Storytime.

When I was a kid, I attended a no-nukes protest.

It’s true. My dad was a Protestant pastor, and also sort of hippie about some things. No drug use or sleeping around, but he liked to live “simply” (for example, keeping his old coffee percolator), and around the time I was a baby, he had become a convinced pacifist. That is, he had become convinced based upon the Sermon on the Mount (mostly) that for Christians nowadays, it is never permissible to resist violence with violence. And this went for nations too. For him, principled pacisfism was part of following Jesus.

So here it was, the mid 1980s, late in the Cold War (though we did not know it was late at the time). A no-nukes protest had been planned in a downtown plaza in our large Midwestern city. I believe it was organized by the city’s churches, because among other people, my dad had been asked to sit in a panel onstage.

I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I was excited to go along. It seemed like a good thing. It was pretty clear to me that us, or anybody else, getting killed by nukes was a bad thing, something that we would not want to have happen. I had heard gruesome stories about people’s eyeballs being turned into jelly when the bomb was dropped (by us!) on Hiroshima. This was in a book that we had at home called Peace Be With You.

As the family artist, I made the sign for our protest. I tried to draw the symbol from the cover of Peace Be With You, a dove holding a branch in its beak. I had never drawn a dove before, and I got the beak wrong, so it came out looking more like a parrot.

I don’t remember all the content of the rally, but two things stand out. There was a play about a couple who survive a nuclear holocaust and live in a tent city, only to get radiation sickness. And, I remember the final song.

With the panel of pastors still seated on the stage, a lady came up to give a moving musical number. The first verse was about the Statue of Liberty and how she represents to many people that they have arrived in a place that is free from oppression. The second verse was about the cross of Christ, and how, to the Christian, it means liberty from sin, death, and hell. The refrain was “the Cross is my Statue of Liberty.”

Horribly blasphemous, of course. It was trying to compliment the greater by comparing it to the lesser, which actually reverses the roles of greater and lesser, unintentionally offering a huge insult to Christ.

As soon as he realized where the song was going, my dad abruptly got up from his seat on the stage behind the singer, stalked off the stage in a huff, and marched me and my brother out of there before the rally ended. I’m still proud of him for this. As someone said (I can’t find the reference, but I think it was Spurgeon), “Even a dog barks when its master is attacked.” Referring to himself defending the honor of Christ, however inarticulately.

I think what the organizers were trying to convey with that song was, “We are Christians, and don’t worry, even though we are against nukes we still definitely love our country.” But it was ill chosen.

Although I now think the whole event was incredibly naive, I commend my dad for attending it and for bringing his kids. Kids need to have experiences where they go fight for the right alongside their parents, even if the cause later turns out to have been somewhat misguided. This sends the message, “We have certain values as a family, these are important enough to do something about, my parents are good people” and, above all, “I and my parents are on the same side.” Please, give your kids many experiences like this before they become teenagers!

So, why naive? Well, I can’t blame myself for not noticing this as a kid, but why in the world did we think we were the only people who objected to the idea of a nuclear holocaust? Surely that is something that everyone recognizes is bad? (Except, perhaps, the mullahs, I digress.)

And given that we were not uniquely intelligent or good such that we were the only ones who didn’t like the idea of people being annihilated by a nuclear bomb, it would make sense to connect the next pair of dots (#s 2 and 3) and ask ourselves, since 99% of people don’t like nukes, how is it that they still exist? Could it be that, once you have a nuclear standoff, getting rid of nukes is more complicated than just “getting rid of them”? Perhaps there are people who also don’t want an apocalypse, but whose options are limited?

By the same token, perhaps there are more obstacles standing between humanity and the cessation of wars in general than just a dearth of people saying, “We don’t like war.” After all, most people don’t like wars, including most people who fight them.

But we, the anti-war protestors of the Cold War era, honestly, naively, conceitedly thought we were the only people in our country who saw a moral problem with human suffering. And we thought it would somehow stop if only we were to stand up and heroically say, “We are against this.”

It didn’t work. And not because not enough people were against it. It turns out, just saying that doesn’t do anything.

I’m sure my dad’s generation would say that these antiwar protests were ineffective because “our leaders didn’t listen.” “Listening,” in this context, would mean disarming our nukes and other WMDs, and perhaps completely disbanding our military. After all, if every country did this, peace would flow into the empty space where the weapons used to be. And someone has to go first! So it might as well be us! Someone has to give peace a chance.

This made sense to me at 10, especially when it was coming from respected authority figures. Once we grow up, however, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves what could possibly go wrong with this scenario. And the answer is: a lot. Everything.

War is, unfortunately, the default state of human beings. When we are not at war, it is because a lot of people are working very hard to maintain a precarious balance where things don’t tip into war. Fortunate are we who live in a country or empire large enough, or strong enough, that all that work has paid off and we get to go about our daily lives, assuming that peace is the natural state of things. But it isn’t. It is not the case that wars don’t happen unless some “war monger” goes out and “starts one.” That would be nice, but it’s not what we have here.

There are multiple reasons for this. Until recently, I thought it was sufficiently explained by human beings being sinful, and full of fears, lusts, and cravings. All of that is certainly a huge factor. We usually see wars explained as being caused by “fighting over scarce resources,” but I think that materialistic explanation is far from sufficient. Wars have not become less common as the worldwide standard of living has increased. I have also seen wars attributed to “religion.” There are a number of logical problems with this as well. To test this theory, you’d need a control group of humans who had either no religion, or no war. Since both war and religion are things that humans universally do, such a control group does not exist. To say that because both are universal, means one causes the other, is the post hoc fallacy.

So in general, I think the stubborn persistence of war is adequately explained by the Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger, and Pride. Especially Pride and Envy.

Say somebody hates you and wants to go to war with you because they are prideful and think their way of life is better, but also, at the same time, they envy some things about, tacitly acknowledging that in those respects, you are better than they are. Is such a person going to put down their weapons because you fold your hands and say, “Look. None of us like war. Let’s all mind our own business and disarm”? No, unfortunately, your enemy may not like war, but they hate you a lot more than they hate war. If they even recognize that you are taking the moral high ground, that is only going to exacerbate the wounded-pride-and-envy problem.

This is why fifty years of “anti-war” protests have done nothing but make the protestors look silly.

But it recently came to my attention that there may be an additional cause besides human sin that keeps stirring up wars in the world.

We need to expand our understanding of spiritual warfare to include the larger social and political structures of our world. Why does war bring ruin to the world? Why do we feel constantly on the verge of a new world war? … Why is peace, specifically the peace the permeates through the spread of the gospel, such a threat to world powers? The answer to these questions falls under the larger context of the unseen battle, a battle that has in mind the final unification of the nations of the world under the banner of Christ.

–Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, p. 120

Muddamalle is suggesting that the gods of the nations, who would prefer to go on ruling them, feel threatened by the spread of the Gospel and use geopolitical instability as one of their tools to slow this spread. (For more about these entities, see my review of Michael Heiser’s book.)

The idea is that human beings, while plenty fight-y on our own, would sometimes like to rest. But these spiritual entities will not let their people rest. They are hard at work, with demonic delight, stirring up, prolonging, and accelerating generations-long conflicts, to keep the Gospel of Christ out and also perhaps, as a side benefit, because they enjoy human suffering.

This certainly matches the picture of “the gods” that we get in, say, Greek mythology. People are bad enough on their own, but even when you have a majority of people who want to do the right thing, you will see that Fate, or the gods, or whatever, intervene so that exactly the wrong thing happens at exactly the wrong moment. The result: ten years of war.

Peace, it turns out, is not a passive, waterlike thing that flows in wherever a space is opened for it. It has to be established, like a fortress. It is the result of someone coming in, taking names, and routing the false gods. That someone is the Lord Jesus.