A Brief History of American Protestant Ethics of War: Just War, Antiwar, and Nonviolence

This essay traces American Protestant thinking about the ethics of war from the 1960s to the present. It argues that Paul Ramsey's recovery of Just War ethics, building on the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, set off three streams of thought. It places these debates within an American civil religion that has long framed foreign policy as a matter of divine purpose and covenant. Ramsey rooted Just War in neighbor love and defended a qualified account of nuclear deterrence. The first stream, an antiwar liberationism, grew out of the radicalization of the mainline churches during the Vietnam era. By the 1991 Gulf War, it amounted to a practical pacifism, even when force had clear international sanction. The second, a nonviolence grounded in postliberal theology, is associated with John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. It rejects force on the basis of the person and teaching of Jesus rather than on liberal political commitments. The third is a Just War traditionalism. James Turner Johnson deepened it through historical recovery of the classic tradition, and Jean Elshtain extended it by joining Christian Realism to the post-9/11 debate.