Cheap Grace and the American Way of War
When American soldiers deploy to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, what is the cause for which they fight? The patriotic answer is this: they fight for freedom. Challenge that proposition and you’ll likely pick a quarrel. Endorse it and the conversation ends: what more is there to say?
In fact, at least two elements of that assertion merit serious further examination. Does fighting as such actually contribute to freedom’s preservation? And to what extent is freedom as actually exercised worth fighting for? This evening I want to suggest that as far as the post-9/11 period is concerned, neither of those questions merits an affirmative answer. Yet we begin our inquiry not in the present but in the past, with a young German seeker after truth who found what he was looking for on 138th Street in New York City.
In his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously reflected on the difference between what he called “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” The distinction between the two defined the crisis confronting twentieth century Christianity. “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares.” Endowing the church with an “inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits,” cheap grace served as a sort of self-replenishing debit card for the soul, allowing everything to be had for nothing. Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer continued, “is the grace we bestow on ourselves” unearned, allowing “forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.” Cheap grace “means the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner.”
Acquiring costly grace, in contrast, entails sustained effort. Costly grace, wrote Bonhoeffer, citing New Testament parables, is “the treasure hidden in the field” or “the pearl of great price” that can be gained only through exertion and sacrifice. Rather than received passively, such grace has to be earned.
In Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, church leaders specialized in dispensing cheap grace. As a consequence, the German church itself became implicated in unspeakable crimes.
Some churchmen courageously refused to conform, Bonhoeffer prominent among them. He became part of the anti-Hitler resistance, eventually (despite a strong inclination toward pacifism) joining the secret plot to assassinate Hitler. The unraveling of that plot led to Bonhoeffer’s arrest, imprisonment, and eventual execution in April 1945.
This story of German martyrdom, inspiring in its own right, features an important American prelude. As it turns out, Bonhoeffer himself had not coined the phrase “cheap grace.” He had instead appropriated it. The concept originated in Harlem, which is where Bonhoeffer himself first encountered it.
In 1930, Bonhoeffer had travelled to New York. There he spent a year in residence at Union Theological Seminary. Finding famous Manhattan churches like Riverside Congregational and Broadway Presbyterian to be liturgically insipid, Bonheoffer set out in search of worship services more to his liking. That search led him uptown to 138th Street and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Among the African-Americans who worshipped there, Bonhoeffer encountered a community of believers pursuing a vision of what it means to live an authentically Christian life.
Abyssinian was the handiwork of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the son of slaves who after a misspent youth had become a dynamic preacher, critic of racism, and promoter of social justice and Christian ecumenism.
The “cheap grace” that the Rev. Powell denounced from his pulpit was the tendency of white Christians to turn a blind eye to American racism while still counting themselves faithful followers of Jesus. When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany the following year, he carried Powell’s concept of cheap grace with him. His critique of religion as medium for unearned self-justification marked Bonhoeffer as a troublemaker in the eyes of the Nazi regime and spelled his doom. Yet if acutely relevant to Germany in the 1930s, Bonhoeffer’s critique had a far wider application. Then and now it applied to the United States.
The penchant for unearned self-forgiveness that Adam Clayton Powell diagnosed from his pulpit eventually spread throughout the American body politic. Since 9/11, it has reached pandemic proportions. The Powell-Bonhoeffer formulation describes a syndrome to which Americans today demonstrate a pronounced propensity: cheap grace deployed to excuse or gloss over the nation’s shortcomings or misguided actions.
For Reverend Powell, cheap grace allowed white Christian America to give itself a pass on race, a tendency that persists even today. Yet of equal or greater moment, a predilection for cheap grace also shapes the way that the United States approaches the world beyond its borders. Cheap grace permeates and perverts American statecraft, upholding claims of entitlement and a sense of innocent victimhood when those claims meet resistance. Expecting deference, Americans take umbrage when others refuse to accord it. When umbrage yields to violence, American leaders cloak their actions in the language of liberty, democracy, and humane values. Yet such language serves chiefly to camouflage actual intent.
The United States is hardly the first great power in history to clothe less-than-exalted purposes in high-sounding language. Hypocrisy is inherent in the practice of statecraft. Yet to lose the ability to distinguish between publically professed motive and actual purpose is to forfeit situational awareness.
This describes the predicament in which the United States finds itself today. In exercising so-called global leadership, policymakers outlining what the United States must do routinely speak as if they have an inexhaustible treasury upon which to draw. Those who lead or aspire to lead the nation reject second thoughts – no apologies, no remorse – and refuse to acknowledge limits of American resources or perspicacity. Conferring on the nation gratuitous blessings, they insist that America is doing God’s work without offering evidence of God’s assent or approval.
Left unchecked, an indulgence in cheap grace induces a state akin to auto-intoxication. To consider the potential consequences we need look no further than the fate befalling Bonhoeffer’s Germany: During the Nazi era, the moral compass of the German people largely ceased to function. That Americans will in a similar manner lose their ability to distinguish between good and evil is by no means inevitable. Yet neither should that possibility be fully discounted. Ours after all is an age in which the United States engages in preventive war and presidents order the extra-legal killing of U. S. citizens.
Lending this present-day fondness for cheap grace an element of irony is the fact that it is not endemic to the nation’s character, at least as far as war is concerned. On the contrary: At crucial points in their history Americans have abjured cheap grace in favor of the harder alternative. They paid; as a consequence, the nation reaped very considerable rewards. A necessary first step toward appreciating the corrupting and pernicious effects of cheap grace is to recall what costly grace once wrought.
For Americans, the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan proved an occasion entailing the expenditure of costly grace. This was a war fought for freedom.
Persuading Americans that securing this freedom at home obliged them to fight for freedom across the oceans required more than somber presidential reflections on God’s purposes. So Roosevelt and his lieutenants shrewdly infused democratic considerations throughout their approach to waging war against the Axis. To a greater extent than any prior conflict, mobilization became an indisputably communal undertaking. So too did the war’s actual conduct.
“In a democracy,” Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson declared in 1944, “all citizens have equal rights and equal obligations.” A graduate of Harvard Law School, Patterson was himself a combat veteran of World War I. “When the nation is in peril,” he continued, “the obligation of saving it should be shared by all, not foisted on a small percentage.” With regard to obligations (if not rights), Patterson’s Axiom accurately describes the Roosevelt administration’s approach to war. All would contribute to the cause. All would share in whatever burdens the war effort imposed. All (or mostly all) could expect to share in the benefits.
At least as important was this unspoken caveat: Although achieving victory would require shared sacrifice, the president sought to limit the pain and suffering that Americans would actually endure. The price of defeating the Axis promised to be high. Yet Roosevelt intended wherever possible to offload that price onto others, while claiming for the United States the lion’s share of any benefits. For some (but not too much)pain, enormous gain: that describes the essence of U. S. grand strategy.
To an astonishing degree, Roosevelt and his lieutenants made good on both elements of this formula. When it came to raising an army, therefore, equitability became a defining precept. Rather than relying on volunteers, the United States implemented a system of conscription. The draft took black and white, rich and poor, the famous and the obscure, Ivy Leaguers and high school dropouts. The sons of leading politicians like Franklin Roosevelt served as did the sons of multimillionaires such as Joseph P. Kennedy. Hollywood idols Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, and James Stewart found themselves in uniform. So too did baseball stars Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Hank Greenberg, along with boxing greats Joe Louis and Gene Tunney.
In other words, the United States waged World War II with a citizen army that reflected the reigning precepts of American democracy (not least of all in its adherence to Jim Crow practices). Never again after 1945 would U. S. forces reflect such broad diversity. Never again after 1945 would they demonstrate comparable levels of overall effectiveness.
Service exacted sacrifice. Patterson’s Axiom applied across the board. Among the 400,000 American lives claimed by World War II were nineteen players from the National Football League. Glenn Miller, America’s most popular bandleader, was killed while serving with the U. S. Army Air Forces. Harvard contributed its share. Inscribed on one wall of the university’s Memorial Church are the names of 453 Harvard men who died in World War II – just 35 fewer than the total number of West Pointers lost.
The citizen-army’s strengths and its limitations as a fighting force both reflected and affirmed the civil-military contract forged for the duration, the essence of which was a widely-shared determination “to get the goddam thing over and get home,” the sooner the better.
Home signified homely satisfactions. “Your ordinary, plain, garden-variety GI Joe,” wrote the journalist Richard Polenberg, “was fighting for the smell of fried chicken, or a stack of Dinah Shore records on the phonograph, or the right to throw pop bottles at the umpire at Ebbets Field.”
Such mundane aspirations did not imply a grant of authority allowing Roosevelt to expend American lives with abandon. Indeed, to assume otherwise would be to place his bargain with the American people at risk. Fortunately, circumstances did not require that Roosevelt do so. More fortunately still, he and his advisers understood that.
The outcome of World War II turned above all on two factors: in Europe, the durability and fighting power of the Red Army; in the Pacific, the weakness and vulnerability of the Japanese economy. To hit the perfect strategic sweet spot required the United States to exploit both of these factors. This Roosevelt ably succeeded in doing. Success entailed above all making the most of America’s comparative advantage, which lay in the production of war-essential materiel. Whatever the category, no other belligerent could match the U. S. in productive capacity. Moreover, since the United States was (and is) difficult to attack and impossible to conquer, the American “arsenal of democracy” lay beyond the effective reach of Axis forces. Not long after Pearl Harbor, General George C. Marshall announced that “We are determined before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming power on the other.” By tapping that arsenal for all it was worth, the United States managed to do just that.
In that regard, however much Anglophiles might swoon at Winston Churchill’s inspiring rhetoric, in the eyes of America’s senior war managers the Red Army mattered a great deal more than shared ideals. Soviet fighting power represented an asset of incalculable value to the United States.
With France defeated and the British Empire short of will and wherewithal, the president looked to the Red Army to destroy the mighty Wehrmacht. “The whole question of whether we win or lose the war depends on the Russians,” he told Henry Morgenthau in June 1942. That same year Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, assured reporters in an off-the-record briefing that “Russia will do nine-tenths of the job of defeating Germany.”
Getting the Russians to shoulder the burden of defeating America’s most dangerous adversary promised both to sustain support for the war effort on the home front and to position the United States to become victory’s principal beneficiary.
This distribution of effort – the Soviets doing most of the fighting while drawing freely on the endless bounty of American farms and factories -- showed itself most vividly when it came to casualties. U. S. battle deaths for the period 1941-1945 were hardly trivial. Yet compared to the losses suffered by the other major belligerents, the United States emerged from the war largely unscathed. Estimates of Soviet military losses, for example, range between 11 and 13 million. Add civilian deaths – 10 million or more in the Soviet Union, a mere handful in the United States -- and the disparity becomes even greater. To ascribe this disparity to the fortunes of war is to deny Roosevelt credit that is rightly his.
The U. S. approach to waging war against the Japanese empire offered a variation on this theme. With opportunities for outsourcing that war less available (and less desired), the United States shouldered the principal responsibility for defeating the Japan. Yet the Japanese were as resource poor as the Americans were resource rich. When it came to industrial capacity, in comparison with the American colossus Japan was a pygmy, its economy approximately one-tenth as large. In 1941, Japan accounted for 3.5% of global manufacturing output, the United States 32.5%. As the war progressed, this gap only widened.
“In any week of her war with Germany between June 1941 and May 1945,” writes the historian H. P. Willmott, “the Soviet Union lost more dead than the total American fatalities in the Pacific war,” succinctly expressing the genius of U. S. grand strategy in World War II. Many factors account for that disproportion, but among them were calculated choices made by FDR and has principal advisers: give the Russians whatever they needed to kill Germans; engage the Wehrmacht directly in large-scale ground combat only after it had been badly weakened; fight the Japanese on terms that played to American advantages, expending materiel on a vast scale in order to husband lives.
“Our standard of living in peace,” Marshall had declared in September 1939, “is in reality the criterion of our ability to kill and destroy in war,” adding that “present-day warfare is simply mass killing and mass destruction by means of machines resulting from mass production.” The unspoken corollary was this: in addition to limiting U. S. casualties, this preference for expending machines rather than men was going to could produce positive effects on the home front.
Even today, the numbers remain startling. Between 1939 and 1944, the nation’s gross domestic product grew by 52% in constant dollars. Manufacturing output trebled. Despite rationing, consumer spending actually increased during the war.
More remarkable still is this: the benefits of this suddenly restored prosperity were broadly distributed. To be sure, the rich became richer. Yet the non-rich also benefited and disproportionately so. Families in the lowest quintile saw their incomes grow by 111.5% and in the second lowest quintile by 116%. Between 1939 and 1944, the share of wealth held by the richest 5% of Americans actually fell, from 23.7% to 16.8%. The war that had exhausted other belligerents and left untold millions in want around the world found Americans becoming not only wealthier but also more equal.
Notably, all of this happened despite (or because of) increased taxes. Americans paid more and more Americans paid. In 1940, approximately 7% of Americans paid federal income taxes; by 1944, that figure had mushroomed to 64%. No one proposed that wartime might offer a suitable occasion for cutting taxes.