Christian National Security Experts: Christians Should NOT Be Pacifists
According to reporting by the Christian Post, a small crowd of people recently assembled at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. to hear a number of national security experts of a Christian orientation share their thoughts on a recent, high-profile declaration that deals with how world affairs should be negotiated from a Christian perspective.
The declaration itself was published in Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy, and signed by dozens of Christian scholars and theologians.
The speakers present at the Mayflower Hotel included Paul Miller and Mary Habeck, both former staff members of the National Security Council, as well as John Owen, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
Mark Tooley, who hosted the discussion at the Mayflower and is president of The Institute on Religion and Democracy, remarked, ���Young evangelicals are prone to a neo-Libertarian isolationism, pessimistic that America has any major constructive role in sustaining global order.���
���The young and the comfortable in today's America too often assume their security and ease are the human historical norm. They don't know that war, genocide, tyranny, extreme poverty, and oppression are far more common to the human experience. Today's evangelical pacifists and isolationists are partly a reaction against past evangelical and Protestant failure effectively, if at all, to articulate historic Christian ethical teaching about God's purpose for nations and governments.���
The Providence editors write in the declaration itself that they ���believe much more than American security is at stake. Free nations are more secure in a world of ordered liberty. All nations can and should join in the collective effort to accountable governance, free entrepreneurship, and mutual security. The United States and its allies have, for much of the last century, helped foster these ideals around the world ��� and we believe they should continue to do so for the foreseeable future.���
Marc LiVecche, Managing Editor at Providence who served to moderate the discussion, said, in part, ���If you take a comprehensive picture of Scripture, what you're going to end up with is a portrait of Jesus that is an example of not pacifism.���
By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large
