Rush from judgment

ONCE AGAIN this nation with the soul of a church has gone to war. The decision to counterattack against Iraq's aggression was preceded by a remarkable exercise in democratic governance. For five months, Americans debated the rights and wrongs of military action. Among the remarkable aspects of the debate was the almost complete irrelevance of our institutions of putative moral leadership. This is not to say that the churches were silent. Far from it. But in their eagerness to be relevant to policy, where they have neither authority nor competence, the churches made themselves irrelevant to moral deliberation.

When in this connection we speak of "the churches" we refer to those to which the media have paid attention. Not all the major religious groups in the country have declared themselves in opposition to American policy. While there is no national organization to speak for the fifty million evangelical Protestants, there is every reason to believe that most of them accepted, however reluctantly, the necessity of military force. Jewish organizations, with a particular interest in the well-being of Israel, have been generally supportive. There are about five hundred thousand local churches of all kinds in America, from scruffy storefronts to sedate cathedrals. We know that the majority of people in these churches support U.S. policy because the majority of Americans belong to these churches, and the overwhelming majority of Americans support U.S. policy.

So why are we told that religious leadership opposes our policy in the Gulf? Because those who tell us that have paid attention to two sectors of leadership-to the mainline Protestant and a few Orthodox churches connected with the National Council of Churches, and to the Roman Catholic bishops. Controlled by refugees from radicalisms past, the NCC is manifestly pleased with its star billing in The Return of the Peace Movement. These churches specialize in no-fault prophecy. Never mind that they have been proved wrong on almost every public issue of consequence for decades, and most egregiously wrong about the terror of Communism (see the accompanying letter from Czech Protestants).

The risk of military action is "out of proportion to any conceivable gain," declared 32 heads of NCC churches. Which is what they have been saying for years about any and every U.S. military measure aimed at deterring aggression and securing peace. It is one of the less happy evidences of interreligious rapprochement that for liberal Protestant leaders, as for some Muslims, America has become the Great Satan. The mainline Protestant leaders of an earlier time declared America to be the "redeemer nation" and source of universal blessing. Their heirs today declare America to be a universal curse, the chief source of the innumerable miseries of our time.

In comparison with the NCC, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) is a center of religious and moral sobriety. And yet, in the great moral debate over U.S. policy in the Gulf, the bishops, too, failed their flock and their nation. Those who turned to them for the bread of moral guidance were offered the stone of political advocacy. We disagree with the policy backed by the bishops, but our complaint is not with the bishops' politics. Our complaint is that the bishops acted like politicians.

Moreover, they evidenced an unseemly condescension toward those who are in positions of political responsibility. In November the bishops declared that they "seek to draw attention to the ethical dimensions of these choices, so that they are not ignored or neglected in a focus on simply military and geopolitical considerations." The offensiveness of such clericalist conceit was compounded by the bishops' then concluding, precisely on the basis of military and geopolitical considerations, that the U.S. should continue to pursue the course of peaceful pressure and not resort to war."

Contrary to their presumption, the bishops did not introduce the moral dimension into the debate. They did not even introduce the traditional moral criteria for a just war. Those criteria and how they are to be applied was the subject already being debated in numerous forums, not least the United States Congress. What the bishops introduced was partisan advocacy coated with moral pretension. This is disappointing especially because they weakened their credibility on other great questions in our national life that are matters of moral principle and not simply of prudential judgment. In their zeal to be relevant to policy prescription, they made themselves irrelevant to one of the great moments of moral deliberation in American history.

For America continues to be, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, a nation with the soul of a church. Even if it is such despite the leadership of some of its churches. Post-Victory Remarks Helped by the Brits and, with a face, The French, who like to run the place, Americans supplied the mass That did the job (though not in TASS) While Japanese were pleased to toil With no disruptions in their oil. W. H. VON DREELE To the Protestants of the United States of America: