Two military ethicists agree that a controversial Air Force ethics
course, incorporating Bible passages and Christian theology, presents
appropriate subject matter but needs revision.
“As clumsy as this lecture seems to be, it would be equally bad to
try to drive out, from any presentation about just war theory, its
intellectual history,” said Monsignor Stuart Swetland, a former Naval
officer who has taught military ethics courses and now holds the Endowed
Chair for Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland.
In late July, California's Vandenberg Air Force Base suspended its
Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare course after students and activists
objected to its section on “Christian Just War Theory.”
Msgr. Swetland
has his own criticisms of the course, but says the Church's just war
tradition has its place in a secular classroom.
Rutgers Professor James Turner Johnson, a specialist in just war
thought, also expressed “serious concerns about the course” after
reviewing its materials. But his concerns differ from the objections of
the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a secular group whose
agitations prompted a review of the contents.
Foundation president Mikey Weinstein has called the course's
“Christian Just War Theory” section “an outrage and a deliberate attempt
to torture and distort our constitution.”
He claims the course violates
the First Amendment's establishment clause, and imposes a “religious
test” on officers.
Johnson, who believes secular institutions can legitimately present
religious perspectives on war, presented his own critiques of the
material to CNA on Aug. 5.
“The Vandenberg course misrepresents the nature of the idea of just
war,” he said. “It not only presents just war as a specifically
Christian idea, but its way of describing its Christian nature is at
odds with the teaching on just war of major strands of Christianity.”
“Medieval just war thinking was 'Christian' in a broad,
undifferentiated sense as a product of a Christian culture and as having
been contributed to by Christian canonists and theologians,” Johnson
explained. “But that is not the same thing as calling it 'Christian' in
the narrow sense used in the Vandenberg course.”
Weinstein says that the group of Air Force officers who brought the
course to his attention consisted mostly of Catholic and Protestant
Christians, rather than atheists or agnostics.
Its PowerPoint slides contained material likely to raise suspicion
among both believers and nonbelievers – including implicit comparisons
of modern warfare to the religious wars of the Old Testament, and a
presentation of Jesus Christ as “the mighty warrior.”
Johnson said the presentation, despite its use of St. Augustine's
writings, did not present the Church Fathers' and medieval theologians'
synthesis of faith and reason.
These writers, he said, “were working from secular sources as well as
Christian ones, and the conception of just war they produced was set
squarely within the frame of natural law and the moral responsibilities
of temporal government.”
“They emphatically did not develop this conception out of the Bible
itself, though they saw it as consistent with biblical revelation. The
only Bible verse they cited with any regularity was Romans 13:4,” used
to explain “that the responsibility for using armed force lies with the
temporal ruler and follows from the ruler’s obligation in the natural
world” to maintain order, justice, and peace.
Johnson said that St. Augustine and the medieval theologians, unlike
the authors of the Vanderberg course, had no need to make references to
Old Testament wars, or draw on metaphorical descriptions of Christ as a
“warrior” – because these earlier authors believed that “the
requirements of just war could and should be understood and followed by
anyone simply by use of natural reason.”
The Rutgers professor maintains that a careful and thorough
presentation of “specifically Christian teachings and arguments” can be
appropriate matter for a military classroom.
“While there is no place for Christian indoctrination as a part of
American military professional education,” Johnson stated, “it is going
too far, as sometimes argued by critics, to seek to deny any place for
consideration of religious teachings and arguments in the course of such
education.”
Msgr. Swetland told CNA on Aug. 5 that such critics were applying a
“false understanding of the separation of Church and state,” in
attempting to argue that religious material has no place in a military
ethics course.
“To show intellectual patronage, to show the lineage of an idea, to
present objective facts about how these ideas developed – that's not
evangelizing or proselytizing,” the priest and professor pointed out.
“That's just showing the development of intellectual history.”
“Anyone who's intellectually honest, if they present the just war
tradition and its intellectual heritage, will have to admit that it's
rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition.”
“It intellectually developed, especially beginning with Saint Ambrose
and Saint Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth century, as
Christians began to deal with the question, 'Can you fight for the Roman
Empire, in defense against the invading barbarians?'”
Reflection on this question led to the larger question of whether
Christians could fight in wars at all. The Church answered in the
affirmative, but took care to distinguish between just and unjust wars –
and also between moral and immoral actions within war. In subsequent
centuries, Msgr. Swetland noted, these same principles became a part of
secular reflection and law.
He criticized the Vandenberg course for its heavy reliance on
Biblical allusions – which he said were helpful in a limited way, but
largely extraneous to the Church's just war tradition.
“A just war presentation is about ethics that anyone should have
access to, through reason alone. You don't need to proof-text with
Scripture. I think that's not the best way of teaching in any setting,
let alone in a multi-faith setting like the military. Pedagogically,
it's not the best method.”
Classroom time spent on Old Testament references, he said, could be
better spent solidifying officers' knowledge of the just war theory's
important distinctions.
“The presentation, as given in those slides, left out a lot of the
just war tradition when it came to the requires of both the 'ius ad
bellum' – the justice of war – and the 'ius in bello,' the justice in
war. There are a lot more criteria there, than the ones they were
presenting on the slides.”
A revised course, he said, “should present the just war theory in its
entirety – as far as the criteria for a war itself to be just, and the
criteria for action in war to be justified.”
Msgr. Swetland also noted that the Catholic Church's just war
teaching rules out any use of nuclear weapons that would
indiscriminately kill both civilians and combatants, such as the U.S.
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Vandenberg's course in nuclear ethics is partly intended to guide
students toward a signed, formal commitment, saying they would authorize
nuclear launches of this type under certain conditions.
“One of the problems that the chaplain instructor at Vandenberg might
have, is that the very weapons he's talking about are the kinds of
weapons that, more than likely, if ever launched, would be both
disproportionate and indiscriminate,” Msgr. Swetland said, explaining
why most possible uses of nuclear weapons are intrinsically evil.
“It's hard to even imagine a scenario where they would be proportionate and discriminate,” he stated.