Shortly after her son returned from his first tour in Iraq in the autumn of 2005, the Rev. Nancy McHugh got a phone call while she was reading in bed at her suburban New Jersey home. On the other end of the line was her son, Erik Hamilton. He was calling from Camp Lejeune, his Marine base in North Carolina. He was asking his mother to pray for him.
For McHugh, a pastor in the progressive Protestant denomination of the United Church of Christ, there was no question of praying. Prayer is part of any minister's personal calling and professional vocation. Of course she would pray for Erik.
Then she asked what she was praying for. Erik was about to enter a weekend-long test, known as an indoc, Marine lingo for indoctrination. How well he did would determine whether he would get into the training school he wanted to attend. What school was that, McHugh asked. Erik's answer sent his mother into a tailspin of spiritual confusion and maternal worry. Her 20-year-old boy wanted to become a Marine scout sniper.
McHugh is living out two of the most polarizing debates rankling our country today: the war in Iraq versus the role of religion in our public lives and political discourse. The intersection of religion and politics is nothing new in the United States; it has been part of our national dialogue since the Pilgrims established New England towns where congregational churches doubled as public meeting halls. But President Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed how Americans approach this issue, and the most vocal support for a religious-political dialogue in recent years has come from the right. Spurred by the tragic catastrophe of the prolonged Iraq War, however, a growing number of progressive American Christians like McHugh and the 1.4 million members of the United Church of Christ are starting to affirm that religious principles are inseparable from political stances.
The political ends and religious means these Christians support, though, are nothing like the crusade to "rid the world of evil" that President Bush announced in a service at the National Cathedral days after the terrorist attacks. Without a doubt, the president's war policy has been backed most loudly and definitively by fundamentalist Christians: A survey taken by a branch of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq showed that 69 percent of evangelical Christians favored military action against Saddam Hussein, 10 percentage points higher than the U.S. population as a whole. But almost all official American church bodies -- including more than 30 denominations that belong to the National Council of Churches -- have come out against the war. And now, McHugh's church has launched a campaign to sound the Christian opposition to this war through the halls of Congress. Like countless other Christian leaders, McHugh opposes the war in Iraq, and her dissent is steeped in Jesus' teachings of peace and justice. The love she feels for her son Erik is boundless. But since receiving that phone call from her son nearly two years ago, McHugh, 49, has found her professional and maternal roles challenging each other and herself.
"I had already said, 'Absolutely I will pray for you,'" she recalled recently. "And I was thrilled that he was turning to faith for strength and courage."
McHugh's husband and Erik's stepfather, Michael McHugh, is a retired Marine. He served for 27 years, and while he believes in God and prayer, the 51-year-old readily admits that when it came time for military operations, he turned off religion and turned on duty. On the night of Erik's phone call, Michael realized a similar separation was impossible for his wife.
"She said, 'How do I do that? How do I pray for my son to be a trained killer?'" Michael remembered. He saw clearly for the first time the profundity of his wife's dilemma. "She really believes this God stuff. It's who she is," said the lean, clean-shaven former sergeant major, as he lounged in a Marine Corps folding chair outside the parsonage of Nancy McHugh's parish, the Community Church of Cedar Grove, 20 miles west of New York City.
McHugh, a soft-spoken, lanky woman with gray-flecked chestnut hair and warm brown eyes, said she and Michael discussed her new spiritual challenge that night. "I don't usually pray for specifics, like give me this or give me that," she said, and explained that she eventually decided to pray that "God would be present with [Erik] and that God would keep him safe and lead him in whatever his duties were."
Erik passed the indoc that weekend and returned to Iraq last summer as part of a scout sniper platoon, manning the radio and navigating for the team of five as they made their way toward targets in the Anbar province. And while McHugh's son, now 22 and a self-proclaimed "adrenaline junkie" who loves his job, has made it safely back from a second tour in Iraq, this mother of two and stepmother of three has spent the last two years wrestling with the theology she preaches, which contradicts her son's vocation.
In her church office, McHugh leaned forward in her computer chair as she explained why for her, Erik being a sniper is different than him just being a Marine. "There's no mistake. It's not personal as far as he is concerned, but it seems more personal. It's intentional. It's specific," she said.
One wall in McHugh's office is covered, floor to ceiling, with books. The other walls are paneled with wood, the carpet is teal and the room smells as all churches do -- of old pages in old books. Some of those books, including a few Bibles, are strewn about her desk and coffee table. There is a timeless quality here, as though, except for the computer, the office might have looked similar 40 years ago. Above that computer, a sheet of paper reads simply, "Breathe Deep, Seek Peace." Talk about timeless. Jesus preached peace more than 2,000 years ago.
Those who study the teachings of Jesus academically couldn't agree more: Seeking peace and loving one's enemies are central tenets of the religion. "You can't take the Sermon on the Mount seriously and not be involved in peace movements," Gary Dorrien, a social ethics professor at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, wrote in an e-mail. He referred to the famous section in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus flips the reigning social order on its head and tells the crowds that the meek and those who work for peace -- rather than the powerful and violent -- are blessed by God.
And while all Christians agree that love and peace are key, many concede that in a modern world, with competing political and economic interests, total pacifism is not realistic. That's why several denominations endorse a principle of "just war." First introduced by St. Augustine in the fifth century, the theory, as evolved over time, lays out criteria that must be met before a war can be considered just. In a sermon weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the president of Chicago Theological Seminary, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, quoted St. Augustine to explain the concept: If "the reason for undertaking war is to restore human affairs to peace," Christian leaders can accept the necessary evil and support the political endeavor. Still, military operations must be the last resort.
Though she could not always articulate why, McHugh has been opposed to war since she was a child growing up in Southern California. Her brother, 10 years her elder, signed up to fight in Vietnam the summer before he was to head to college. McHugh remembers living in constant anxiety, fearing the phone's ring. She remembers gleaning from her mother and father, who was an American Baptist minister, that regardless of her brother's service, war was wrong. Recalling her earliest days of political consciousness, McHugh said, "Our position was that violence was never right. That might is not the way, because the Gospel message is pretty clear."
It's a message she finds herself preaching often these days. In a service marking the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, McHugh joined other clergy from northern New Jersey United Churches of Christ. The gathering was not an anti-war protest, but a vigil. "In the time of Jesus' ministry, he could not stop the politics of his enemies in Jerusalem, but he also did not let them stop him," McHugh preached. "We are called to do the same -- to work for justice, to forgive those we do not understand and sometimes hate, to extend our love where there is none and to bring light into darkness."
Still, McHugh knows that she walks a fine line when it comes to preaching sermons with political messages. "The Gospel calls us to speak up against injustice and to be the voice against oppressive structures and greed and power. But it's incredibly important not to be partisan," she said. Legally, that's because as nonprofit institutions, churches are barred from entering the partisan fray. Gut reactions count, too, and just as many Americans don't want our elected officials telling us what to believe in, most churchgoers don't want their ministers telling them how to vote.
But that doesn't stop church leaders from telling members of Congress how to vote. In the 2006 midterm election, 53 percent of voters surveyed by the Pew Research Center named the war in Iraq as the most important issue affecting how they cast their ballots. On this question, white mainline Protestants -- precisely the folks who fill many of the pews in the United Church of Christ -- mirrored the national average. According to the Rev. M. Linda Jaramillo, the executive minister of the United Church of Christ's division of justice and witness ministries, that gives church groups like hers just as much right as any other organization to lobby legislators around the Iraq war. "That is our obligation as members of society and members of God's kingdom," Jaramillo said from her office in Cleveland.
To that end, the United Church of Christ is currently asking members of its congregations around the country to sign a letter opposing the war in Iraq. Local churches read the letter during their services on Sept. 16, the Sunday closest to the International Day of Peace. By World Communion on Sunday, Oct. 7, church officials plan to have at least 100,000 signatures. They will then head to Washington to show legislators that God-loving Americans are opposed to this war. Jaramillo said a large group of churchgoers raising the issue would likely hold a unique moral authority.
Joanna Swanger, the director of the peace and global studies program at Indiana's Earlham College, agrees. In the black-and-white world of secular versus conservative that the mainstream media perpetuates, anti-war protests by secular groups such as anarchists or labor unions are often "greeted by the Right with a simple dismissive yawn," Swanger said in an e-mail. "If a Christian group speaks out against the war, however, this is unexpected, given the current political climate, in which it has been driven home that 'Christian' equates with 'socially conservative.' A Christian group swimming upstream in this way potentially has more power because it has caught people unawares."
In its early and decisive support of the civil- and gay- rights movements, the United Church of Christ has shown for decades that it is not afraid to swim upstream. The last two years have challenged McHugh to adopt a similar fearless commitment to her faith. These years have also heightened her awareness of the joys and pains of motherhood. McHugh's eyes fill with tears when she recalls having Erik home for a week after his second Iraq tour. "He wanted to wrap his arms around people...," she said, her voice trailing off.
Erik has now completed the scout sniper school and for the rest of his life will be able to say he is a Marine sniper. His unit deploys to Iraq for the third time in as many years in November. Erik's first term is up in January, and he's considering re-enlisting because he loves the intensity and responsibility of his job. If he does sign up for another four years, he now knows he won't have to ask his mom to pray for him.
"When he was overseas, I told him pretty regularly about the number of people who were praying for him," McHugh said. "Many of my colleagues had him on their prayer lists, said his name on Sunday mornings. Gosh, I can't imagine anything more powerful than that."
