Is Killing Innocents Christian? - National Logistics Post

“Killing innocents is never acceptable … under any circumstances by any person or any nation,” Tucker Carlson said in an interview last week.

Tucker made a similar statement at the last AmericaFest conference: “We are not as Christians allowed to kill the innocent. Period.”

In fact, however, Christian armies have been killing innocents since the dawn of Christianity with the full imprimatur of leading Christian thinkers. St. Augustine (354-430), for example, “held that in a war deemed to be ‘just’ all might be legitimately killed,” writes historian Christopher Allmand. “The fact that all might not be equally involved (and therefore culpable) in war was an irrelevance.”

Tucker is entitled to hold whatever moral opinions he desires…. But he shouldn’t pretend he is speaking in the name of mainstream Christianity.

Christian warfare often reflected this thinking. In 1099, for example, the victorious fighters of the First Crusade barged through the streets of Jerusalem “slaughtering men, women and children,” historian Thomas Asbridge writes. When Christian troops of the Fifth Crusade conquered the Egyptian city of Damietta after an 18-month siege in 1218, they “found its streets strewn with the bodies of the dead, wasting away from pestilence and famine,” according to the crusader Oliver of Paderborn. The death toll was in the tens of thousands.

Historian Jim Bradbury writes matter-of-factly: “What to the modern mind are ‘atrocities,’ were a normal part of medieval war.”

Even Christian thinkers who rejected indiscriminate warfare sometimes sanctioned killing civilians. For example, Honoré Bonet, in his famous 14th-century work The Tree of Battles, writes that armies shouldn’t target the innocent but acknowledges that sparing them entirely is impossible, just like “a gardener cannot pull out all the weeds from among the good plants without plucking from the earth the good with the bad.”

A century later, Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546), a Catholic theologian and philosopher, argued that “it is not permissible to kill innocent members of the enemy population for the injury done by the wicked among them.” Nonetheless, he maintains that

it is occasionally lawful to kill the innocent not by mistake, but with full knowledge of what one is doing, if this is an accidental effect: for example, during the justified storming of a fortress or city, where one knows there are many innocent people, but where it is impossible to fire artillery and other projectiles or set fire to buildings without crushing or burning the innocent along with the combatants.

If such action weren’t permissible, he writes, it would be “impossible to wage war against the guilty, thereby preventing the just side from winning.”

Read more The Old Man and the Sea

This logic undergirds much of Christianity’s just war tradition. This tradition ultimately led to the Geneva Conventions, which also permit the unintentional killing of civilians as long as it isn’t “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

Civilians, incidentally, are rarely wholly innocent. As Vitoria writes: “the enemy rely upon the resources of its people to sustain an unjust war, and their strength is therefore weakened if their subjects are plundered.”

That’s why America and England relentlessly bombed German and Japanese cities during World War II. They knew that a beast cannot fight unless it is fed. That the front line cannot survive without the home front. For who else but civilians grow their army’s food? Sew its uniforms? Manufacture its weapons? Refine the oil that powers its tanks and planes? Provide it moral and political support? And who funds war if not the civilian-powered economy?

Tucker Carlson — who has publicly admitted to reading the Bible for the first time in 2023 — claims he is speaking in the name of Christianity in deeming the killing of civilians in warfare “murder,” but is he seriously suggesting that his moral instincts and those of the woke left are more Christian than those of the Greatest Generation, which carried out and applauded the bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II?

Tucker claims the New Testament opposes killing children for the sins of their fathers. This opposition actually appears in the Old Testament — Deuteronomy 24:16 — but it concerns courts of justice. A judge may not condemn a son to death for the crimes of his father. But war is not a court case. War, by its very nature, is a collective enterprise. It pits one state or nation against another.

That’s why no American, for example, cares whether the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor survived World War II. Because they know that these pilots didn’t attack us as individuals. They did so as representatives of a nation. And we fought back against the nation. Not against the pilots.

Tucker is entitled to hold whatever moral opinions he desires. If he wishes to reject the Christian just war tradition and adopt pacifist values that make winning a war impossible, he can do so. But he shouldn’t pretend he is speaking in the name of mainstream Christianity. He is not.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the former chief editor of The Jewish Press and the author/editor of 10 books, including Nuggets of Gold: Donald Trump on Marriage, War, Plastic Straws, and 330 Other Topics.

READ MORE from Elliot Resnick:

Stop Projecting Your Beliefs onto Donald Trump