Recovering Jesus’ Non-violent Ethic in an Age of American Militarism
By Dennis P. Allan
Sept/Oct 25
Christian theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas opened the preface to his book War and the American Difference (2011), published 10 years after the United States launched its so-called “War on Terror,” with an admission that he doesn’t remember a time when the country wasn’t at war. The reason was because “the United States has been involved in either open or clandestine warfare for 225 out the 243 years of its existence. Said another way, America can then be considered a nation of war.”
In recent decades, many American Christians — especially those who identify as evangelicals — have become some of the most ardent public supporters of military intervention, war, and the use of state violence. Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Tex., one of the country’s largest evangelical churches, praised President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb nuclear sites in Iran. “He wants to bring peace, but peace comes through strength,” he said during a sermon. Graham’s view is not an anomaly — it reflects a prevalent posture among evangelical Christians that weds the use of military force with the pursuit of peace and the military, itself, as an instrument of divine justice.
This affinity for military strength is not anecdotal. In a 2025 study published in the journal Religions, political scientists James Guth and Brent Nelsen found that white evangelical Christians are consistently the most likely of all religious groups in the country to support the use of military force across a range of scenarios — from defending allies to securing oil supplies. This pattern persists even after accounting for demographic differences, suggesting that something deeper — perhaps theological — is at work.
The Evangelical Embrace of Militarism
At its core, evangelicalism is a theological movement centered on four key commitments. First is personal conversion — the belief that each person must make an individual decision to follow Jesus (‘alayhi as salam). Second is an uncompromising commitment to the Bible’s authority; evangelicals believe the Bible is inspired by God and is without error in its original form. Third is a focus on Jesus’ death on the cross (as Christians believe) and the belief that his death was a necessary sacrifice by which Jesus paid the penalty for human sin and made reconciliation with God possible. Lastly, evangelicals emphasize an active faith, the idea that faith in Jesus should lead to visible and tangible action in daily life, including working to shape culture and society according to their moral, ethical, and spiritual convictions.
In the 1960s, evangelical Christianity reached unprecedented social and cultural influence. Pastors like Billy Graham advised presidents, and church attendance hit historic highs. These developments reflected the country’s increasing embrace of a new civil religion deeply informed by evangelical convictions which resulted in the creation of a national motto — “In God We Trust” — and adding the language “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Yet, the social and political turbulence of the 1960s — marked by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the legalization of abortion, and shifted sexual norms — left many evangelicals feeling culturally threatened. In response, evangelicals began to prioritize political activism to reassert their dominance within American cultural life.
This increased political activism led evangelicals to align with conservative political ideology by supporting the Republican Party, its platform, and its leaders — namely Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump. The result of this marriage between evangelicalism and conservatism was a theology that took on a more nationalist posture, absorbing, reflecting, and even celebrating American militarism. The country’s military endeavors were seen as divinely sanctioned, especially as it pertained to protecting the United States’ national interests or its citizens. As a result, the killing of any person deemed to be an enemy of the U.S. and, even, the murder of civilians, including children — while acknowledged as unfortunate — could be deemed morally necessary. It’s why some evangelical Christians, while staunch supporters of political policies that protect the lives of unborn children, are indifferent to the “collateral” deaths of Muslim children.
Evangelicals’ embrace of militarism contrasts sharply with the deep ambivalence — and often outright discomfort — with which early Christian thinkers approached violence. Origen of Alexandria, one of the most influential Christian theologians of the third century, wrote, “We no longer take up ‘sword against nation,’ nor do we learn ‘war any more,’ having become sons of peace for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader… we do not go forth as soldiers with the emperor, even if he demands this of us.”
But by the late fourth century, Christianity had become the empire’s favored — and eventually official — religion. Christians were not only serving in the military, but leading armies, holding political office, and enforcing imperial decrees through state-sanctioned violence both against external enemies and internal dissenters. Some Christians embraced this new power with zeal, viewing it as a divine mandate to expand the Christian faith by force.
This reversal forced theologians like Augustine to confront a new moral reality: what does it mean to follow Jesus when fellow Christians wield power, command armies, and use imperial violence against Rome’s enemies? Augustine laid the groundwork for what would become Just War Theory as a moral and theological concession — an attempt to restrain violence within a church newly entangled with imperial power. For Augustine, war, even if it could be justified, was a lamentable departure from the peace Jesus taught and embodied.
Author C.S. Lewis, writing during World War II, echoed Augustine’s moral restraint insisting that violence, while sometimes necessary, was always tragic and never to be glorified. In a talk he delivered to a pacifist society in Oxford, Lewis remarked with understatement, “The main relevant fact admitted by all parties is that war is very disagreeable.” Christians, he believed, should approach war with moral gravity and reluctance, seeing it as a sorrowful reality in a broken world.
If the early church and its leading thinkers — like Origen — rejected violence outright, refusing to even serve in the Roman military, and if later Christian thinkers like Augustine and C.S. Lewis permitted war only as a last resort, calling it a tragic necessity rather than a cause for celebration, how then should Christians today — especially evangelical Christians — respond to the realities of militarism and the use of force?
The Sermon on the Mount
In the Gospel of Matthew, one of four books in the Bible’s New Testament that chronicles Jesus’ life, ministry, and teachings is a sermon known as the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a sermon that many Christian scholars and theologians consider to be a political manifesto, of sorts. Specifically, it outlines the moral and ethical standards Jesus expected His followers to embrace in their daily lives. At the time Jesus delivers the Sermon on the Mount, the Romans were in charge. The crowd was likely eager to hear Jesus describe how He’d raise up a military force, overthrow the Romans, and usher the Jewish people into a brave new world in which they ruled over the nations.
Instead, these are some of the first words Jesus’ audience hears him speak, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Jesus’ own brother, James, picks up this theme of peacemaking in a letter he penned in the mid-first century, writing, “Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness” (James 3:18). The implication for all Christians, including evangelical Christians, is clear: people who claim the name of Jesus must strive to reconcile all conflicts as humbly, lovingly, and peaceably as possible. While the Quran doesn’t mention James by name, some Islamic scholars and traditions acknowledge him as a significant figure, often equated with “James the Just” (Ya’qub al-Adil), a leader of the early Jerusalem church.
Later in Jesus’ sermon he speaks even more directly to the way His followers must be people of peace. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45). The word translated as “love,” in the original Greek, means a self-giving, active, volitional kind of love that seeks the good and well-being of the other, even at personal cost. This is how Jesus expects His followers to love their “enemies.”
Jesus did not invite his followers to imitate Rome’s ethic of domination or state-sanctioned violence. He called them to embody a different way — one that fulfilled even Old Testament prophets’ visions for a peaceable world. Jesus’ people are to be known by their peacemaking and their radical, enemy-embracing love. This ethic is intended to shape how Christians — including evangelicals — think about militarism and the use of state-sanctioned force.
Augustine and Lewis were right: war and military violence are tragic and lamentable departures from the peace Jesus taught, lived, and expected His followers to pursue. When Christians celebrate war, glorify military might, declare “peace through strength” as a divinely sanctioned strategy, or shrug their shoulders at the needless deaths of Muslim children, they no longer reflect the ethic of Jesus. Instead, they bear witness to a civil religion that prioritizes and upholds American power, not the sacrificial love of Jesus.
Dennis P. Allan is a pastor at Garden City Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is a Public Life Fellow at the Center for Christianity and Public Life in Washington D.C.
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