doomed by its sinfulness to face circumstances where even doing the right thing comes with enormous moral costs. To respond to this reality with celebration or glee is to fail to appreciate the moral horrors that human sinfulness has begotten; it is also to deaden one’s conscience at the prospects of killing others made in God’s image, and to make one all too confident about the rightness of one’s cause. The appropriate response to war, therefore, is one of sorrow and regret.
Some might object that to sorrow at war saps the warfighter’s motivation to endure the costs of war and fight to win. St. Augustine and Niebuhr would answer that to lack sorrow at war is to corrupt oneself. The just warrior’s sorrow at war is a powerful restraint against becoming what he fights against. In contrast, the civic leader who revels in war becomes more likely to commit enormities, to lose sight of proportional response, and to wage war beyond necessity. Sorrowing at war need not sap the motivation to fight justly; instead, it is what makes a just war possible at all.
In this essay I have not weighed in on the justness of the US-led war against Iran. I have my opinions on the matter, but they are not relevant to my point: that the posture of one’s heart toward any war—even just ones—should not be one of tough-guy, triumphalist, flag-waving celebration. It should be one of sadness. By any reasonable measure, the regime of the ayatollahs in Iran is violent and oppressive, and Christians and all people of good will should hope that it ceases and is replaced by another that promotes freedom and prosperity for the Iranian people.
But every Iranian, Arab, Israeli, American—every human, no matter whose side they stand on—who dies in this conflict bears the divine image, is beloved by God Almighty, and has been called to a life of noble purpose. We should not rejoice or celebrate the deaths of our enemies, but instead sorrow.
Alex Arnold is director of research at the Center for Christianity and Public Life
Wrote my senior thesis about Niebuhr. Even if many consider him one of the great public theologians of the 20th century, I still don't think he is discussed enough.
It seems to me that we also should lament that there was a better leadership in Iran, up until 1953, when the superpowers of the day, consumed by greed and the desire for more profits for BP, overthrew the Shah.