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The clash of civilizations is a clash of gods.

Whose Side Is God On?
by Marian Kester Coombs
Chronicles, August, 2003

oes God take sides in conflicts between men? If He does, how can we tell? Can we divine some rule of divine thumb on the scales of history? Is the side favored by God always victorious, or can a lost cause also have been blessed?

Bob Dylan mocked the very notion of God taking sides in human warfare:

Accept it with pride,
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side ...
The Germans now too
Have God on their side ...
You never ask questions
When God's on your side ...

And he concludes that "If God's on our side/He'll stop the next war."

For Muslims, there exists a seamless identity between their own political and military interests and those of Allah. This is a boon of theocracy: With no separation of church and state, Allah cannot help but be on the side of an Islamic government no matter which way it decides to jump.

At the other end of the spectrum lies traditional Christianity. Time was when the Christian God rode high, leading His soldiers into battle and on to victory. The stunning success of the Christian West in engulfing all the continents of the earth seemed proof positive that its God must be not only paramount but beaming genially upon the labors of His children.

Certainly this was the lesson learned by those engulfed, from Hawaii, where "the greatness of your Christian god" was ritually acknowledged, to North America, where the European invaders' fearsome weapons, immeasurable riches and miraculous resistance to diseases that wiped out the natives were all interpreted as signs of their god's superiority. In the great story of Europe's Encounter with indigenous peoples the world over, there were a thousand tragic moments when old gods faltered and fell silent, leaving their worshippers defenseless. To most peoples defeat meant either that their own gods had deserted them, or that the enemy's god was a more powerful Being to whom they must now bow down.

Worship of the Lord God of Hosts, the god of victory in battle -- He whose saving Arm avails us when the foe assails us, to quote "Rock of Ages" -- remains in the anthems and official poetry of most nations. Anthems are usually patriotic hymns; God is identified with the nation, and both are worshipped together. England's "God Save the King" is notable:

O Lord our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks:
On Thee our hopes we fix --
God save us all!

Likewise Russia's national anthem:

And should dread war arise,
Stretch forth Thy Hand,
To guard from wicked foes
Our dear, dear land.

And Japan's:

God of valor, God of war,
Let our arms forevermore
Vanquish foes -- ever those
Who oppress the weak and poor!
RIGHT IS MIGHT!
FIGHT FOR RIGHT!
Hail, Japan!

Even humble little Switzerland's:

When the morning skies grow red
And over us their radiance shed,
Thou, O Lord, appeareth in their light.
When the Alps glow bright with splendor,
Pray to God, to Him surrender,
For you feel and understand
That He dwelleth in this land.

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "America," and "America the Beautiful" are also psalms to a land seen as divinely authored by virtue of its virtuous people and the beauty of its terrain. Like the Swiss anthem, these songs preserve the ancient belief that the gods dwelt physically in one's own territory -- occupying particular caves, rivers, groves of trees and mountaintops. Long ago all gods were tribal, your own ethnos writ large and set dancing across the heavens. Certain tribal gods, however, have managed to survive into the modern world.

By now most Westerners have learnt to mistrust heady talk of divine inspiration and "God's will." They hear such talk and murmur to themselves, "How awfully convenient." For many Christians the revelations of philosophy, anthropology and psychology have forever demystifed the workings of man's religious "tic." They seem to have studied too closely Comparative Religion; they see too clearly the "many faces of God."

Not only has the self-critical, self-questioning streak in Western civilization at last put an end to the blissful certainty of God's approval -- so, of course, have the terrible deeds of the past century, in which the West has been wallowing since its first great crise de confiance, World War I.

The God of Christianity is associated with peace and peacemakers, in any case. Christ counseled love and forbearance in all things. The source of conflict in earthly life is Satan, who thrives upon ire and vengeance, bloodlust and force. The Christian doctrine of "just war" is thus purely defensive: If Satan has inspired one's neighbor to transgress upon the God-given substance of your people, you are morally justified in using just enough force to resist the transgression.

Just-war doctrine imposes the moral imperative of finding a casus belli before declaring war. "He hit me first!" -- therefore I smite him back in righteousness. "Interference with the full exercise of a nation's rights or independence, an affront to its dignity, an unredressed injury, are instances of casus belli," according to the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Of course, human beings being the great deceivers they are, the casus belli may be either faked or deliberately misconstrued if a true cause fails to present itself in time.

Sometimes an honest mistake is indeed made. It is likely no one did know until much later that the battleship Maine — although slightly out of place lurking in a harbor held by another power — was not actually blown up by Spanish mines. But then we have "Gulf of Tonkin incidents," whose exposure only adds to the paralyzing cynicism of modern life. We now know the Lusitania was in fact carrying munitions as well as unwitting civilian passengers. The jury is still out on Pearl Harbor -- but even the provenance of the September 11 attacks has been questioned, as a tortured Cui bono? continues to echo down the mirrored corridors of history.

The right to defend oneself is still universally recognized and is enshrined in even the more self-abnegating religions (except Jainism). But some religions do not abhor or abjure violence. Allah relishes a good fight, as long as his adherents win. The Koran is a standing order to make war upon the infidel. Shiva the Destroyer, Hindu god of creative destruction whose dancing sustains the cosmos, loves carnage and chaos, as does Kali, the Black One, drunk on the blood of her victims.

Sikhism was born of a desperate attempt to reconcile Hindu and Muslim precepts, and has succeeded only in becoming another combatant on the killing fields of the subcontinent. Shintoism, Japanese ancestor worship, incorporates the idea that the emperor is of divine origin, which removes all doubt as to whose side the gods are on once hostilities commence. Confucianism is mainly an ethical system based on the Chinese social hierarchy, but as such has many shrewd and practical things to say about the conduct of war. Taoism and Zen Buddhism, teaching the great "way" of Heaven, are both highly adaptable to military strategy and the martial arts:

One who excels as a warrior does not appear formidable;
One who excels in fighting is never roused in anger ...
--Lao-tse, Tao te Ching, Book Two, LXVIII

Victory is often viewed as evidence of which side God was on. The Allied nations' Nuremberg tribunal declared that "War is essentially an evil thing," then proceeded to accuse the losers of waging a "war of aggression" which was still more evil. Naturally the Axis nations believed themselves to have been grievously forced into reprisal by the actions of England, France and the United States. But the victors write not only history but theology: our side stood for Good, their side for Evil, the Devil's party. Victory is the proof of God's pudding. The greatest "war crime" of all is to have lost.

Self-defense is all very well, but is there never a case where God enjoins us to fight in His name against a certain evil? Are there some causes so holy that mere preaching, praying and proselytizing are not enough, and violence is called for? Between peoples both professing Christianity, we need look no farther than the Civil War for such a scenario. The crisis between North and South was at a slow burn due to divergent economic interests and realities, but war itself was fanned to flame by religiously-inspired antislavery agitators, beginning with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe and ending with John Brown and Lincoln himself. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/While God is marching on."

All other factors being equal -- which of course they were not -- the sheer righteous wrath of the Northern abolitionists might have vanquished the South all by itself. Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth's "Sic semper tyrannis!" invoked not Christ but the ancient Roman republic; the Lost Cause is revered even today not for religious but for familial, regional, sentimental, constitutional and aesthetic reasons.

Some belief systems, then, are spoiling for a fight. It is not always gods who thus spoil, but other entities, such as the Volk or an abstraction called Liberty, appealed to in the Marseillaise in lieu of the discarded Dieu. Nationalism, rooted in the instinctive preference for kin, is widely recognized to have become a quasireligious force in the course of the 18th century, a trend that only intensified in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nations, self-deified and convinced of enemy perfidy, have hurled themselves at one another repeatedly in this era, still seeking that final, vindicating victory.

But God as instigator of war is hardly dead. He is risen again in the current conflict between America and the Muslim world -- on both sides. Georgie Anne Geyer reports that "the president of the United States of America sees himself as part of God's divine plan. For America, for the Middle East, for the world." Bush has become "gripped by the idea that he [is] the man chosen to liberate the Middle East" (column, 3/9/03). Out of the woodwork come evangelicals spouting things like "The very presence of evil gives the righteous the right and the responsibility to place their armies upon the field. As the barbaric Taliban met defeat ... so then will God bless the forces of the United States in freeing the world's peoples from the fear of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, weapons that a satanically driven leader such as Saddam Hussein would indeed use" (Religious Freedom Coalition newspaper ad).

Bush, moreover, is surrounded by people who openly speak and write of fulfilling Israel's biblical destiny through the use of American force. Orthodox Judaism is rivaled only by Islam in its vision of God -- its God -- standing astride the whole world. The Messiah of Zion will be incarnated (or, as the Lubavitchers believe, reincarnated) in the Holy Land in time for the End of Days, Armageddon, the final salvation of the Jewish people. The Horsemen are assembling for their rendezvous with mankind; the Apocalypse draws nigh. As one follower of the the extremist Israeli settler movement Gush Emunim rhapsodized, "When I saw the planes ram the World Trade Center, I praised God, I knew that the Redeemer's coming was near!"

Whom to fight, when to fight, and why -- how simply these questions are answered in a fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. There, in Middle-earth, Sauron bends his will to completely evil, inhumanly cruel ends. Along with his satrap Saruman he unleashes, in a hideous parody of Creation, two races of creature with not one shred of soul between them expressly to "destroy the world of men," "rick, cot and tree, " "down to the last child." Self-defense against such forces is a sacred duty, not an agonizing choice.

So when William Murchison, a fine patriotic American full of right feeling, is moved to write that the Iraqis "are the Orcs" and "We are the elves and hobbits and dwarves and men of the West" (column, 3/27/03), it is a sobering moment. War fever dehumanizes and demonizes the Enemy, and even Mr. Murchison has fallen prey to it. Evidently too many people have forgotten how the "relativism" and "fuzzy internationalism" they ridicule arose originally: in the sickening aftermath of World War I, when the frenzy had worn off and the shock and shame set in.

That global morning-after destroyed the joie de vivre of a generation. For many the purgative relativism progressed to nihilism and could never go home again. This reaction will come in the present conflict as well. But all history teaches is that men do not learn from history.

In the historical novel Black Robe, a Jesuit priest strives to bring the Gospel to the "savages" of New France, suffering terribly in the process. As one of these savages lies dying, having received the priest's sacraments in order to enter Paradise, his daughter looks back at him:

Her father lay alone in the clearing, resting on the
pallet of branches. But, as she watched, his spirit
rose out of his body. The spirit of her dead father
walked toward the trees, his hand in the She-Manitou's
hand.

And at the end of the film Gladiator, as Maximus believed it would, his shade strides joyously through the lush Elysian fields toward home, where his dead wife and son await him, and you think, Yes, different peoples have different gods, after all.

The "clash of civilizations" is a clash of gods. "Evil" has no meaning outside a religious context. "Nations do not have friends, but interests," and it may equally be said that nations pursue not Evil but their own interests, which may well seem barbarously evil to those who do not share them. Even the most horrid parasitic wasp believes, in its insect heart of hearts, that those who resist its unwanted attentions are quite wrong to do so. We must pray that defeat never renders us "evil" and thus culpable for all the attentions we have visited upon the world.