Evangelicals’ embrace of the military made preemptive war morally defensible.

Evidence

HAVING EMBRACED THE MILITARY, evangelicals would find it difficult to articulate a critique of militarism. If the military was a source of virtue, war, too, attained a moral bearing—even preemptive war. In the 1987 book One Nation Under God, Christian Reconstructionist Rus Walton offered a robust defense of preventive war. Suppose a “thug,” a barbarian, a “depraved maniac,” threatened your wife or daughter. “What would you do? When would you move to protect her? Before the attacker made his advance? … When he began ripping the clothes from her body?” Yes, Jesus might have instructed his followers to love their enemies, but not His enemies. Christians must steel themselves: “Let others seek to remove that great old hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ from their hymnals. Let us go forth, the Cross of Jesus going on before.” Christians were called to fight the Lord’s battle, at home and abroad, and seek dominion in His name. The paperback edition of Walton’s book boasted 150,000 copies in print, and Walton became a frequent speaker at D. James Kennedy’s annual Reclaiming America for Christ conferences. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 310

Categorization

• QUESTION: Walton’s argument explicitly redefines Jesus’ enemy-love instruction as not applying to God’s enemies — worth tracing how this exegetical move propagates through later evangelical just-war discourse.
• DEFINE: Contains the mechanism of ‘crusade theory of warfare’ — righteous states justified in taking offensive action — central to the book’s case that this is a dominant evangelical strand, not a fringe one.