Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad.  Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

I confess that I struggle praying this prayer, on moral and theological grounds. Morally, it seems to me that any realistic assessment of praying for our troops necessarily entails a prayer that sooner or later those who are against our troops will be injured or killed.  Morally, I have become my enemy in such a situation. I have adopted their morality. This is simply wrong, not an option. Put another way, as a Kantian in ethics, I must treat the enemy as an end in herself or himself, never merely as a means. To me that means they are of absolute value, regardless of any danger they may pose to me or my cause.

Yet another way of applying Kant's ethic for me is to understand the categorical imperative as defining fairness as standards (read "prayers" in this context) that apply to all persons, not just to me and mine (the universal law version of the categorical imperative). I argue that this is simply what the Golden Rule demands of me. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. constantly lived out this understanding of the Golden Rule in their conflicts with opponents.

Theologically such a prayer is equally perverse. Bumper-sticker theology is always suspect, but I have one that reads: "God bless the whole world, no exceptions." I must love my enemy in the deepest sense possible. This is entirely independent of how they behave. I argue that I must ask God to bless my enemy. What that blessing might mean I must leave up to God. At that point I am required to let go of my agenda, my understanding of what is best for me or anyone else in the world. Now that requires faith! A deep faith that (potentially) allows God to call my life and commitments into question rather than lining up God to follow my agenda.

John Howard Yoder is one of the best in combining moral and theological discourse. A favorite place where he does this is in the opening Section of his little book, What Would You Do?, a masterpiece of Christian ethics. He suggests that one of the most deeply embedded arguments for self-defense is seemingly altruistic, but dangerously egoistic. When I defend my wife, my child, my country, the root justification for this self-defense is because they are mine!

I remember waking up the first time I read this idea in Yoder. This argument does not suggest 1) that I have the same responsibility to defend the wives, children and nation of Iraq as they are being attacked by my countrymen, nor 2) that I have any special concern for the wives and children of the attackers (be they suicide bombers, etc.). The reason for defending or praying for "our troops" is not that they are my neighbors, but because they are mine! A very simple test for me on this is: am I as concerned about or as aware of the number of Iraqi casualties as I am the number of U.S. casualties? The very fact that the Pentagon is carefully not keeping such records for our enemies is just one religious reason to be troubled by our involvement in Iraq. But it is rare to hear any complaint of this by Christians.

So Yoder concludes, "this becomes an act of selfishness; though covered over with the halo of service to others, it is still self-oriented in its structure." I cite the tragic deaths of Amish children in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as a perfect illustration of what Yoder is getting at here. The grief-stricken Amish families quietly insisted on bringing food and solace to the wife and children of the gunman who carried out those terrible murders.

Yoder goes on to assure us that self-centeredness is not all bad. Self-love is necessary for psychological health and certainly aids in motivating me to take care of what has been entrusted to me. It becomes idolatry when I make self-centeredness the basis of how to respond in any situation. "Christianity relativizes the value of self and survival as it affirms the dignity of the enemy and offender," he writes. "True, the potential victim is my neighbor and thus deserving of my help, but the attacker also at that moment becomes a neighbor."