EVEN WITH THE START of the war to unseat Saddam Hussein, religious leaders continue to oppose the use of force as unnecessary and unjust. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, laments the "failures of heart, mind and will that led to this war." The Church World Service, an association of mostly Protestant churches and relief agencies, sees only "horrendous humanitarian consequences" ahead.

The criticism carries a familiar ring. Liberal Protestants led the peace movement just prior to World War II--and sustained it even after the German blitzkrieg in Europe, when all rational hope of negotiations had collapsed. Finding endless reasons to oppose a military response, they became in effect apologists for Nazi aggression. And yet, their voices move among us still, animating marches, sermons, and proclamations. They almost make us forget that most of the churchmen of that earlier generation finally discarded their "sentimental illusions" about taming a tyrant.

Indeed, the most grievous flaw of the 1930s peace movement was its blindness to the gulf separating totalitarian regimes from Western democracies. War critics assumed the European conflict was merely a collision of selfish national interests. From 1938 to 1941, American Protestant groups issued no less than 50 statements about how to achieve a just and durable peace. But barely a handful argued that the defeat of Nazism was essential to international justice.

John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister in New York, decried the "fundamentally immoral clash of imperialisms" at work again in Europe. "If America goes into the war," he

Many Protestant ministers, in fact, saw little difference between the German Reich and Anglo-American democracy; they indulged in the same self-loathing critique that energizes many protesters now. "If evil is today rampant, this has a cause," explained the Federal Council of Churches in a 1940 statement. "Through our action or non-action we exerted a profound influence on the course of world events. That course has generated widespread unrest, great violence and immense disaster." Rev. Holmes, also head of the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed many ministers when he called Hitler "the veritable incarnation of our nationalistic, capitalistic and militaristic era." A German victory, he said, should be viewed as "the punishment for our transgressions."

Albert Palmer, a leader in the United Church of Christ, rejected condemnation of Hitler as "short-circuited, adolescent hatred of individual leaders." Terrible as the war in France had been, he reasoned in June 1940, "would not the Allies have done much the same thing in Germany if they had got there first?" Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the influential Christian Century magazine, likewise saw no important distinction between the warring factions. "It is not a war to preserve civilization!" he exclaimed. "It is the war itself that is destroying civilization--destroying it increasingly with each day that the war lasts, and destroying it definitively if it lasts to the point of victory, no matter which side wins." (Emphasis added.)