Loving Our Enemies

As anti-war Christians, we must not make the mistakes of many of the Vietnam-era protesters. To love our enemies means not to undermine their moral fervor. We must respect the idealism of those who justify war by using an appeal to bringing democracy and freedom to the world. There is a world of difference between showing the means to the end to be morally flawed and casting aspersions on the ideal itself. The mistake of the Vietnam protests was to promote a nihilistic cynicism that brought all ideals into question. Let us take the opposite path this time and give honor to what is real in the idealism of our opponents, while doing everything possible to magnify the dissonance between those ideals and the means they use to carry them out.