COLUMN ONE : Morality, War: Do They Mix? : As Americans search their souls for answers, some religious leaders question whether there can ever be a ‘just war’ when modern warfare can be so terribly destructive.

When, if ever, is war moral?

Do the justifications of war devised when the Roman Empire was defending itself against the barbarians apply in the nuclear age? Has the terrible destructiveness of modern warfare made the very thought of waging war archaic, a violation of the deepest laws of man and God alike?

Confronted with the prospect of war with Iraq, Americans have been searching their traditions and their souls for answers and for guidance on how to act on their convictions.

More Christian religious groups have announced their opposition to war at this time than to any American war in this century before it was undertaken. A majority of the Roman Catholic bishops have opposed war now, as have the National Council of Churches and the leaders of most mainline Protestant churches.

Evangelical churches are split, but most are inclined to support President Bush. So are the traditionally all-black Protestant black churches, though with misgivings about the large numbers of black men and women in the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf. Some Jewish groups, many fearful of Saddam Hussein’s threat to Israel, have expressed support for Bush, though there is a Jewish peace movement. Some American Muslims have expressed opposition.

Each group has its own traditions and beliefs which influence but do not necessarily govern the views of Americans.

In the Christian tradition, the dominant concept of war is that of “just war.” Drawn from the classical thinkers of Greece and Rome, among them Plato and Cicero, it was embedded in Christian thought in the 5th Century by St. Augustine, the North African church father. It was systematized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, embellished by some later Spanish scholastics and has remained a staple of Roman Catholic ethics.

The doctrine was accepted by reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 16th Century and has remained part of the Protestant tradition, though less rigorously than in the more formal Catholic Church.

The “just war” doctrine involves a clear presumption for peace and against war. War is justified only in self-defense or to repel aggression. Even then, it must meet restrictive tests to be called “just.” For example: Is there a real and just cause which can only be confronted by war? Has a competent authority authorized the use of force? Are the stated objectives the real ones? Have all peaceful alternatives been exhausted? Is the prospect of success sufficiently clear to justify the human and other costs of war? Is the damage inflicted by war proportionate to its objectives?

Once under way, a “just war” must be commensurate with the evil to be overcome and it must be directed toward the aggressors, not innocent people.

Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony made precisely these points in a letter Nov. 7 to Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Mahony recalled to Baker that the Second Vatican Council declared: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”

A majority of the U.S. Catholic bishops, believing that conditions for a “just war” have not been yet met, subsequently adopted Mahony’s letter as their own statement.

Despite such principles, in the 1,500 years since St. Augustine, the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant churches blessed the most frightful of wars. The Catholic Church itself initiated the Crusades against the Muslims; the idea of the religious Crusade was adopted by Calvin’s followers as they sought to extend the Puritan doctrine by war; the fearful wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants tore Europe apart for more than 100 years.

In World War 1, churchmen on both sides claimed justice for their cause. The Anglican Bishop of London exhorted British troops to “kill Germans,” the late Yale church historian Roland H. Bainton recalled in his influential book, “Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace.”

After the horrors of that war, there was a surge of pacifism in Western Christian churches, only to be squelched with the coming of Adolf Hitler and World War II. Another surge came with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 and, in the United States, with the Vietnam War.

There has always been a strain of pacifism in the Christian Church. Many scholars argue that the early church, following the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament, was essentially pacifist until Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312. In fact, St. Augustine’s “just war” doctrine, following Jesus, did not include self-defense as a permissible reason for war, only the defense of others or the defense of peace and justice. Self-defense was added later.

Some modern Protestant churches are themselves historically pacifist, notably the Quakers, Mennonites and the Brethren, but the mainline Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches associated with the National Council of Churches, like the Roman Catholic Church, do not bar war altogether. But members of those churches, like many Catholic thinkers, are tending toward the belief that the technology of destruction in modern war is so terrible that it casts doubt on whether there can be such a thing as a “just war.”

“For me personally it is a time of rethinking” about the whole issue of the justification of any war, said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary-elect of the National Council of Churches. She questions the idea of “war as the way to peace,” as asserted recently by former President Richard M. Nixon--a concept advanced by Plato, Cicero and by St. Augustine.

“Denominations like the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians are moving more and more toward the idea that there cannot be a just war in the modern world, “ said John P. Crossley Jr., associate professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

“The No. 1 factor is the nuclear possibility; there is always the risk that the nation that has it (the bomb) will use it. Then there is the global village concept--the knowledge that in the modern world, war is usually not just one nation against another but war somewhere affects everyone everywhere. And there is a very realpolitik understanding of the political and economic causes of war, for which old men send young men to fight.”

George F. Regas, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, who was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam, said that “most of the time the church has used the just war criteria to justify war. The Vietnam war marked the first time the church used the just war criteria to condemn war. It is impossible for me to see how modern war can meet the ‘just war’ tests of due proportionality, just cause and just means,” he said.

In explaining his own attitude toward Hitler and World War II, Regas quoted Protestant theologian Karl Barth’s statement about them: “A just cause is only when there is the threat of the total loss of freedom”--that is, the freedom of all mankind.

Aside from the Catholic pacifists, there was very little theological objection to the allied conduct of World War II, according to Jesuit Father William O’Neill, of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, though Jesuit Father John Ford did publish an article during the war arguing that the saturation bombing of German cities violated requirements for a just war.

For Protestants, attitudes toward the morality of war have been shaped by the opinions of 16th-Century reformer Martin Luther about the relations between man, God and society--views that differed from Catholic tradition. Luther developed the notion of “two kingdoms”: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the princes, which turned out to be that of the developing nation state.

The role of the minister and the church, as historian Bainton wrote, was to be strictly spiritual; the role of the prince and the state, who are ordained by God, was to punish crime and to control all civil affairs, including war. The state’s decision to go to war has generally not been challenged.

It has been argued that the separation of authority led in the 19th Century to German Lutheran acceptance of the Prussian military state and, in the 20th Century, of Hitler; but the Lutherans were not alone among the religious people of Germany in that position.

The principal Scriptual text cited to support the idea of the temporal or civil kingdom is the 13th Chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans in the New Testament, which begins: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

“The evangelical movement recognizes the basis of civil society as Romans 13,” said Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of the magazine “Christianity Today.”

In this theology, the state acts on God’s behalf to punish crimes. “Evangelicals recognize that in a sinful society there is some necessity for war in order to restrain aggressive powers,” Henry said.

“The idea that war can be eliminated in a sinful society is predicated on a super-optimistic view of human nature,” he added. “The great bulk of evangelicals would support a ‘just war’ concept--that is, they believe that a war in self-defense or to restrain aggression by a third party is justified,” said Robert Dugan, of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, based in Washington.

Traditional all-black Protestant churches, like the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A, the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, have held similar views and historically been more accepting of governmental authority when it comes to war.

“When the bugle sounds, the black churches are ordinarily ready to go,” said C. Eric Lincoln, professor of religion at Duke University and author of the recently published “The Black Church in the African American Experience.”

“Black church people are extremely patriotic,” he said. “Traditional black churchmen accepted what God sent.”

There is not a strong tradition of pacifism in the traditional black churches, he said, noting that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lost a lot of black support when he turned against the Vietnam War before his assassination in 1968.

On the other hand, he said, there is a “distressing feeling” among blacks that the “armed forces in the gulf have a very heavy black presence, and a feeling that the reasons for being there are either not clear or insufficient.”

“The black people have no enemies in the Persian Gulf,” Lincoln said. “We can relate to the people of the Middle East because they’re not white. There is some feeling that is a case of blacks fighting blacks . . . . There is a great deal of talk about the fact that Bush never sent troops to Southern Africa. I think there is suspicion.”

Lincoln said that among younger black clergy, there are some who identify with the various Christian pacifist movements. The Rev. J. M. Lawson, pastor of the Holman Methodist Church, a United Methodist congregation on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles, said he knows some members of his congregation disagree with him when he preaches against war in the gulf.

“I was very much a loner when I worked with Martin (Luther King),” said Lawson, now head of the Los Angeles branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “There was just a small minority of us.”

“But I’m sure that since then more conscientious Afro-American people and pastors understand how horrible and racist these wars are,” he said. The term racist was used because the proportion of blacks who died in Vietnam was so high.

Two major religions, Judaism and Islam, have no specific doctrines of “just war,” but contain teachings that both permit war and provide for restraint.

American Jews have responded in different ways to the threat of war in the gulf.

“Jews have always been leaders in the peace movement, but Jews are very worried about Saddam Hussein,” said Neil Sandberg, retired Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee. “Yet it is not fair to say that Jews as a group want war.”

“The Jewish community is very much concerned that unless Saddam Hussein is disarmed, there will be a much bloodier war down the road,” said David Lieber, president of the University of Judaism, a Los Angeles institution affiliated with the Conservative branch of Judaism.

The leaders of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, of the Reform branch of Judaism, passed a resolution supporting the President. And the union called a National Council of Churches’ resolution in November advocating a general peace conference for the entire Middle East “a moral obscenity” because it linked Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait to the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the Palestinians.

Recently, about 50 Conservative rabbis in a regional convention in Palm Springs supported Bush’s tough position and urged him “to take whatever steps necessary . . . to eliminate Iraq’s capability to wage nuclear and chemical warfare.”

Jewish tradition, Lieber said, has “not had a pacifist tradition,” though in recent years attempts have been made to read such tendencies into the Jewish Bible and the Talmudic commentaries on it. In the Jewish Bible, wars of self-defense are clearly recognized and God commanded the conquest of what became the land of Israel.

In waging wars, though, Jewish tradition emphasizes elements of mercy. Inhabitants of a city under siege, for instance, must be afforded an opportunity to escape.

And the Jewish prophets preached peace “as the most divine of man’s accomplishments,” as retired Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Los Angeles’ Leo Baeck Temple once said.

Isaiah, for instance, prophesied that “ . . . They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more . . . . “

The Book of Deuteronomy provides for conscientious objectors and calls for certain men to be excused from war (men who are betrothed but not married, who have built houses they haven’t yet lived in, who have planted vineyards from which they haven’t tasted the fruit). Citing such examples and writings of the rabbis in the Talmud, the Shalom Center of Philadelphia organized a recent meeting in New York in which several hundred Jewish attendees expressed their opposition to war in the gulf at this time.

Jews also joined Christians and Muslims at an anti-war service Sunday night in Los Angeles at the Islamic Center of Southern California.

Muslims are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in America, through both immigration and conversion. Hassan Hathout, outreach director of the Islamic Center of Southern California, guesses that there are 300,000 in the region.

Hathout believes that, apart from those Palestinians in the United States who have come to identify their enemy, Israel, with the United States, the great majority of American Muslims are outraged by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

“Yet they have to be suspicious of America’s silence when Saddam Hussein used poison gas (against the Kurds and the Iranians),” he said. “And why should the bastion of democracy have helped to strengthen the dictator?”

Hathout believes, and thinks that many other American Muslims agree, that peaceful solutions to the Persian Gulf crisis have not yet been exhausted.

In the Koran, the Muslims’ holy book, and in the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, war is permitted but limited to two conditions, said Maher Hathout, spokesman for the Islamic Center and brother of Hassan Hathout. War may be waged against:

--Those who attack Muslims in an effort to change their religion or drive them from their homes.

--Anyone who oppresses other helpless people, whether they are Muslim or not.

In either case, war is viewed as a last resort after all other means of dissuasion have failed. Maher Hathout said that the word “jihad,” often mistranslated as “holy war,” actually means “utmost effort.” It can be applied, he said, to wars that meet the two conditions.

In addition, Muslim tradition says that war must always be declared ahead of time, and must be limited to warriors, not innocents.

“That is what the religion teaches. Unfortunately, as with Christians and Jews, it is not always followed,” Maher Hathout said.