No “holy” wars!
I appreciated Bill Donahue’s letter (April 25) that poked fun at Pete Hegseth and his Christian Nationalist cohorts who claim to be fighting a holy war in the name of Christ. The headline for his letter was “Onward Christian Soldiers?” and it would not surprise me if Secretary Hegseth included that old hymn in the prayer services he so inappropriately sponsors at the Pentagon. But I wonder if Mr. Hegseth knows the origin of the hymn?
In 1865, an Anglican priest in Yorkshire county was tasked with getting a group of rambunctious children to a Sunday School rally in a neighboring village. He wanted them to sing something as they marched, so he composed a hymn for the occasion. In my opinion, the key word in that hymn is the word “as”—“Onward Christian soldiers, marching AS to war….” With his metaphor comparing children hiking down a country road to soldiers marching, the hymn writer had no intent to send people into battle. He just wanted to get those kids safely to the nearby village. (Note: the author of the hymn did not say, “…marching OFF to war.”) It’s a good song to sing if one wants to get a bunch of unruly children to walk together, but it is not a song meant to justify the kind of childish lethality and cruelty that seem to warm Mr. Hegseth’s heart. The fact that he wants to put a Christian label on his perfidy is another indication of how far away he and his compatriots are from the teachings of Jesus. How tragic.