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The Sanity of Religious War
The idea of religious war, I confess, does not fill me with horror. It certainly does not fill me with any more horror than the idea of patriotic war; and considerably less than the idea of humanitarian war, or the idea of imperial war. The very phrase religious war seems tinctured with the peculiar effect of Euphemism. G. K. Chesterton once produced, from that immensely fertile mind with its enormous sense of humor, a consummate definition of Euphemists: “I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them.”...

...The phrase religious war has something of that air about it. It startles. Upon hearing it, men sit up quite suddenly. The Euphemists are all around us. They bedevil our speech and, a fortiori, our thinking. We have spent nearly three years trying to develop a suitable euphemism for religious war — and it has not gone very well. We have declared war on a method of warfare. We have declared war on a tendency within a religion, or (better for the Euphemist) a tendency within all religions. I suppose next we shall declare war on a tendency within a method of warfare, or a method within a tendency. Some have even argued that we ought to declare war on a moment in time, namely the “premodern.”

...Many things would be clarified by acknowledging this, not the least of which is our understanding of why men fight. The thing is so simple that it does surely startle: men will fight, and die — and kill — for their religion. I might even say that the only thing that moral men will fight and kill for is their religion — especially if we recognize that the idea of religion is inextricably bound to the idea of home. When a man feels that his world is threatened by another power, he will fight. When a man conceives that something alien is bent on the destruction of his home, he will fight....

...So I say again that religious war does not horrify me. I recall the exotic words with which St. Paul counseled the church at Ephesus: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” but against powers, principalities, and “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Religious war is like any other war — full of great evil and some precious good — except that it is saner. It is saner in the sense that it is waged for that which means the most to us and our enemies. It is saner because it is more inescapable; in that sense it is saner because it is more tragic. It is merely a part of the Liberal’s religion to deny that a difference can become so real that only recourse to arms will vindicate it.