I weekly receive letters from Christians who are looking for my perspective on various wars — past, present, and future. My simple answer is this: In the context of our nation, for a war to be legitimate, it must meet the biblical standard that a just war is a defensive war, and it must meet the Constitutional standard which requires a formal declaration of war by Congress. If we fail to meet either of these standards then we as a nation are acting like covenant breakers and should not presume on the good favor of the Lord over our efforts.

Not only must wars be biblical in their inception, but they must be fought biblically. War is not a justification for setting aside the moral laws of God. For example, we are not free to explicitly target non-combatants, to mutilate or torture opponents, (who like us are made in the image of God), or to use women in combat, (either because we have a shortage of men, or for reasons of political correctness.)

The two men who had the greatest negative influence overthrowing biblical principles of just war in American history, and whose behavior set the stage for 20th century Americans to set aside the doctrine of “women and children first,” were John Brown and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Both men introduced forms of terrorism to America, though one had an official government sanction. Brown terrorized and shot men, women, and children with whom he disagreed. He was subsidized and lionized for his murders by the Northern Unitarian media elite known as the Secret Six, who believed killing little children was a necessary cost to defeating slavery.

Sherman also waged wars on women and children, displacing tens of thousands, depriving them of food by burning their crops to the ground, pillaging the private property of the women in the many communities, and deliberately seeking to break their spirit by utterly laying waste to their ancestral homes, churches, and communities. His cruelties were epic and his strategies tantamount to cultural genocide. I was reminded of him while driving through Atlanta yesterday, one of the few major Eastern cities in America of which there is no surviving legacies from its pre-Civil War history (which in the case of Atlanta was nearly two centuries old). Sherman burnt to the ground everything, including the dozens and dozens of church buildings (except two being used by his troops) with the goal that the people would not even be able to worship their God.