Honoring the nation’s war dead is discomfiting to many on the pacifist Religious Left. One Protestant theologian’s fairly thoughtful Memorial Day ode to fallen veterans this year hailed their “sacrificial living.”

But Bruce Epperly, a United Church of Christ “process theologian” from liberal Lancaster Seminary, cautioned against “American exceptionalism” or “America first” ideologies in favor of embracing the “wellbeing of others, including the planet.” After all, “We can celebrate our nation’s fallen heroes without being nationalistic.”

And he concluded:
“Memorial Day is about remembering, and then dedicating our own lives to a larger, greater good for those we love, our nation — and this may mean protesting against military action, injustice, and enmity to immigrants — and the planet as a whole.”

Well, maybe. But most of America’s fallen veterans were probably more focused on “American exceptionalism” than “the planet.” Rev. Epperly’s sentiment contrasts with C.S. Lewis’s famous defense of patriotism against abstract humanitarianism. “I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar,” Lewis explained. “But if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds — wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine — I become insufferable.”

More directly critical of Memorial Day than Epperly was a column last year by Episcopal author Diana Butler Bass. “Every Memorial Day, I remember how early Christians almost uniformly rejected any kind of military service — and how little we have learned from their witness to peacemaking,” she lamented. Bass suggested “it may well be good for our souls” to consider “what it means to be both a Christian and a soldier,” which from her apparent perspective, is incompatible.

Quoting her own recent book, Bass insisted: “Long before theologians Ambrose and Augustine argued for just war, Christians were not allowed to fight,” and “no record exists that Christians served in the Roman army before 170.” She perhaps overlooked the Gospel account of the Roman officer who sought Jesus to heal his servant, not to mention the New Testament account of Saint Peter’s momentous stay with the Roman centurion Cornelius.

There is, at most, insufficient evidence that Christianity in the first 3 centuries had any settled teaching on war, though the Apostles Paul and Peter both described temporal rulers as ordained by God to wield the sword.

Ignoring the historic Christian teaching about war, prominent Minnesota megachurch pastor Greg Boyd several years ago blogged critically about Memorial Day. Formerly a relatively conventional evangelical, he earned a New York Times story when he renounced his own once conservative politics and denounced the Right’s supposed version of “Christian America.”

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