Discovering Anglican Peace in Wartime
Prayer as kingdom citizenship, pastoral care as moral witness
When faced with war between nations, what are we to think and pray about before we act? In wartime, the Anglican tradition, and thus the Episcopalian tradition, prays and works for peace by practicing “kingdom citizenship” sacramentally, interceding for enemies, protecting conscience, tending the wounded (including soldiers), and holding rulers accountable so that any “peace” pursued by the nations is tested against the peace of Christ.
This claim assumes two things that Anglican sources repeatedly insist upon. First, the Church’s mission is intrinsically reconciling: the prayer book catechism defines the Church’s mission as restoring people “to unity with God and each other in Christ,” pursued as the Church “promotes justice, peace, and love” (Book of Common Prayer, 2006). Second, wartime prayer is not escapism but formation. Prayer in a time of war is training Christians to resist the soul-shrinking logic of conflict (Alexander, 2025).
Within that frame, “supporting the men and women in the armed forces” is neither propaganda nor silence. It is a demanding pastoral practice: praying for those who bear lethal responsibility, caring for moral injury and trauma, and refusing to let the Church’s intercession be captured by the myth that “God is automatically on our side.” In Citizen, I named the pastoral necessity plainly: soldiers are not “bad people,” and the Church should pray for them and care for them, including providing spiritual and psychological support. This comes with a warning that wartime support can quickly mutate into a theological endorsement of violence (Doyle, 2019).
1) Prayer that refuses war’s catechism: peace among nations, reconciliation with enemies
Anglican liturgy does not merely request “victory” or “success.” It places war inside a larger moral and spiritual horizon: God’s final end is a just peace.
After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” (Revelation 7:9-12)
Our prayer book’s collects explicitly bind peace to righteousness and reconciliation, asking God to guide nations into justice and truth and to “enable us all to stand reconciled” (Book of Common Prayer, 2006). In other words, Anglican prayer tradition refuses to let the enemy become subhuman. It makes Christians practice, week after week, the hardest commandment in wartime: love of enemy, renunciation of revenge, and the possibility, however remote, of restored communion.
This is where Anglican practice becomes apologetic in the deepest sense: the Church’s common prayer embodies a counter-story. Through an Embodied Apologetics I insist that the Church’s worship and shared life are themselves a public witness, “a counter-narrative” enacted through liturgy, sacrament, and communal ethics (Doyle, 2024). In wartime, that counter-narrative is not sentimental; it is costly. To pray for enemies while grieving one’s dead is to let the Gospel interrogate tribal loyalty at its roots.
2) Anglican moral reasoning in war: just war, pacifist witness, and “peace aims”
Historically, Anglicans have not reduced the ethics of war to a single slogan. Modern Anglican debates (especially in the 1930s–40s) drew on multiple Christian ethical traditions: pacifism, just war reasoning, holy war imagery (sometimes problematically), and Christian realism (Alexander, 2025). The existence of these competing strands is not mere confusion. It reflects a pastoral and political reality: Christians must make judgments under conditions of uncertainty, fear, propaganda, and genuine evil.
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) is considered the first to comprehensively think through and formulate the foundations of Christian just war theory. He argued that while war is unwanted, it could be justified. We might say that it was because Christians are so hard-hearted that we have continued to allow war. Yet, I like Stanley Hauerwas believe we cannot bless war of anykind.
Just war reasoning (in its best form) does not glorify violence; it restricts it, treating war as morally exceptional, judged by cause, intention, last resort, proportionality, and the conduct of hostilities, with an eye toward a peace that can actually be lived (Alexander, 2025). Anglican leaders have at our best engaged those criteria while also pressing questions that are sometimes neglected: What kind of peace will follow? How will victors avoid sowing the seeds of the next war? And, like many across the aisles of politics do not believe that nation building or reform is a just cause.
Alexander describes wartime Anglican engagement with “peace aims” and what later theorists call jus post bellum, justice after war, especially the fear that punitive settlement (as after Versailles) produces future catastrophe (Alexander, 2025). I suggest that Archbishop Tutu models this in his Truth and Reconciliation talks.
At the same time, Anglicans also protected pacifist conscience as a legitimate Christian vocation. In the Church of England context, wartime leaders reached a characteristic accommodation: pacifists were not expelled, but neither were they allowed to claim pacifism as the only faithful option (Alexander, 2025). This was true in our Vietnam context as Episcopal priests counseled those who were pacifist, went to war as chaplains, and joined many Episcopal soldiers there.
Such a compromise matters for an Anglican theology of supporting service members, because it insists on two non-negotiables:
Conscience must be taken seriously (including conscientious objection).
Civic responsibility cannot be outsourced to “the unchristian,” as if Christians have no obligations in public life.
That second point is precisely why Anglican ethics of war and peace remains a public, contested discipline rather than a private feeling.
3) “National church” temptations: establishment, civil authority, and the church-state knot
Because Anglicanism emerged within political establishment, it has always wrestled with the danger of becoming a spiritual arm of state power. The modern Anglican “public theology” described by Alexander is, in part, a disciplined attempt to live inside that knot without letting the Gospel be swallowed by civil religion (Alexander, 2025). This is as true for the Episcopal Church with its American flags in the churcvh buildings and sanctuaries.
Dmitri Levitin’s study of Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) illuminates an older version of the same struggle: debates over ecclesiastical supremacy, the authority of crown-in-parliament, and the legal-constitutional claims used to manage conflict between clerical power and civil order (Levitin, 2011). Even if twenty-first-century Anglicans are rarely arguing about Convocation, the underlying question persists: When the state is at war, who gets to narrate the meaning of the war? Who gets to name the enemy? Who gets to define “peace”? Anglicans and Episcopalians in our context cannot give up our Christianity to answer these questions.
The prayer book’s Articles of Religion capture a careful distinction: civil authority extends “in all things temporal,” but has “no authority in things purely spiritual,” even while Christians owe respectful obedience to legitimate civil authority (Book of Common Prayer, 2006). That distinction is a structural safeguard against turning the Church into a propaganda machine. It also underwrites a specifically Anglican form of wartime discipleship: Christians may serve the common good of their polity, but they cannot hand over the Church’s spiritual and moral speech to the state.
Our conversation and witness to peace cannot be silenced because it makes us feel uncomfortable with our individual political beliefs.
This is where Citizen becomes especially helpful. I understand the complexity of Christian life lived within a nation is a dual citizenship and insists that Christians must be “citizens of God’s reign first” (Doyle, 2019). That ordering is not anti-patriotic; it is anti-idolatrous. It protects both the integrity of the Church and the dignity of the neighbor, even the enemy neighbor, by refusing to baptize domination as righteousness.
4) Supporting the armed forces: intercession, chaplaincy, moral injury, and truthful care
Anglican support for service members has at least four layers.
a) Intercession that names the full human reality
Prayer for those who serve is not romantic. It asks God to “support and strengthen” those in harm’s way and to grant that “no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness” (Book of Common Prayer, 2006). Read carefully, this is not a blank check for violence; it is a plea that those who bear arms will be guarded from hatred and directed toward justice. The same prayer book places prayer for peace and prayer for enemies side by side, preventing congregations from splitting the world into innocent “us” and demonic “them” categories (Book of Common Prayer, 2006).
b) Chaplaincy as ecclesial responsibility, not institutional capture
Anglican and Episcopal structures have long recognized military chaplaincy as a real ministry requiring ecclesial oversight. The Episcopal Church’s canons provide for ecclesiastical endorsement and a bishop’s pastoral supervision for chaplains and others in “Federal Ministries,” including the armed forces, to ensure that sacramental and pastoral care remains genuinely ecclesial (The Episcopal Church, 2022). This is crucial: it acknowledges the dual pressures chaplains face, serving within a chain of command while remaining accountable to the Church’s Gospel.
Alexander notes that one twentieth-century temptation was to treat the Church as a “national chaplaincy,” expected to bless the war effort and care for a nation at war while leaving policy entirely to politicians and generals (Alexander, 2025). Anglican public theology resists that reduction. Chaplaincy is a ministry of presence, sacraments, and truth-telling, not a religious veneer on state violence.
c) Care for moral injury as part of peacemaking
One of the most Anglican things we can say is that peace work includes tending the damaged soul. Citizen describes war as a spiritual and social sickness and warns against confusing “support our troops” with “God supports our war” (Doyle, 2019). That distinction strengthens a theology of care: soldiers may need confession, lament, therapy, community support, and an honest moral vocabulary to name what they have seen and done.
I have come to believe that the tragedy of our soldiers today is that we pretend that killing is okay and that there is no moral question. Yet, our bodies know, a soldier’s body knows that killing another human being is morally damaging. Healing must recognize that the moral trauma of war demands a return to the ancient understanding that when brother kills brother it is not God’s wish and that the survivor shall walk all their days with the burden of the responsibility (Genesis 4:1-16).
This is where the Church’s sacramental life matters. If Eucharist is, as Embodied Apologetics argues, a public act of reconciliation that forms a people for mercy and justice, then the Church cannot abandon veterans to private suffering. The table trains the community to bear one another’s burdens, including burdens carried home from war (Doyle, 2024).
d) Advocacy for justice for service members and for those harmed by war
Support includes material advocacy, healthcare, housing, living wages, family stability, and long-term care. But Anglican support must also widen the circle: peacemaking refuses to care only for “our” wounded.
The Buffalo Statement insists that human dignity is given by God; each person is of “absolute worth,” and Christian vocation includes peacemaking and “conflict resolution,” challenging systems that are violent and opposed to peace (International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue, 2015). If enemies are also icons of God, then Christian support for troops cannot become moral numbness toward civilian deaths, refugees, or the “collateral” suffering that war normalizes.
This rests upon an ancient Christian tradition. St. Basil, writing in the fourth century, states that while homicide perpetrated in the just defense of "virtue and piety" does not constitute murder in the eyes of the law, it nevertheless stains a soldier's hands "not clean." Basil counsels that newly returned veterans fast from communion for three years. This discipline derives from the early Church understanding of penance as "medicinal"; even when violence committed by Christians was necessary for reasons of state, they had to undergo some period of healing and rehabilitation before being restored to communion with the community (St Basil the Great, Epistle 188; Canon 13).
A three year fast from communion may not be necessary, but the seriousness of such a requirement challenges us to take the moral injury of the soldier more seriously than we do today.
5) Kingdom kinship, citizenship, and shalom: why peacemaking is not optional
Anglican peacemaking is not an add-on for idealists; it is a baptismal vocation. The Anglican Communion’s Marks of Mission explicitly include challenging violence and pursuing peace and reconciliation (Anglican Communion, 1984). The prayer book catechism similarly frames the Church’s mission in terms of unity and justice, peace, love, carried out through all members, not clergy alone (Book of Common Prayer, 2006).
Doyle’s writings sharpen this into a theology of kingdom kinship. Peace is not merely “order” enforced by coercion; it is the interpersonal fabric of a redeemed community. In Citizen, the Church is described as “the practice field for Christian citizenship” (Doyle, 2019). That metaphor is potent for wartime: congregations rehearse a different way of belonging; one not grounded in vengeance, scarcity, or domination, but in shalom.
Shalom, in this theological register, is not a mood. It is “peaceful human interconnectivity,” the repair of sibling rivalry, the re-weaving of social life so that the vulnerable are protected and the stranger is welcomed (Doyle, 2019). The Buffalo Statement presses the same point anthropologically: because humans are icons of the Triune God, we are made for relational life, mutual responsibility, and the protection of the vulnerable; Christian discipleship therefore includes peacemaking and resistance to oppressive powers (International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue, 2015).
War, though, is a cancer (Doyle, 2019). It spreads into language, imagination, and the habits of the heart. If the Church does not offer a counter-formation—through prayer for enemies, truthful lament, Eucharistic reconciliation, and moral discernment—then Christians will simply absorb the nation’s wartime catechism.
6) A specifically Anglican realism: repentance, truth, and the long work of peace
Anglicanism is often stereotyped as “moderate,” but its best wartime theology is better described as realist repentance: it takes sin seriously (including national sin), acknowledges tragic choices, and refuses despair. Alexander notes that Anglican leaders interpreted total war through themes of judgment, repentance, and prayer, even as they debated justifications and limits (Alexander, 2025). That penitential note matters, because it prevents triumphalism. It insists that even “necessary” war calls for grief, restraint, and renewed conversion.
This penitential realism also explains why Anglican traditions can hold together commitments that many ideologies separate: Care for soldiers (including those who have killed); Care for civilians and enemies (including refugees and the demonized); Critical scrutiny of policy and conduct (including just-war limits and post-war justice); Protection of dissenting conscience (including pacifists and conscientious objectors).
These are not contradictions; they are facets of a Church trying to live as a visible sign of a kingdom “not as the world giveth” (Alexander, 2025).
7) Practical Anglican disciplines for wartime peace and armed-forces support
To translate this theology into congregational practice, Anglican resources suggest concrete disciplines:
Pray the full sequence, not selective patriotism
Use prayers for peace among nations and prayers for enemies, refusing revenge as a spiritual habit (Book of Common Prayer, 2006).Normalize lament and confession for moral injury
Create spaces where service members and families can name grief, anger, guilt, and fear without being told to “move on.” Tie this to sacramental reconciliation and community support (Doyle, 2024).Support chaplains as both pastors and moral witnesses
Treat military chaplaincy as an extension of the Church’s ministry, requiring ecclesial accountability and spiritual resilience (The Episcopal Church, 2022).Teach conscience formation
Not to manufacture agreement, but to train discernment: intention, proportionality, limits, and post-war justice (Alexander, 2025).Practice “kingdom citizenship” locally
Let parishes become the “practice field” where strangers become kin—especially veterans, refugees, and those harmed by war’s ripple effects (Doyle, 2019).Commit to peace as mission, not hobby
The Marks of Mission explicitly name challenging violence and pursuing peace and reconciliation as integral mission work (Anglican Communion, 1984).
Conclusion
The Anglican tradition’s distinctive gift in wartime is not a tidy answer to whether a given war is “just.” Its gift is a liturgically formed conscience and a publicly accountable compassion: prayer that refuses hatred; pastoral care that refuses abandonment; ethical reasoning that refuses propaganda; and a baptismal vocation that refuses to let “peace” be defined as domination.
To support men and women in the armed forces, then, is to do more than wave flags or avoid hard questions. It is to become a community capable of telling the truth about war, tending the wounds war creates, and practicing the shalom that war cannot produce. The Church prays and works as citizens of another realm first, so that its love for neighbor, including the neighbor in uniform, does not become captivity to the powers that make perpetual war feel normal.
Short bibliography (APA)
Alexander, J. D. (2025). The Church of England and the Second World War: Ethical traditions in Anglican public theology. Brill.
Anglican Communion. (1984). The Five Marks of Mission (as received in Anglican Communion mission statements).
Doyle, C. A. (2019). Citizen: Faithful discipleship in a partisan world (editor draft). Church Publishing (draft manuscript).
Doyle, C. A. (2024). Embodied apologetics: Faith, action, and witness in a connected age (draft manuscript).
International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. (2015). In the image and likeness of God: A hope-filled anthropology (The Buffalo Statement). Anglican Communion Office.
Levitin, D. (2011). Matthew Tindal’s Rights of the Christian Church (1706) and the church-state relationship. The Historical Journal.
The Episcopal Church. (2006). Book of Common Prayer (2006 ed.). (Prayer book PDF).
The Episcopal Church. (2022). Constitution & Canons of the Episcopal Church (2022 ed.).