“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” (Matt 5:9).1

Christianity is a religion of political and interpersonal peace. In response to Jesus’s call for his followers to be people of peace and his prohibition of vengeance and retaliation in the Sermon on the Mount, the early church considered violence incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.2 Yet, the church is called to establish the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven” by exhorting secular institutions to greater congruence with YHWH’s design for humanity.3 Christian participation in the profession of arms and engagement in military violence sits at the intersection of these two callings. Throughout church history, the Christian response to the question of military service has ranged from outright pacifism to an uncritical baptism of the state’s raison d’état, with many positions between the two extremes.4 However, many of these understandings fail to grasp the complexity of military violence and Christian participation in the profession of arms as they grapple with the morality of violence rather than the character of the combatant. In contrast, Augustine’s use of narrative to critique social imaginaries provides an alternative lens to evaluate the morality of Christian participation in the profession of arms.

1. The Role of Narrative Critique in Augustine’s Apologetic

Narrative is at the heart of Augustine’s apologetic methodology as he grounded his argument within a story, whether personal in Confessions or societal and historical in The City of God.

1.1. Narrative Critique in Confessions

In Confessions, Augustine presented his journey to faith as a cohesive story in several acts that invites readers to accompany him on a reflective examination of his experiences and desires.5 Through his use of vignettes like the theft of the pears, the death of his friend at Thagaste, or Monica’s death, Augustine used the internal narrative of Confessions to engage in critical self-reflection, as his response to events revealed his motivations, desires, and loves.6

Augustine also recognized the formative impact of external narratives on his thinking and desires. Confessions recalls his engagement with a series of texts—Cicero’s Hortensius, the writings of Mani, Aristotle’s Ten Categories, the “books of the Platonists,” and finally, Paul’s writings.7 Augustine recorded how each text’s embedded “social imaginary” captured his affections.8 Per Charles Taylor, a social imaginary is “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc.”9 In each text, Augustine encountered an embedded picture of human flourishing born out of images, legends, and specific practices. Contingent on his embrace or rejection of the social imaginary within these narratives, Augustine experienced their impact on his desires and vision of the human telos. This culminated in his embrace of Scripture’s social imaginary, catalyzing his reflections on the grand story of creation that concludes Confessions.

Confessions demonstrates Augustine’s dual use of narrative critique as an apologetic method. First, Augustine used events in his personal, historical narrative to engage in critical self-reflection—his experiences are apocalyptic, revealing his motivations, desires, and loves. Second, he examined the external narratives he embraced (and their constituent social imaginaries) and their impact on his actions and desires.

1.2. Narrative Critique in The City of God

Augustine expanded his use of narrative analysis in volume 1 of The City of God to critique the social imaginaries embedded in Roman history and society.10 Augustine engaged the stories, legends, and narratives that constituted the Roman identity, demonstrating a deep familiarity with the cultural canon of the Roman Empire. He conversed with Sallust, Cicero, Livy, Varro, and Virgil. Virgil was a particularly significant interlocutor for Augustine in The City of God, as his Aeneid offered a compact summary of the Roman self-understanding—the grand conclusion of a thousand-year story of military victory through which peace would flow to the rest of the world.11 As such, Aeneid became a stand-in for the Roman social imaginary in Augustine’s critique of Rome’s imperial ambitions and a foil for Augustine’s alternate history of human society in volume 2 of The City of God.12 In his famous statement on the nature of the two cities, Augustine singled out the eschatological claims of Roman literature, arguing Rome’s greatness was ultimately self-serving rather than the climax of history its poets imagined.13 Thus, City of God demonstrates Augustine’s dialogue with the canon of classical Roman narratives and his exegesis of their embedded social imaginary. Through his examination of the individual and societal fruits born from its embrace, Augustine illustrated the inability of the Roman social imaginary to achieve the ends it promised.

Yet, Augustine also used narrative to develop an alternate social imaginary. Volume 2 of The City of God is a constructive project that expounds the narrative arc of creation and elucidates a different, thoroughly Christian social imaginary. In this, Augustine used a metaphor of two cities, one earthly and one heavenly, each with a different eschatological claim—as contra the city of God, the earthly city claims ultimate good can be realized in this life via human efforts.14

In Confessions and The City of God, Augustine offers an apologetic model for the examination and critique of contemporary social imaginaries and the construction of alternative Christian understandings. By examining narratives that contain social imaginaries with embedded eschatological claims, Christians can illustrate the gap between those claims and their realized achievements. Once this insufficiency is revealed, the biblical metanarrative is used to construct an alternate social imaginary that achieves the promised eschatological ends. Thus, the task at hand is to apply Augustine’s method of critique to the social imaginary embedded within the narrative of military service in twenty-first century America.

2. The Narrative and Embedded Social Imaginary of the American Military

The first step in applying Augustine’s narrative apologetic to the participation of American Christians in the profession of arms is to examine key narratives promulgated by American society (and specifically the military) to determine the contours of their embedded social imaginary.

2.1. The End of History and the Last Man

The story of the United States is a story of political and philosophical liberalism. The Founding Fathers drew from the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment in establishing American society and governance and believed the United States was a unique recipient of divine favor due to its liberal underpinnings. However, they did not limit their ideals to the United States but claimed the universal principles appealed to in America’s founding documents undergirded the structure of all human governments.15 Thus, the United States had a duty to champion democratic liberalism as the ideal system of government and world order.16 Yet initially, American foreign policy focused on maintaining strength to safeguard domestic liberalism from encroachment by illiberal European powers rather than exporting liberalism abroad.17

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, US foreign policy shifted from ensuring the security of liberal democracy domestically to establishing it internationally in order to expand American power and influence.18 The genesis of this shift was the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who justified American entrance into WWI by adding a moral component to the defense and expansion of liberalism, famously claiming “the world must be made safe for democracy.”19 Wilsonian idealism insisted American values—i.e., liberalism—were the only moral foundation for world order.20 While Wilsonianism was a historical failure, the specter of Wilson’s idealism and his neo-liberal fusion of American exceptionalism with international affairs had an enduring impact on US foreign policy and, through its articulation and implementation, the American social imaginary.21

While Wilson’s intervention in WWI was the first significant instance in the history of American foreign policy of ideological rhetoric used to justify the advance of neo-liberalism via military intervention abroad, WWII crystallized it in the American social imaginary.22 Franklin Roosevelt articulated the defense and expansion of democracy as one of the United States’ strategic aims, and in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (with Europe and the Soviet Union ravaged by war), the United States was able to unilaterally define the post-WWII international order as a liberal order. 23 Thus, neo-liberalism became the foundation of the post-war peace and American identity.24

The USSR challenged this post-war expansion of neo-liberalism, and the Cold War was understood as an ideological contest between two mutually opposed systems of government.25 The Truman Doctrine announced the United States’ intent to support and expand neo-liberalism worldwide, setting the course for American foreign policy for the rest of the Cold War.26 Paul Miller describes the significance of the Truman Doctrine for US foreign policy (and thus the American social imaginary) thus:

Truman’s declaration amounted to a global security guarantee granted to every democratic state in the world—perhaps the most ambitious foreign policy doctrine outlined by a US president in history, yet also one that, by its strategic deployment of liberal ideology, was a plausible extension of 150 years of American foreign policy tradition, an effective tool of US Cold War strategy, and a precedent future policymakers should not ignore.27

Throughout the Cold War, the United States used military means to defend neo-liberalism worldwide. While the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam are the most famous examples, the creation of NATO used military power to provide collective security to neo-liberal Western Europe and deter Soviet aggression. Ronald Reagan’s unabashed use of military power (through his build-up, interventions in Libya, and invasion of Grenada) to confront the USSR ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the expansion of neo-liberal democracy to Eastern Europe, and the creation of a unipolar world with the United States as the sole superpower.28

The dissolution of the USSR and collapse of Marxist-Leninism as a viable system of government transformed the American social imaginary. The “evil empire” of the Soviet Union was condemned to “the ash heap of history,” and the righteousness of American neo-liberalism had triumphed.29 Francis Fukuyama’s thesis in his 1992 work, The End of History and the Last Man, captured the messianic zeitgeist of the post-Cold War American social imaginary, where he argued modern liberal democracy was utterly satisfying to man.30 Thus, there are no “serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy,” and given sufficient economic and cultural investment, the telos of every nation-state is a form of democratic neo-liberal internationalism.31

As such, the narrative of American society can be summed up by Ronald Reagan’s phrase from his farewell address: “a shining city on a hill,” a utopian beacon of liberalism worldwide.32 Embedded within that narrative is a social imaginary where American neo-liberalism—democratic self-government, individual freedom, and free market capitalism—is the means to global prosperity on a previously unimaginable scale. Vital to securing and ensuring said prosperity is the United States military, with its own unique narrative and social imaginary, to which we now turn.

2.2. A Global Force for Good

Just as WWII defined the American societal social imaginary, it also provided the foundation for the social imaginary of the United States military. WWII marked a shift from an underfunded, skeletonized, peacetime military only capable of engaging in limited operations to a robust, global, expeditionary force.33 In a “great crusade,” the “free men of the world” had “marched towards victory,” liberated Europe and Asia, and established a new liberal global order.34 With over sixteen million Americans in the military from 1939 to 1945, this narrative became deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness, indelibly shaping the military’s social imaginary.35 While the failures of Vietnam and the “hollow force” of the Carter administration threatened to disrupt this identity, the Reagan era defense buildup, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, and the overwhelming tactical victories achieved in Operation Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom codified within the American social imaginary the narrative that the United States military is unmatched in lethality, global reach, and professionalism.

The purpose of the American military’s battlefield dominance is the defense and expansion of neo-liberalism. The 2017 National Security Strategy states:

The United States will seek areas of cooperation with competitors from a position of strength, foremost by ensuring our military power is second to none and fully integrated with our allies and all of our instruments of power. A strong military ensures that our diplomats are able to operate from a position of strength.36

The unclassified summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) notes, “We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.”37 The NDS goes on to state that the post-WWII international order has been undermined by illiberal revisionist powers and rogue regimes like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.38 Thus, the need for “a more lethal, resilient, and rapidly innovating Joint Force, combined with a robust constellation of allies and partners, will sustain American influence and ensure a favorable balance of power that safeguards the free and open international order.”39 The top-level strategic guidance of the Department of Defense recognizes the intertwined nature of American influence and the liberal world order, and the necessity of its military defense.

This narrative and social imaginary is reinforced at the tactical and individual level of each of the military services. The Soldier’s Creed reminds each member of the Army, “I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.”40 Similarly, the Airman’s Creed states members of the US Air Force are “Guardian[s] of freedom and justice, My nation’s sword and shield, Its sentry and avenger.”41 Learned in basic training, prominently displayed in military facilities, and recited at military ceremonies, these and other creeds, stories, and images provide liturgical formation that inculcates the social imaginary of the US military within each member.

Thus, the narrative of the United States military is one of ensuring American power, influence, and prosperity (and consequently guaranteeing the security of all liberal democracies) through defense of the neo-liberal, post-WWII international order. Embedded within the narrative is a social imaginary of unparalleled professionalism and discipline, technological dominance, global reach, and lethality.42 Yet, the Augustinian question remains—is this story true, and what fruit has this social imaginary borne?

3. An Augustinian Critique of the Social Imaginary of the American Military

The next step in Augustine’s model of narrative critique is to illustrate the gaps between a social imaginary’s claims and reality. Two primary critiques emerge from the narrative of America and its armed forces: the unfounded teleological and eschatological claims of neo-liberalism and the results of the United States’ attempts to establish neo-liberalism abroad via military intervention.

3.1. The End of History?

The contemporary theological mood is inimical to liberalism, and disillusionment with neo-liberalism energizes much of modern public theology. For while neo-liberalism claims to be theologically neutral, it is governed by religious presuppositions and makes teleological and eschatological claims incongruent with Scripture.43 Thus, American claims about the nature of neo-liberalism are ripe for theological critique.

3.1.1. Teleological Failures of Neo-Liberalism

Neo-liberalism claims the telos of society is to ensure justice by maximizing individual freedom.44 This is the vision of liberalism articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr in The Nature and Destiny of Man, where (due to the limits of sanctification he described in Moral Man and Immoral Society) the kingdom of God manifests in societal arrangements that imperfectly ensure justice and community and thus fulfills the law of love.45 For Niebuhr, the task of the church is to contribute to the neo-liberal project through its social ethic.46

Yet, as Stanley Hauerwas is so fond of noting, “the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.”47 Liberalism’s teleological claims subordinate the Christian affirmation that humans are called to “love YHWH with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love their neighbor as themselves” within the neo-liberal project of securing personal freedom to increase individual and societal economic prosperity.48 In this, neo-liberalism attempts to subsume the redemptive Christian social imaginary within its own narrative. In the neo-liberal social imaginary, Christianity becomes merely another means of ensuring personal and economic freedom within society, rather than the visible manifestation of YHWH’s kingdom on Earth.

Neo-liberalism’s teleological reductionism results in a social imaginary that is “thinned”—unable to support the institutions it undergirds. This thinned social imaginary atomizes society, reducing it from an interdependent community of institutions bound by a shared narrative and centered around what Augustine termed “common objects of love” to a collection of mistrusting individuals connected by economic advantage.49 As such, while the social imaginary of modern liberalism purports to maximize personal liberty and equality, in practice, it pushes its adherents into adopting a Rawlsian understanding of justice that merely licenses the pursuit of individual desire.50

Therefore, while wrapped in high-minded idealism, American attempts to export and expand neo-liberalism are often undergirded by self-interest—liberalism offers increased economic opportunity (especially for the United States, which sits at the apex of the neo-liberal world order), which creates additional modes of satiating desire. This also explains the United States’ enduring failure to create strong international institutions, for neo-liberalism, in its attempt to create a people without a collective narrative, is unable to forge the communal bonds necessary to sustain a thick social imaginary that can uphold robust non-economic partnerships and institutions.

3.1.2. Eschatological Failures of Neo-Liberalism

Yet, neo-liberalism’s teleological failures are trivial compared to its eschatological failures. Fukuyama’s thesis that, given sufficient economic and cultural investment, the natural end of any nation-state is a form of liberal democracy has been decisively disproven.51 American attempts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to create functioning liberal democracies ex nihilo were manifest failures. The early twenty-first century rise of revanchist authoritarian regimes and renewal of great power conflict repudiates neo-liberalism’s triumphalist rhetoric. Liberalism is not a natural evolution of polities, nor is it capable of satisfying humanity’s deepest desires. While neo-liberalism claims the human heart longs for freedom, Augustine’s opening prayer in Confessions accurately recognized that true rest, peace, and satisfaction are only found in God.52

Furthermore, Fukuyama’s claim that the culmination of human history is the advent and triumph of liberal democracy is incompatible with the biblical metanarrative.53 In its eschatological outlook, neo-liberalism lives up to John Milbank’s provocative accusation of Christian heresy, for it co-opts the biblical story of redemptive self-sacrifice to make eschatological promises of shalom through the establishment of a temporal kingdom, often through military means.54

3.2. Martyrdom and Instability

The social imaginary of the United States military also cracks under Augustinian analysis. While the American military catechizes its members to see conflicts they participate in as existential defenses of the ideals of American society, Clausewitz’s maxim, “war is politics by other means,” remains true.55 Thus, while Wilsonian idealism may be used to justify military intervention via moral rhetoric, said intervention is often motivated by a realpolitik that uses war to advance, secure, or defend American economic interests.

Furthermore, in its narrative as “guardians of freedom and democracy,” the military forms members to defend ideologies with violence and, if necessary, sacrifice their lives in their defense.56 By using moral language of confrontation between good and evil to justify military intervention, the civil/military establishment births a social imaginary where violence is the first tool used to resolve ideological differences, and self-sacrifice is infused with eschatological significance.57 The language of martyrdom and redemptive violence is co-opted to sustain the expansion and continuation of the American experiment and liberalism as a whole.58 In addition, the moral language used often draws from the United States’ common Judeo-Christian vocabulary, equating the triumph of the United States and the post-WWII liberal international order made in its image with the coming of the kingdom of God.

Finally, while the narrative of the United States armed forces speaks to successfully securing and expanding democracy worldwide, the abject failures of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan reflect a level of strategic and ethical atrophy within the American military. A preference for kinetic operations combined with a neglect of peacebuilding and peace-sustaining capabilities demonstrates “strategic and moral myopia.”59 Within the US military, the narrative of lethality, victory, and “warfighting” has eclipsed the strategic end of achieving peace. By failing to engage in robust pre-conflict diplomacy and proper post-war reconstruction, American military action contributes to further global instability, negating the justice of the original intervention.60 Neo-liberalism’s attempt to co-opt redemptive violence from the biblical story of forgiveness and restoration results in perpetual cycles of “judgment” (i.e., kinetic operations) without any hope of reconstruction or renewal.61

4. A Better Story: Augustine’s Alternate Apologetic for Military Service

Thus, while the social imaginary of the United States military proclaims it to be an instrument of peace that secures freedom through the defense of neo-liberalism, critical reflection demonstrates the paucity of this narrative. In response, some Christians view participation in the protection or expansion of the liberal world order as indefensible, idolatrous, or otherwise incompatible with fidelity to the ethic of Christianity. Yet, Augustine’s thought offers an alternate apologetic to justify Christian participation in military service rooted in the biblical metanarrative and individual virtue.

4.1. Pilgrims Who Make Use of the Earthly City

Augustine recognized the insufficiency of all temporal social imaginaries to achieve eternal life and produce lasting earthly good.62 Despite this, he considered the temporal peace produced by pagan society laudatory, for it benefits the kingdom of God by providing stability in which the church can work unmolested.63 Thus, Augustine did not abandon or reject the earthly city, instead, he affirmed it as common grace. However, as Eric Gregory notes,

This affirmation, following Augustine’s overcoming an initial attraction to imperial theology of the Constantinian establishment, rejects the sacralization of earthly political communities as vehicles of salvation. This move serves as the crucial element that opens the door for a separation of the political and the ecclesial without separating morality from politics or condemning the religious to private subjectivity.64

As such, while Augustine had no concept of neo-liberalism, his bifurcation of the political and salvific aspects of human political arrangements provides a framework for its evaluation. The apostle Paul reminds readers in Romans 13:1–5 that violence is a power divinely delegated to the state, yet with the advent of the kingdom, the state is demonstrably no longer an authority sui generis but instead is subordinate to the risen Jesus and now exercises limited authority that facilitates the mission of the church.65 While the state and the church operate in the same sphere, and the state may licitly use violence to restrain evil, the state is morally and teleologically subordinate to the church, and only the church can realize eschatological claims.66

While neo-liberalism attempts to subsume the church into its social imaginary, an accurate understanding of the biblical story sees classic liberalism as the political outworking of the mission of the church—through its witness, the church has shifted the secular social imaginary.67 The hallmarks of classic liberalism—freedom, mercy, equality, and openness to speech—are located within and drawn from the Christian social imaginary and narrative of salvation history.68 In this, the liberal narrative is subordinated to the kingdom, and it becomes a political fruit of the gospel.69 The political freedom and equality prized by neo-liberalism are rooted in the spiritual freedom found in the resurrection.70 Scripture recenters the locus of history to the resurrection of Jesus, negating the eschatological claims of neo-liberalism.71

Therefore, the biblical narrative undercuts the idolatrous claims of neo-liberalism but redeems features congruent with the kingdom. Thus, mature and well-formed Christians can recognize the insufficiencies and failures of neo-liberalism while also receiving its benefits as common grace.72 Much like the Pax Romana, the post-WWII liberal international order—while imperfect—provides a measure of stability in which the church can build the kingdom while also providing fertile ground for cultural criticism that leads to evangelism.

4.2. “Even in Waging War, Cherish the Spirit of a Peacemaker”

As such, Augustine would regard it as entirely appropriate for Christians to engage in state-sponsored violence to defend this vision of modern liberalism, for “even the heavenly city makes use of earthly peace during its pilgrimage, and, so far as sound piety and religion allow, it defends and seeks an accommodation among human wills with regard to the things that pertain to humanity’s mortal nature.”73 Yet, Augustine’s concern was not the sanctity of the social imaginary of secular society—for it will always be insufficient and idolatrous—but rather the motivations and desires of those who participate in it. In book 5 of The City of God, Augustine examined the virtues that animated Rome’s imperial ambitions, concluding “these then are the two things which spurred the Romans to their extraordinary feats: liberty and lust for human praise.”74 The Roman motivation for their martial endeavors was ultimately self-serving and incapable of producing lasting peace due to its roots in human pride.75 While the temporal peace Rome secured was laudatory, Rome itself was yet another idolatrous empire.

Thus, Christians who are members of the profession of arms must embrace an alternate social imaginary in their motive for military service. In Augustine’s mind, Christians who participate in military service do so not for the glory and expansion of the state but to preserve peace, restrain evil, and through their service, facilitate the work of the church. As such, the church must actively participate in the spiritual and liturgical formation of potential combatants, for to delegate such formation to the profession of arms ensures that the primary loyalty of individuals will be to the state, and not to the church. Thus, Christians who join the profession of arms must evaluate their motives—do they desire human glory and temporal power or to contribute to earthly peace that enables the expansion of the kingdom?76

Augustine practically expressed this understanding of Christian membership in the profession of arms in two of his letters to Bonifatius, a Roman tribune assigned to patrol northern Africa and secure Rome’s borders against barbarian incursions.77 In his correspondence with Bonifatius, Augustine recognized the legitimacy of members of the people of God participating in the profession of arms—David, the centurion in Matthew 8, and Cornelius all engaged in military violence.78 The issue for citizens of the heavenly city is not their status as combatants but the virtues and desires that motivate their participation in military violence.

Thus, Bonifatius’s ultimate loyalty could not be to the Senatus Populusque Romanus, but instead must be to the church, for the aim of his military service was not to secure Roman prestige and expansion but rather to ensure peace for other believers who “in praying for you, fight against your invisible enemies; you in fighting for them, contend against the barbarians, their visible enemies.”79 The Christian social imaginary embedded in the statement, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” invalidated the eschatological claims of the Pax Romana and transformed Bonfatius’s objectives from conquest to the maintenance of temporal peace by using military force to restrain evil.80 In a second letter, Augustine was even more explicit; in response to Bonifatius’s desire to withdraw from military service into monastic life, Augustine reminded him “how much service the work which then occupied you might render to the churches of Christ if you pursued it with this single aim, that they, protected from all disturbance by barbarian hordes, might live ‘a quiet and peaceable life.’”81 So long as Bonifatius’s motivation for military service remained to secure temporal peace, his participation in the profession of arms contributed to the expansion of YHWH’s kingdom. If Bonifatius maintained clear distinction in his loyalties and saw himself as first a citizen of the kingdom and second a soldier of Rome, his military service was not inherently immoral.82

Thus, Augustine’s framework of narrative analysis provides an apologetic for American Christians who are members of the profession of arms. To rightly and wisely participate in the American military, Christians must first understand and embrace the narrative of Scripture and the social imaginary of peace embedded within it.83 Habitually formed by this narrative, Christians recognize and reject the idolatrous teleological and eschatological claims embedded within the social imaginary of American neo-liberalism.84 Yet, the Christian narrative also equips believers to parse that social imaginary and recognize elements of truth and common grace contained within. Thus, American Christians enter military service not to defend neoliberalism’s intrinsic value but to secure the imperfect temporal peace provided by the post-World War II liberal international world order which facilitates the mission of the church.

5. Conclusion

The question of Christian membership in the profession of arms is multifaceted. Christians must wrestle with the New Testament prohibitions of interpersonal violence, the nature of the state they inhabit, and the morality of the conflicts they engage in. The social imaginary of American neo-liberalism in the early twenty-first century provides ample reasons for contemporary Christians to consider military service incompatible with their faith. However, Augustine’s narrative apologetic method used in Confessions and The City of God provides an alternate lens for American Christians to understand the morality of participation in the profession of arms. Rather than uncritically embracing the narrative of American neo-liberalism and submitting to the liturgical formation of the US military, Christians can use Augustine’s method to recognize the idolatrous claims within the American narrative. Yet, Augustine’s recognition of the benefits and limits of the Pax Romana provides Americans a similar means of embracing the positive fruit of the post-WWII liberal international world order. Finally, Augustine’s framework allows American Christians to enter the profession of arms to defend American neo-liberalism, not to secure American power and influence, but to secure an imperfect temporal peace that facilitates the expansion of the kingdom.

---

[1] Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.[2] John Driver, How Christians Made Peace with War: Early Christian Understandings of War (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 21.[3] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 526.

[4] Driver, How Christians Made Peace with War, 81.

[5] Augustine, Confessions, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2012).

[6] James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 50.

[7] Augustine, Confessions 3.4.7; 4.16.28; 7.9.13; 7.21.27.

[8] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 171.

[9] Taylor, A Secular Age, 172.

[10] Augustine, The City of God, Books 1–10, trans. William Babcock, The Works of Saint Augustine (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2012).

[11] N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1:311.

[12] Augustine, City of God 5.11–20.

[13] Augustine, City of God 19.28.

[14] Augustine, City of God 19.4.

[15] Paul D. Miller, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 33.

[16] Miller, American Power, 33.

[17] Miller, American Power, 33.

[18] Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 41.

[19] Woodrow Wilson, “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany” (Speech, 2 April 1917), National Archives. Prior to Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt opened the door to a more ideologically driven American foreign policy, yet Roosevelt’s foreign policy was still tempered with an imperial realism Wilson rejected.

[20] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin, 2014), 256.

[21] Kissinger, World Order, 264. “Neo-liberalism” is used primarily in its political and ideological sense of seeing individual freedom as the highest political good, rather than the economic sense of deregulation, free trade, and globalism, although both are related in execution.

[22] While Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to seriously use American military power to confront foreign expansion outside the bounds of US territory (both in the Caribbean and Central America and the Pacific with the Great White Fleet), this was grounded in defense of the Monroe Doctrine to maintain a favorable balance of power, rather than an ideological attempt to advance liberalism. Indeed, Roosevelt’s famous foreign policy maxim “speak softly and carry a big stick” reflected a restrained realism antithetical to Wilson’s idealism.

[23] Miller, American Power, 42.

[24] The US insisted on democratizing both Germany and Japan, as well as all liberated territory. Furthermore, the European Recovery Program (better known as the Marshall Plan) provided economic and technical assistance to buttress Western Europe against Soviet influence and was used to encourage the expansion of liberal democracy (Francoist Spain was initially excluded, and the US State Department threatened to end aid to the Netherlands in response to Dutch opposition to Indonesian independence).

[25] Miller, American Power, 43.

[26] Harry Truman, “Message to Congress” (Speech, 12 March, 1947), National Archives.

[27] Miller, American Power, 44.

[28] This is a massive oversimplification of the contributing factors leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR. However, a nuanced discussion of the causes of the end of the Cold War is beyond the scope of this article, and the oversimplified explanation above is the narrative that has become embedded within the American social imaginary.

[29] Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire Speech” (Speech, 8 March 1983), Reagan Presidential Library.

[30] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free, 1992), 206.

[31] Fukuyama, The End of History, 222.

[32] Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation” (Speech, 11 January 1989), Reagan Presidential Library. While an argument can be made that contemporary (2016 onward) unrest and cultural dissension invalidates this imagery, present discord centers around how the United States has failed to live up to the vocation described in Reagan’s speech, rather than a wholesale repudiation of American exceptionalism.

[33] Conn Stetson, “Between World Wars,” in American Military History, Volume 2, ed. Richard W. Stewart (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2010), 59.

[34] Dwight D. Eisenhower, “D-Day Statement to Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force” (Statement, 6 June 1944), National Archives.

[35] “Research Starters: US Military by the Numbers,” The National WWII Museum, https://tinyurl.com/bdd5jtbs. Even today, the triumph of WWII is central to the social imaginary of the American military. Distinguished units from WWII are maintained (82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 8th Air Force, etc.), current uniforms such as the Army Green Service Uniform (AGSU) recall the WWII era “pinks and greens,” and current weapons systems are named in reference to WWII era equipment and events (for example the F35 Lightning II and the B21 Raider).

[36] Donald J. Trump, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2017), 26.

[37] James Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2018), 1.

[38] Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, 2.

[39] Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, 1.

[40] “The Soldier’s Creed,” United States Army.

[41] “The Airman’s Creed,” United States Air Force.

[42] To see this social imaginary fully on display, one only needs to read commentaries on social media by American servicemembers on the multiple failures of the Russian Armed Forces during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The expressions of incredulity at the Russian’s blatant incompetence in multiple domains and operational categories, mockery (for example, referring to the failed assault on Kyiv as a “ruble store Thunder Run”) and explanations of how such failures would be (in theory) unseen in the US military provides a compact expression of the above social imaginary.

[43] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 2.

[44] Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 73.

[45] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 2:276.

[46] Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), 137.

[47] Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 99, emphasis added.

[48] As such, neo-liberalism argues the chief end of man is not “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever” but instead to work and consume to maintain societal economic prosperity.

[49] Augustine, City of God 19.24. See also Hauerwas’s famous aphorism that “liberalism attempts to create a people whose story is that they have no story” (Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 12.).

[50] Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 83.

[51] Fukuyama, The End of History, 206.

[52] Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1.

[53] Fukuyama, The End of History, 126. Fukuyama notes earlier (p. 56) that the first attempts at “universal history” were Christian (specifically referencing Augustine’s work in City of God) but later regards Christianity as incapable of satisfying the human desire for temporal freedom and recognition offered by liberal democracy (p. 197).

[54] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 3.

[55] Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Anatol Rapoport (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), 119.

[56] Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 25.

[57] This can be observed in the increasing polarization of American society in the aftermath of the Cold War and Global War on Terror. After spending 1950–2021 proclaiming the necessity of using force to advance and protect American ideals abroad, it only follows that a generation of Americans have been catechized to apply the same rhetoric to domestic ideological opponents.

[58] Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, 49. One must only peruse Memorial Day remarks by American leaders to see the veneration of servicemembers as martyrs or martyrs in potentia.

[59] Miller, American Power, 56.

[60] Miller, American Power, 56.

[61] Or, to put it crassly, it is impossible to drone strike a failed state into a functioning democracy, despite the aspirations and rhetoric of both civilian and military leaders.

[62] Augustine, City of God 19.11. This renders the Constantinian approach to Christian participation in military service untenable. Yet, the pacifist position is also repudiated, for while Hauerwas’s criticisms of liberalism are accurate, the pacifist/separatist impetus of his theology that declares participation in military violence morally illicit for followers of Jesus relies on an over-realized eschatology. Additionally, Milbank’s criticisms of liberalism, while distinct from Hauerwas’s pacifist concerns about the use of coercive force in the political arrangements of liberalism, also go too far in both an over-realized eschatology and an over-realized ecclesiology that collapses the state into the church.

[63] Augustine, City of God 19.17.

[64] Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 78.

[65] Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 217. While YHWH was sovereign over the nations in the Old Testament narrative, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus opens a decisive new age in human history where the nations have been demonstrably humbled under the reign of a new king. While the state still exercises authority in the church age (as Romans 13 notes, magistrates are servants of YHWH) it is an authority delegated to it by YHWH, and which must be executed in a manner congruent with the kingdom.

[66] O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 219.

[67] O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 229.

[68] O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 229.

[69] This is not to claim that liberalism is the political fruit of the gospel, but that liberalism is merely another good faith (albeit imperfect) human attempt to arrange society in conformity with the contours of the kingdom.

[70] O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 256.

[71] O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, 153.

[72] This of course requires a church capable of forming Christians who are able to critically embrace key aspects of liberalism without falling prey to idolatry. The work of James K. A. Smith in his Cultural Liturgies project (particularly volume 3, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017]) offers a useful corrective to Hauerwas’s separatist impulses while still acknowledging the allure of the liberal social imaginary.

[73] Augustine, City of God 19.17.

[74] Augustine, City of God 5.18.

[75] Augustine, City of God 19.12

[76] According to Clausewitz, war is “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will” (On War, 101). Thus, the question for assessing the righteousness of military intervention becomes discerning the precise nature of what will is being imposed on the enemy.

[77] Jeroen W. P. Wijnendaele, The Last of the Romans: Bonifatius—Warlord and ‘Comes Africae’ (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 36.

[78] Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine 189 (NPNF1 1: 552–54).

[79] Augustine, Letter 189.5.

[80] Augustine, Letter 189.6.

[81] Augustine, Letter 220 (NPNF1 1:573–76, emphasis original).

[82] This is not to argue the morality of military service is solely determined by the motivation of the individual combatant, as an individual who executes heinous policies out of pious motivation is still morally culpable. Yet, Augustine’s instructions to Bonifatius argue that so long as the state remains within its God-appointed role and bounds (i.e., Rom 13), a Christian prosecuting state violence is not engaged in inherently evil acts.

[83] Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 90. This, of course, requires a continual liturgical counter-formation capable of resisting the catechesis inherent in the process of military induction and membership in the profession of arms. Entering military service disconnected from the church virtually guarantees a level of idolatrous syncretism and an embrace of violence as an end in and of itself.

[84] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 209.

 

---