War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Some know this refrain from Edwin Starr’s song “War” as a contemporary pop culture reference to the 1970s. But decades removed from the Vietnam War for which it was written, the question still hangs in the air with great relevance for today, if not more. For Christians, this raises an urgent question: What does a Christian response to war actually require of us in a moment like this?
Since the U.S. and Israel have started their bombing campaign — named Operation Epic Fury by the U.S. Department of War — many longstanding questions have re-emerged in the public discourse around American responsibility to the rest of the world and what justifies decisions to wage war or pursue ground invasion. (At the time of this writing, U.S. officials describe this as a campaign, not a formal act of war, and have not confirmed a ground invasion.)
Our views on war are often shaped by our lived experience. And as followers of Jesus who live in the United States, we should seek to filter our responses through the grid of the gospel of the Kingdom of God, which is the primary shaper of our identity as both Christians and Americans. That allows us to search for the good — if any — while not neglecting the obvious costs that come with war.
The Costs We Count, and the Costs We Don’t
The justification for war is often framed as a restart for those living under oppressive regimes, and a reset in a region where U.S. allies are strengthened and enemies are weakened. But the good is not so good for those who don’t make it out of bombardment. And the good is extremely delayed for the many who spend years and decades trying to piecemeal their lives together when their homes and homeland are broken.
As a child of the Cold War and a U.S.-born American, I’ve struggled with having luxuries and amenities that were never afforded to those in my parents’ generation. It is more than just survivor’s guilt. It’s grief over the lives of some of my extended family and clan, their futures interrupted both by cruel communist policies and the unprecedented and unrivaled U.S. bombing campaigns over the country of Laos, where my family is from.
My parents lived half of their lives in war, and all three of my older siblings were born amid war. They experienced the bombs, and they saw the costs up close.
In her memoir, Secret Paths Revealed: A Hmong Woman’s Journey from Escaping a Secret War to Becoming a Physician, my sister, Dr. Ia Y. Kue, chronicles our family’s personal experience of bombardment, fleeing home, joining a resistance, living in refugee camps, and then eventually having to start over again in a very foreign country.
Ia recalls a conversation with my dad about the bombardment where he describes it this way,
“The noise became a normal sound to us, as normal as the sound of our hearts beating. You wake up to it and sleep with it in the background. You pray it doesn’t hit where you are at. The bombing had gotten so that people were dying from getting hit with debris in the air.”
Now, as an American, I carry a peculiar and uncomfortable tension knowing these were American ordnances being dropped near my family under Operation Barrel Roll, conducted between 1964 and 1973. The intent was to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which Northern Vietnamese forces were using to advance towards South Vietnam. The decade-long campaign was not successful, and the collateral damage should be calculated both in U.S. dollars and in Lao and Hmong lives — both military and civilian.
The Inheritance of an Empire
What Starr and others during the 1970s saw and felt during the war in Vietnam — but also in Laos, Cambodia, and other proxy locations in Central and South America — was a post-colonial, American pseudo-empire overreaching and trying to maintain global leadership inherited from Great Britain. The “good” of it was to further establish a world order that would prevent a third world war.
It was also during this time that the U.S. worked a deal with Saudi Arabia to buy and sell their oil only in U.S currency, ensuring that the U.S. dollar would become the global standard, commonly referred to as the petrodollar system.
While certainly not the sole reason for the current bombing campaign in the Middle East, the petrodollar system can help us understand what is at stake in the Gulf region, and how Iran is engaging in forms of asymmetrical warfare.
To the U.S., Iran disrupting oil is likely less about our energy supply and perhaps more about fraying its influence and standing in the world.
A vast majority of Americans feel this current conflict mostly by the increasing prices at the gas pumps. But while our concerns should certainly include affordability, we should also think about what happens if a fragile world order, which in the past maintained the East and West distinctions, struggles to stay intact.
In its first two weeks, the bombardment of Middle Eastern nations has resulted in the cost of billions of U.S. dollars, millions of people forcibly displaced, and thousands of casualties — civilians included. And while the justification of this war may eventually be seen as the freeing of oppressed people, the strengthening of U.S. allies and the weakening of enemies, Christians cannot conveniently ignore the eternal impact of war in the name of competing powers.
Jesus Is Lord in the Shadow of Empire
The New Testament phrase “Jesus is Lord” was not a simple theological statement of belief that came to the early Christians through a treatise or even a national election. It was an identity-forming mantra that was divinely revealed, biblically constructed, and politically challenged as the early Christians could no longer reconcile their Roman imperial identity as their first allegiance.
It was a process of negotiation where their ethnic and national identities eventually succumbed — and were seconded — to their Kingdom identity (Matt. 6:33; Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 5:20; Gal. 2:20; Phil. 3:20).
While the early Christians were not bombed by Roman military and tribal religious regimes, Roman imperialism was the air that they breathed. And in time, their worldview was deeply shaped by understanding who they were no longer and to whom they primarily belonged (Matt. 20:15, 22:21).
The fact that Jesus was crucified because King Herod and Pontius Pilate conspired together (Acts 4:27) was religiously and politically significant to the first Christians. And it did not take long to understand that the license to persecute them was not simply a result of religious zeal unchecked, but also a tool and tactic of the empire that was constantly navigating and manipulating smaller and weaker groups as pawns to maintain their world order (John 19:12–16).
In Caesarea (the city of Ceasar), the Apostle Paul was treated as an ethnic and religious minority of Rome, but savvily invoked his Roman citizenship as he asked to stand before an imperial tribunal to seek justice for himself and this Jesus movement (Acts 25:10-12).
Paul was smart enough to do this because his primary identity was not in his ethnic or national identity (Phil. 3). He realized that as a responsible citizen of Rome, he could act on behalf of those suffering under Rome’s policies — which often benefited from setting weaker groups against each other. Paul’s passion was for the gospel to reach the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8; Rom. 15:20-21), and he, along with the early apostles, were painfully aware that they would at times be against the policies and systems of the empire (Acts 17:6-7).
A Different Response in a Time of War
The “good” of things such as war and occupation, if anything, is that it is the occasion in which those who follow Jesus can separate Kingdom from empire — something that should be obvious to us even without war.
But alas, the greatest cosmic battle saw God slain in Christ Jesus — ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven, permeating but also set over the empires of man. And still it took decades for the first followers who witnessed his crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension to understand.
The way that the Kingdom expands is hugely different from the way human empires expand. Often when empires expand, the collateral — and sometimes intended — damage is the creation of widows, orphans, poor, and displaced.
But when the Kingdom expands, it is the caring for the least of these that makes good out of what should probably never be labeled good unto itself.
For those who are of the way of the Kingdom, it is time again for us to rise to the occasion, believing Jesus the Messiah is Lord, and committing to the gospel of peace which obligates us to action that facilitates healing and salvation for the nations.
The evil of war is much more obvious — death, displacement, destruction, and disaster. And the reality is that those are the things that are upon us right now.
Whether this current campaign in the Middle East escalates or levels out, a tremendous need has arisen once again, and those who identify with the Kingdom that is already here but not yet fully are called to be a faithful witness of it by offering relief and repair, and by being a prophetic voice to those in power on behalf of the ever increasing numbers of widows, orphans, poor, and displaced.
Daniel Yang serves as the Senior Director of Global Mission and Church Movements at World Relief. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Church Multiplication Institute at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. Daniel has been a pastor, church planter, engineer, and technology consultant. He has planted churches in Detroit, Dallas, Toronto, and Chicago, either as the lead planter or through recruiting, training, assessing, and mentoring church planters. Daniel is a sought-after conference speaker, missional strategist, consultant, and co-author of Inalienable: How Marginalized Kingdom Voices Can Help Save the American Church (InterVarsity, May 2022) and Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders (Zondervan, October 2024). Daniel is a CSA pundit.
