I have often prayed for God to bless our troops, to protect them, and to give them victory. But in recent years, a thought has been tickling the back of my head that when we pray for God to give us victory, there is also an unspoken prayer being said, namely, that God would help us defeat our enemies.
But is this really what we want to pray?
I am not so sure.
I am proud to be an American. I support and pray for our troops. I think the people of our military are some of the best, most honorable, disciplined, noble, and heroic people alive.
But sometimes I wonder… if they are the best, why are we sending them off to kill and be killed? Is war a modern form of human sacrifice where we try to appease the gods of justice, liberty, and freedom by sacrificing our brightest and best to their cause? Is it really true that the only way to obtain liberty and justice for all is by killing other people? You know how ludicrous that sounds?
I have no firm answers. So it was interesting for me to recently discover an by Mark Twain called “The War Prayer.” I found it at Experimental Theology, the blog of Richard Beck. Here is the post and the :
Below is the full text of “The War Prayer” by Mark Twain. It was published posthumously in Harper’s Monthly in 1916, six years after Twain’s death.
Twain delayed publication during his lifetime because, as he said to his publisher, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.”
The War Prayer
by Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
