My parents rarely spoke about the war. But they carried it.
It was there in the pauses. In the way certain news images could change the atmosphere in a room. In the silence that followed, there were questions about childhood. In the grief that did not announce itself but lingered just under the surface, like a wound that had closed without ever truly healing. The Korean War was not, for my family, a historical event tucked neatly into a textbook chapter. It was an inheritance. It shaped memory and identity. It lived in the body before it ever became language.
For many in the Korean diaspora, the war often called “forgotten” has never been forgotten at all. It separated families, destroyed villages and left millions dead, most of them civilians. Historians estimate that nearly 5 million people died during the Korean War, a devastating toll that continues to shape Korean and diasporic memory, according to Bruce Cumings, author of the 2010 book The Korean War: A History. The war remade the Korean Peninsula through devastation and division, and it remade countless lives through displacement and trauma. It also marked an early, consequential chapter in the global expansion of American military power during the Cold War.
What my parents carried with them was not only private pain, but the afterlife of a larger political story — one in which war was justified using the language of freedom, democracy and security, even as it left profound human ruin in its wake.
That tension remains with us still. In the U.S., we rarely discuss militarism as an everyday moral and theological problem. We treat war as episodic, something that happens “over there,” in conflicts that have names, dates and official endings. But militarism is not only about war. It is a way of organizing national life. It is a system of values, habits, priorities and assumptions that teaches us to trust domination and fear more than mutuality, justice and repair.
And for Christians – especially for those of us formed by the Gospel of the Prince of Peace – that should trouble us deeply.
The Christian response to militarism
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has not been silent on these issues. Over decades, general assemblies have spoken to peacemaking, gun violence, human rights, drone warfare, divestment and the disproportionate effects of militarism on communities around the world. In 2010, the denomination launched a six-year peace discernment process, producing studies and resources to help congregations grapple with the realities of modern warfare and Christian witness in a changing global landscape. This long record matters. It reminds us that peacemaking is not a niche concern for a few activists in the church. It is part of our ecclesial and theological inheritance.
Still, many congregations struggle to name militarism clearly. That is partly because the term can feel abstract or ideological. In reality, militarism becomes clear once we learn to recognize it. It is the elevation of military logic – hierarchy, domination, discipline, threat, destruction – into a governing imagination for society. It appears not only in warmaking abroad but in policing at home, in bloated defense budgets, in the language of enemies and targets, in the suspicion of dissent, in the glorification of redemptive violence and in a public culture that too often confuses peace with control.
Jesus names a different way.
The gospels do not present peace as passive sentimentality. Nor do they present nonviolence as avoidance, niceness or capitulation. The peace of Christ is active, disruptive and costly.
As he approaches Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel, he weeps over the city. He cries, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” (19:42). That line lands differently when we read it in a militarized society. We, too, often fail to recognize the things that make for peace. We mistake strength for safety. We mistake violence for victory. We mistake domination for order. We inherit the logic of empire and call it common sense.
But the Christian story began under occupation. Jesus was born into a world structured by imperial force. Roman peace –the Pax Romana – was not peace as reconciliation or mutual flourishing. It was peace maintained through conquest, terror and submission. The cross itself was an instrument of state violence, a warning to anyone who threatened the established order. Yet Jesus did not answer violence with violence. He healed, taught, fed, blessed and refused the sword. He told Peter to put it away. He commanded love of the enemy. He blessed the peacemakers.
The gospels do not present peace as passive sentimentality. Nor do they present nonviolence as avoidance, niceness or capitulation. The peace of Christ is active, disruptive and costly. It exposes the false peace of empire. It refuses the lie that security can be built on the suffering of others. It insists that justice, dignity and right relationship are not secondary to peace; they are its conditions.
This contrast is one reason militarism is not only a political concern but a theological one. It shapes the moral imagination. It forms people to believe that violence is normal, necessary, even salvific. It trains us to see some lives as grievable and others as expendable. It teaches us to interpret neighbors as threats and borders as sacred. It rewards hardness and calls it realism.
Yet Jesus did not answer violence with violence. He healed, taught, fed, blessed and refused the sword. He told Peter to put it away. He commanded love of the enemy. He blessed the peacemakers.
In this sense, militarism functions almost liturgically. It has its rituals, symbols, saints, sacred stories and unquestioned loyalties. It tells us what to fear, whom to honor, what to sacrifice and whose suffering must remain invisible for the system to keep working.
And the church is not immune.
Sometimes we participate in militarized culture in subconscious ways. As historian Andrew Bacevich argues in his 2013 book The New American Militarism, militarism in the U.S. is not simply a matter of defense policy — it is a cultural formation that shapes national identity, priorities and imagination. Patriotic worship services can slide into the sanctification of national power. Flags in sanctuaries can carry meanings that go unexamined. Prayers for troops, while often sincere and compassionate, can remain disconnected from lament for civilians, from critique of warmaking, or from attention to the moral injuries borne by veterans themselves. We honor service – and there are ways to do that faithfully – but too easily we stop short of asking what kind of nation continually requires many to bear the costs of war.
An alternative to duality
Sam Kim, associate presbyter of San Francisco and a 1.5-generation Korean American pastor, explains:
“As a descendant of a refugee from North Korea during the Korean War, dualism rooted itself deep in my worldview for a very long time. Everything was either my side or the enemy. The enemy is always evil, while we are righteous — God is always on my side. It has been an intergenerational trauma and propaganda. It took a generation in my family to deconstruct it and reconstruct a healthy worldview.”
The church is most faithful not when it blesses the sword, but when it lays it down.
Kim’s reflection names not only a personal inheritance but a wider formation shaped by fear, division and survival. It is precisely here that theology must speak — not as abstraction, but as a way to unlearn what violence has taught us.
A Presbyterian audience knows, or should know, that our tradition offers resources for deeper discernment. Reformed theology is not uniformly pacifist, but it does insist that no nation, no ruler and no military power is ultimate. If God is sovereign, then the claims of empire are relativized. If Christ is our peace, then walls of hostility cannot be the final architecture of human community.
If every person bears the image of God, then rendering whole populations as collateral damage is not merely unfortunate — it is a theological obscenity.
The U.S. remains the most militarized nation in the world, with a defense budget that dwarfs spending on diplomacy and consistently outpaces investment in housing, education, health and environmental care.
The church’s peacemaking witness has also been renewed by communities who understood nonviolence not as an abstraction but as survival and discipleship. The Black freedom struggle in the U.S. offered one of the clearest modern embodiments of Christian nonviolent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others understood that nonviolence is not only a political method. It is a theological commitment, rooted in the conviction that hatred cannot drive out hatred, that domination cannot heal domination and that the goal is not to humiliate the enemy but to create beloved community. Across the globe, Christians resisting apartheid, dictatorship, occupation and state terror have borne similar witness.
The church is most faithful not when it blesses the sword, but when it lays it down.
The myriad wounds of militarism
The church’s witness becomes especially urgent when we consider how militarism reaches far beyond conventional war. The U.S. remains the most militarized nation in the world, with a defense budget that dwarfs spending on diplomacy and consistently outpaces investment in housing, education, health and environmental care. This spending is not simply a matter of line items. Budgets are moral documents. They tell us what kind of future we are funding.
Militarism also returns home. The militarization of policing has made this visible in devastating ways. Surplus military equipment flows into local police departments, and tactics developed for war migrate into ordinary civic life. Black and brown communities, in particular, experience militarism not as theory but as daily reality. When neighborhoods are treated as hostile territory and protesters are met like enemy combatants, the line between foreign war and domestic control grows frighteningly thin – a connection the PC(USA) explicitly named in its 2010 General Assembly report on gun violence, which links systemic violence, public policy and the church’s moral responsibility.
One of the most damaging features of American militarism is its rhythm of justification and forgetting. We mobilize with urgency, narrate war in grand moral terms, accept staggering violence as an unfortunate necessity — and then move on, often without sustained public reckoning for what has been destroyed or who continues to suffer.
Militarism has an economic dimension as well. For many young people – especially those from under-resourced communities – military service is presented as one of the few viable paths to education, healthcare, stability or mobility. What is often called “economic conscription” is not always experienced as a formal coercion. It is a constrained choice. When a society neglects people and then offers the military as one primary ladder out of precariousness, we should not call that freedom without qualification.
Militarism wounds through gender, too. Military institutions have long been shaped by patriarchy, rigid gender norms and systems that reward aggression while punishing vulnerability. Sexual harassment and assault within military culture are not incidental failures but symptoms of deeper formations of power. The same logic that normalizes dominance on the battlefield often reverberates in intimate and institutional life.
And then there is the environmental cost. War and military infrastructure devastate land, air and water. Communities near bases and testing grounds know this intimately. So do places like Okinawa, Japan, and South Korea, where the long-standing presence of U.S. bases has brought political tension, environmental degradation and deep questions about sovereignty and dependency. The story of militarism is always also a story about land, contamination, extraction and who is expected to bear those burdens.
For Korean Americans, these questions are not theoretical. The war did not end with a peace treaty. The peninsula remains divided. Families remain separated. The U.S. military presence remains central to the shape of life in South Korea and to the region’s geopolitical imagination. Protection and domination, alliance and dependency, security and injury remain entangled. To speak honestly about this as a Christian is not to deny complexity. It is to refuse amnesia.
And memory matters.
One of the most damaging features of American militarism is its rhythm of justification and forgetting. We mobilize with urgency, narrate war in grand moral terms, accept staggering violence as an unfortunate necessity — and then move on, often without sustained public reckoning for what has been destroyed or who continues to suffer.
But Christian faith is a tradition of dangerous remembering. We gather around a table of remembrance. We proclaim a crucified Messiah whose wounds remain visible after resurrection. We do not confess faith in a gospel of strategic forgetting.
That, perhaps, is one of the church’s most necessary callings in this moment: to remember differently, to see differently and therefore to live differently.
What might that calling look like for Presbyterians?
It may begin with truth-telling. Congregations can study the church’s own peacemaking policies and ask whether they have any real consequence for budgets, worship, education or public witness. Churches can create space to hear from veterans, military families, chaplains, conscientious objectors, refugees and those who live with the long aftermath of war. They can examine how patriotism functions liturgically in their sanctuaries and whether national belonging has eclipsed baptismal identity.
It may also mean grieving more honestly. Not only for soldiers, but for civilians. Not only for our “side,” but for all those whose lives are shattered by war. Not only for dramatic acts of violence, but for the quieter ways militarism deforms communities over time — through fear, surveillance, recruitment, pollution, policing and the normalization of disposable lives.
And it may mean practicing peace in concrete ways. Supporting restorative justice efforts. Advocating for budgets that invest in life rather than death. Teaching children that strength is not cruelty, and courage is not domination. Refusing easy enemy-making. Marking national holidays with lament as well as gratitude. Asking, in every sphere of church life, whether we are being formed in the way of Christ or in the habits of empire.
This work is not simple. Peacemaking never is. It is easier to bless abstraction than to reckon with history. Easier to praise peace than to confront the systems that make peace impossible. Easier to speak of security than to ask whose security is being purchased, and at whose expense.
But Jesus does not bless the efficient or the triumphant. He blesses the peacemakers.
When Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continue to endure bombardment and displacement, when Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on and the widening war in Iran has pushed the Middle East into yet another dangerous escalation by the U.S., the church cannot speak about peacemaking as an abstraction.
In recent years, some Presbyterian communities have begun to name this tension more directly. The Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, a longstanding renewal movement within the denomination, has invited congregations to consider becoming “peace churches”: communities that make an explicit, public commitment to the work of nonviolence. Rather than treating peacemaking as one ministry among many, the peace church model calls congregations to integrate it into every aspect of their life together: worship, education, budgeting and public witness. This integration includes practices such as engaging in antiracism work, supporting veterans and survivors of violence, advocating for reductions in military spending, and cultivating conflict transformation skills within the congregation itself. The goal is not ideological purity, but formation: a reshaping of the church’s imagination so that peace is not peripheral but central to what it means to follow Christ in a militarized world.
My parents’ silence taught me that war does not end when the headlines do. It settles into families. It migrates across oceans. It inhabits food, prayer, memory and fear. It leaves marks that can be difficult to name but impossible to erase. And perhaps that is why the church must resist every temptation to speak lightly about violence. We are dealing not with abstractions but with bodies, homes and histories.
Matthew 25, calls us to look for Christ among the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned. In a militarized world, those are often the very people whom empire trains us not to see — the displaced civilian, the detained migrant, the traumatized veteran, the overpoliced neighbor, the family living in the aftershocks of a war most Americans have forgotten. But Christ is there. “Here I am,” he says.
To follow Christ in a militarized world is to trust that another way is not only possible but is already unfolding – quietly, persistently – wherever people choose mercy over domination and love over fear.
