I (Russell) grew up next to Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in Southern California. Many of my childhood friends' parents were marines. The base was simply part of the landscape of my life - the sound of munitions being fired in the distance, convoys on local roads, citizens in uniform at the grocery store, and the continual rhythm of deployment and return.
But this was also Southern California. Other friends' parents were surfers, artists, and hippies. In high school hallways you could hear words both of patriotic pride and anti-war idealism in the same afternoon. When the Gulf War began, our school held a pep rally. I remember classmates crying because their parents were being deployed. I also remember overhearing others say that war itself was immoral. Some were afraid. Some were confused. Some were proud. Some were angry.
Even then, I sensed that something deeper than politics was at stake. The question for me was theological and moral: how does a Christian live faithfully in a world where love of neighbor and the demands of political order do not always sit easily together? How do we resist evil without being seduced by power? How do we speak about justice without baptizing the nation's will? Decades later, as a Lutheran pastor, I find myself standing in that same tension again.
When bombs fall, and they always fall, church leaders feel pressure almost immediately. Some congregants want to hear patriotism preached from the pulpit. Others want to hear pastors condemn war, a sort of prophetic denouncement. Both temptations to use religion to baptize a political cause are real. Both can turn the Gospel into a political instrument. In that sense, the greatest danger is not only bad policy or overheated rhetoric, but the old temptation to make politics salvific. In times like these, Christians can easily confuse patriotism with faithfulness or outrage with prophetic righteousness. And when that confusion sets in, the church begins to forget what it is and what it is not.
We saw a vivid example of this recently when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted a Pentagon Christian prayer service and invoked the name of Jesus Christ in connection with American military action and the protection of U.S. troops. Some of the things he prayed for were "overwhelming violence of action" and "clear and righteous targets" against enemies. He went on to pray for God to let every round "find its mark" and deliver "wicked souls" to eternal damnation. That goes beyond civil religion. Civil religion appeals to providence for guidance, but goes no further. Hegseth's more explicit move places the holy name of Christ in direct service of military power. That is not mere patriotism; it is a form of Christian nationalism, because it identifies the nation's cause too closely with the cause of Christ. Even worse, it tells the world that Americans are participating in a holy war. The Ayatollah might pray in this manner, but Christians must not.
The Lutheran tradition (ours) offers a bracing reminder: the church is not the state. Christ alone rules the church. His kingdom does not advance through missiles, markets, elections, or majorities. It advances through a crucified Lord, through forgiveness, through preaching, through water and bread and wine. Once the church begins to speak as though the nation's cause is identical to God's cause, it has confused the cross with the sword. Worse, it has traded witness for political expediency. To be clear: we are not trying to politicize the Gospel or to make politics salvific.
Christians have long spoken of God ruling the world in two distinct ways. First, he rules through the Gospel - what Martin Luther called the righthand kingdom - in which he forgives sins, nurtures faith, and nurtures a people who love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. Second, Christ rules through civil authority - the lefthand kingdom - he restrains evil in a fallen world by means of law, order, judgment, and, at times, force. These are not two competing authorities; they are two ways that God preserves and governs his creation until its final renewal.
In 1526, Luther wrote a treatise with a blunt title: Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved. His answer was yes, not because war is good, and not because killing is holy, but because protecting one's neighbor in a sinful world may require taking actions with tragic consequences. A Christian may serve as soldier, governor, legislator, or judge, not as an agent of redemption, but as an instrument to promote human flourishing and restrain evil. That word matters. The sword does not save; it restrains. And because it only restrains, it must never be confused with the Gospel.
Still, this way of thinking has its drawbacks. The doctrine of the two kingdoms has sometimes been used too neatly, as though one could draw a clean line between spiritual and temporal life where real history lacks such clarity. At its worst, it can become an excuse for passivity - a way of deferring too quickly to rulers, soft-pedaling public evil, or treating structural injustice as someone else's department. Christians should say that plainly: a doctrine can be true and still be mishandled.
But an abused doctrine is not necessarily a useless one. Properly understood, the distinction remains morally clarifying. It reminds the church that it is not called to sanctify state power, and it reminds the state that it is not competent to save souls. In a time of war, that is not a small insight.
None of this makes war spiritually clean. War always represents a failure of peace, even when the blame for that failure is not equally distributed. It leaves bodies broken and consciences burdened. It trains people to override mercy. It reshapes moral communities. Soldiers return home carrying not only medals, but physical wounds, emotional scars, and what many now call moral injury - the kind of inward burden that settles on the conscience long after the fighting ends. Civilians bury the dead, flee their homes, and learn to live inside trauma long after the speeches have ended. If we speak of war without attending to these realities, then we are not being realistic. We are being evasive.
The church must never romanticize this. If we speak of war without lament, we have not spoken truth. If we honor soldiers without caring for their wounds, visible and invisible, we have failed them. If we call on Christ's name to destroy human adversaries, then we have broken the second commandment by taking the Lord's name in vain. The cross of Christ forbids such forbids triumphalism. Christians worship a Lord who conquered not by domination but by suffering love. That does not abolish civil authority. But it does subject every exercise of coercive power to divine judgment.
At the same time, Christian seriousness requires resisting another temptation: declaring every use of force inherently idolatrous. That, too, is too easy. It is a kind of moral innocence that others must pay for. God's use of civil authority to curb violence is not the same thing as the church blessing violence.
The classical text teaching Christians how to deal with authority is Romans 13: "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." Romans 13 does not disappear in times of moral tension. The church does not wield the sword. But neither does God abandon the world to chaos. To say that force can never be used without sin is one thing. To say it can never be used without responsibility is true. To say it can never be used at all is something else.
This is where the distinction between cross and sword starts to matter beyond Lutheran vocabulary. It becomes a way of judging what power can and cannot do. We need a way of seeing the world that does not confuse coercion with redemption. We need a way of thinking that leaves room for grief, judgment, and responsibility without slipping into sentimentality, vengeance, or idolatry of the state. The old distinction is useful not because it answers every question, but because it keeps us from collapsing distinctions that must remain intact.
Luther's contrast is not simply between church and state, but between two churches. One is the false church, which mixes religion and politics to secure prestige, condemn opponents, and dominate public life. The other is the true church, which tends the Word of God and bears the holy cross. Unlike St. Augustine, Luther did not frame the matter as a struggle between a heavenly realm and an earthly one. He drew the sharper line between true and false faithfulness. That distinction helps expose two recurrent idolatries: church leaders who use politics to enlarge their power, and political leaders who hijack faith to sanctify their cause. The greatest struggle in public life is not simply between church and state, but between faithful and unfaithful ways of invoking God in questions of justice, order, and power. That matters now, because the real danger is not public engagement as such, but the perennial temptation of a false church to use sacred language for political mastery.
Because Christians live in both realms, we are not mere spectators of history. We are citizens, voters, neighbors, officeholders, parents, pastors, and congregants. To proclaim Christ in public is not merely to recite his name while declining moral judgment. It is to tell the truth about human dignity, sin, limits, responsibility, and hope.
That means Christians can demand honesty from our civil leaders. We can question their claims about the necessity of war. We can ask whether force is proportionate, whether diplomacy has been exhausted, and whether civilians are being treated as expendable. We can support humanitarian aid, care for refugees, tend the wounds of veterans, and resist the demonization of entire peoples. We do not need always to condemn war to prove moral seriousness. And we do not need uncritical support for it to prove our patriotism. The cross frees us from both panic and passivity.
And in a pluralistic society, Christians should make these arguments in terms of justice, proportion, truthfulness, and the common good. That kind of argument does not water down conviction. It is one way conviction leads us to speak responsibly in public.
This tension has taken on another dimension because some of our church members are Iranian Christians. In recent weeks, they have prayed with tears of joy. They believe this moment may create space to breathe, space for change, and space for relief from a regime that has burdened them and their families for decades. Their prayers do not sound like political slogans, but the cries of people who have suffered.
Standing with them reminds us that war is rarely experienced from a single angle. What feels like aggression to one community may feel like deliverance to another. It is easy to issue denunciations from a safe distance. It is harder to stand beside people who have buried family members, fled violence, or watched others explain why deliverance of their homeland is not worth the rising cost of fuel.
The church should be able to say plainly that tyranny is real, war is tragic, that some uses of force may be necessary; that governments are never absolved from moral scrutiny, and that Christ remains Lord over every nation involved. It must be able to lament without despair and judge without hatred. It must be able to pray for enemies without pretending that enemies do not exist.
Lincoln, or at least the saying widely attributed to Lincoln, gets at something important here: the real question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln refuses the easy assumption that God simply blesses one national cause. Both sides, he said, "read the same Bible and pray to the same God," yet "The Almighty has His own purposes." That is a wiser posture than trying to bring God onto our side. It is also a needed rebuke to the kind of rhetoric that would draft Jesus Christ into the service of American power.
Christian theology allows us to say three things at once, even if none of them sit easily together: war is tragic, it may at times be necessary, and it never has the power to save. Christ does. This is a way of seeing the world truthfully. Put more simply, it keeps us from expecting politics to save us, from mistaking performance for seriousness, and from turning the church into an arm of power. In a time like ours, that may be one of the most practical and conservative moral disciplines Christians can recover.
I (Russell) think back to that high school pep rally with teenagers trying to understand a world larger than their hallways. I think now of church members praying through tears for family far away. And I think the church's task is neither to baptize the sword nor to pretend the sword has no place in a fallen world. It is to stand beneath the cross, telling the truth.