Christians and war make odd bed fellows. Theologians of every Christian stripe basically agree on a few things and one of them is that war is something to be undertaken as a last resort and is to be undertaken with great humility and great sadness. War is not something to be celebrated, glamorized, or idealized even when necessary.
This broad theological consensus on how to view war puts President Bush’s recent comment to an Australian leader that “We are kicking ass” into even sharper relief.
Moral and spiritual humility is a grand virtue, especially for a Christian president in the midst of a disastrous war that has cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives; a sloppily run war with countless more people wounded and more than two million Iraqi refugees. The words “kicking ass” are two of the more inappropriate words he could have uttered.