Who Are the Soldiers of the Body of Christ?

Ever since the beginning of the war on terror, I have been hearing some version of the following prayed as a petition during mass:  “for the safety of our troops.”  Sometimes, the prayer has also identified “our” troops as those fighting for “our freedom.”  This phenomenon has not been limited to just one parish or even one city.   I have heard this prayer in small town Ohio, in a supposedly liberal parish in big city Chicago, in the basilica at the University of Notre Dame, and in several parishes in the Boston area.

Such a prayer has no place in the Christian community.

First of all, who is the “we” behind the “our” in this prayer?  Clearly, it is the United States military.  Even if the various wars and bombing campaigns associated with the “war on terror” were just, which, at least according to Christian just war theory, they are not, the church, which is the body of Christ, should never claim one nation’s soldiers as their own.  When the church claims the United States military as its own, we are effectively saying that the United States military is the military of the Body of Christ, fighting as and on behalf of Christ himself.  In so doing, we essentially recite a deformed version of St. Teresa of Avila’s beautiful “Christ Has No Body” in which she writes,

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

When we pray for “our troops,” and claim them as ours, we basically say

Christ has no body but yours,

No tomahawk missile, no armored tank but yours,

Yours are the surface to air missiles with which he doles out

Punishment and death on this world,

Yours are the hands with which he waterboards our indefinitely detained enemies….

Moreover, how would an Iraqi Christian feel entering a Catholic church in the United States in which this prayer is uttered—especially when such a prayer is read against the backdrop of an American flag?  How would a Salvadoran, Panamanian, Guatemalan, or Chilean person who lost loved ones to American military power feel in a church that identifies itself as one with the U.S. military?  This is not to say that everything the U.S. military has ever done, either as body or by its individual soldiers, has been immoral, but only to point out two very obvious facts: one, the U.S. military as a military is not a part of the body of Christ and I find it strange that Christians in the United States have such a strong desire to claim the U.S. military our own; and two, in claiming the U.S. military as “ours” we do sanction, indiscriminately, whatever the U.S. military does by saying that it acts in our name.

Finally, we should also note that nowhere in the gospels does Jesus command or even permit us to pray for those who kill in our name.  However, Jesus does explicitly tell us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  It would be tempting to then conclude that the solution would be to begin praying for “Al Qaeda.”  However, if we continue to let “Americanness” set the agenda for our identity as the body of Christ, in praying for Al Qaeda as “our enemy,” we would end up crystallizing not only the identity of those gathered in the church as United States citizens loyal to the prerogatives of a given nation state, but also reify the status of “Al Qaeda” as “enemy” and in so doing legitimize war against them.

However, when we begin to think and speak of ourselves as the body of Christ, something different occurs.  If, after learning to think of ourselves as what we really are—the body of Christ—we continue to identify “Al Qaeda” as an enemy for whom we pray and seek to do good to, we will see them as an enemy not because they seek to kill United Statesians or because they oppose U.S. hegemony or political objectives, but because they seek to kill human beings, some of whom are “innocent.”  When we condemn violence and defend life not on patriotic grounds, but because we are the body of Christ, we are then liberated to be similarly critical of and opposed to the violence that the United States government does in our name.  In fact, we will resist even the United States’ attempt to claim us as its own.