Christianity, 1980-

(in progress)

Addressing a congregation in the Dominican Republic,
August 1983.  That's me at right, about thirty pounds ago!
The man at left is Dan Bonney, a young missionary who
 translated my remarks. 

I was brought up Presbyterian but have never thought of myself as anything but a basic Christian.  I don't have much patience for denominations.  For several years as a teenager I had no patience even for Christianity, which I had come to view as a nice fairy tale.  My mind was changed when, in 1980 at age 20, I attended the annual National Security Seminar at the U.S. Army War College. The War College invited about seventy-five Americans to spend a week discussing U.S. domestic, foreign policy, and military affairs in the company of the officer/students that year. Our group included a professional football coach, a Hollywood talent agent, several prominent businessmen, the producer of the CBS weekend news--and me, the youngest participant and, with one exception, the only one in their twenties.

How was I invited? Participants at the National Security Seminar nominate their successors, and one of my professors, Wick Murray, had nominated me. Wick's military history courses then emphasized "realism," the idea that in war the only morality is that of expedience. Consequently I was surprised to discover that officers at the War College are required to do coursework in ethics. This discovery fascinated me, and the ethical aspects of war have fascinated me ever since.

When I returned to Columbus, I decided to research a historical question:  How did Christianity, founded by the Prince of Peace, become over the course of a thousand years what historian Sir Michael Howard has called "one of the great warrior religions of mankind?"  The research required me to read afresh (and often for the first time) the gospels and Pauline epistles; also a lot of early Christian writers, principally Origen, Tertullian, and Augustine of Hippo.

To my surprise, I discovered that the "nice fairy tale" was intellectually very powerful, and needed to be taken seriously.  So my next step was to read C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, which does an amazingly good job of presenting the basic Christian message to skeptics. Thereafter I became a committed Christian for several years.   I got very involved with a local evangelical Methodist church,, took a couple of courses at a local seminary, and helped with a puppet and singing ministry to the Dominican Republic.

Organized religion made me uncomfortable, however. At least, evangelical Christianity did. While I liked its emphasis on strong personal relationships (with other Christians and with Christ), I increasingly saw that a major part of the evangelical project was a desire to police the behavior of others. At present I have little to do with churches save to make an annual trip to Honduras, where I help a team of doctors and dentists provide medical and dental care to people who would otherwise get none.

This experience has sharpened my awareness of the enormous disparities in wealth and power among the earth's peoples, and to ask why they exist. This is a question military historians seldom address. Military historians usually accept uncritically existing patterns of dominance and subordination, hierarchy, etc. These patterns strike them as natural, and they tend to react with befuddlement, then resentment, then resistance whenever someone challenges the validity of those patterns. Thus the major intellectual movements that have emerged in recent decades to mount such

challenges--neo-Marxism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, subaltern studies--are dismissed with the label "political correctness." And military historians don't even begin to understand how the project of military history, so long as it refuses to interrogate structures of power, appears to scholars who have embraced these movements as reinforcing those structures.

A few of the 300 people living in the city dump in the hills above La Ceiba, Honduras.	Pediatrician Lori DeBold of Irvine, California, examines a young boy
An AIDS hospice in La Ceiba. The man at right, a Honduran minister who drives a cab to earn a living, created the hospice. The man at left has AIDS. He holds one of his prized possessions, a newspaper article that used story to warn other Hondurans of the danger of HIV infection.	Dentist Pat Daulton of Columbus, Ohio, examines a Honduran man while I assist.

Continue to The Army National Guard
Return to The Making of a Military Historian