The Problem with Praying for Soldiers

March 9, 2011

So here’s a puzzle I’ve been trying to untangle for a few years now: praying for soldiers.

It’s not an easy thing, though people make sound as if it were with flip reminders to Pray for Our Troops! What does this mean for me as a citizen of two kingdoms—one of which is eternal and good, the other being oh-so-temporary and not all that good? How should I pray for “our” troops. Safety? Victory? The punishment of evil?

Since many of you are doubtless curious what the problem I could have with praying for the men and women who are willing to lay down their lives for our liberties, I’ll talk about sporting events instead. Specifically high school sports. Trust me, it’ll tie in nicely to why (for me) praying for soldiers is an uncomfortable activity.

As innocuous as it sounds when a high school student asks for prayer for his big football game on Friday, there are some ethical questions that are bound up in the whole thing. And I’m not just talking about the matter of Should we pray for trivialities? See, when I pray that your team would win Friday’s game, I am praying that the other team would lose. I am praying that God would cause their players to fail. I am praying that God would deliver to them disappointment. And depending on the importance of the game, I am praying even that God would put their players into a position that could lead them as individuals into shame, embarrassment, or depression. I am praying that God would hinder their appearance before men so that mine (and those with whom I’ve been associated via the single arbitrary commonality of a shared school institution) might be bolstered.

These things are, in my opinion, not good things to be praying for. They are self-serving and negligent of the feelings and lives of others. And when I say “these things” here, I really just mean one thing: praying for victory. And while the cost of victory or loss in Friday’s big game is pretty paltry in the scheme of what’s important in Real Life, I hope you can apprehend that there is a tangible ethical dilemma in praying for one team’s victory over another.

Now take that small kind of difficulty and magnify it to apply to something as deeply consequential as warfare.

If I pray for our soldiers (not that they are mine, but they act on behalf of the nation to which I hold citizenship—another arbitrary association), for what am I to pray? Victory, while sounding nice, carries with it a lot of implications. The foremost of these is death.

Our soldiers (any soldiers, actually), when victorious, end the lives of men, women, children. That could be my grandma lying under some rubble over there. That could be your three-month-old niece whose legs were torn off in her crib when a shell exploded through her family’s rooftop. That could be my fiancee whose beautiful face is scarred and disfigured because she was collaterally damaged when an incendiary device decided to carve her beauty into a melted visage of revulsion.

When I pray to God that our soldiers would fight well and survive to fight well again and defeat their opposition (“enemy” is rarely appropriate these days), I’m not just praying that some high school kids would go home Friday night dejected or that another group would have their egos stoked. Instead, when we pray for victory, we’re simultaneously praying that grandmothers, fathers, children, schoolteachers, doctors, and expectant mothers would be killed. Because that is the necessary price of victory. When we are praying for our soldiers’ victory against our nation’s chosen target, we are praying that uncountable masses would have their every worldly possession destroyed. When we pray for victory, we are praying for death, dismemberment, maiming, psychological trauma, homelessness, burglary, and the horrible chaos that must result.

When we pray that our soldiers would prevail and return home safely, we are praying for evil to come to pass. So how then are we to pray for our soldiers?

I find myself troubled even praying for their safety—since their safety will merely provide further opportunity for them to commit greater horrors against their opponents. Prayer that our soldiers would punish evil is a sword that cuts in a bloody handful of ways. If the war our leaders have sent them to fight in is an evil or unjust war, then in praying for the punishment of evil, am I not praying that our own soldiers would be cut down that justice might prevail? Rape, as has been increasingly reported, is a growing concern in our own military endeavors; a prayer for justice might then exclude our own soldiers from coming home at all. There are so many abstractions to the things we ask that we should ask them carefully.

Negligence can be as criminal as overt action. So what do I, as someone for whom these concerns are paramount, pray for?

I pray for peace. I pray for the safety of soldiers on both sides of a conflict (“our” soldiers and “theirs”). I pray for swift and diplomatic resolution to conflict. I pray that our soldiers would not have blood on their hands. I pray the same for their soldiers. I pray for the preservation of the lives, livelihoods, and properties of the civilians our soldiers would trample on the way to their goal. I pray that soldiers would seek forgiveness for the lives they take, either out of ignorance or out of knowledge. I pray the haunting trauma that such bloody hands incur would not destroy families at home. I pray that soldiers in all the world would quickly find their way into lives that are not focused around military endeavors. I pray for the leaders who would so abuse the lives of others, that they would recognize the lives of others as precious. I pray for empathy. I pray for peace.

Originally published October 15, 2009

CATEGORIES: Christian ethics / Christianity / Featured