In an odd coincidence, the three most impactful songs I’d pick on the topic of war all owe their origin to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom is not as united as its name implies. England claimed the land of Ulster from the Irish in 1609 and gradually solidified control of it and surrounding lands through military force and legal changes, officially making it and all Ireland part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. Many Northern Irish resented this, with their nationalistic resentments amplified by the religious differences between the still-Catholic Irish and the Protestant (Anglican) English. Conflict continued throughout the centuries, flaring up in events such as 1916’s Easter Rising. Fresh conflict emerged in the late 1960s and became known as the Troubles. Catholic Irish nationalist and republican paramilitary groups, Protestant unionist and loyalist paramilitary groups, and British military and police forces fought over the subsequent decades. 3500 people were killed and over 100,000 injured (almost 1 out of every 50 Northern Irish).
On Sunday, January 30, 1972, British troops in Derry, Northern Ireland fired on and killed 14 unarmed protestors. In “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Irish band U2’s Bono, backed by harsh guitar and electric violin and a military-style drumbeat, cries out over the massacre that came to be known as Bloody Sunday:
I can’t believe the news today
I can’t close my eyes and make it go away
How long? How long must we sing this song?
On Saturday, March 20, 1993, an Irish Republican Army bomb in Warrington, England killed two children and injured 56 others. In response, the Cranberries, an Irish band, released “Zombie.” Dolores O’Riordan’s ethereal vocals, previously put to pop songs such as “Dreams” and “Linger,” instead nearly shout with grief over the conflict that shambled on in undeath for decades or centuries:
Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we, mistaken?
In February 1996, in response to the Irish Republican Army’s Docklands bombing, thousands of Catholics and Protestants joined together to march for peace, with white ribbons and paper doves as symbols.1 Inspired by this, English band Delirious? wrote and released “White Ribbon Day.” Unlike Bono’s and O’Riordan’s cries of grief, Delirious? frontman Martin Smith’s tone is more somber, contemplative:
How can it be that God is love
When blood rolls down upon our land
And fathers lose their only son?
Where is the hope?
Oh God we pray for white ribbon day
The Troubles are over. On Friday, April 10, 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, formalizing power sharing between British and Irish governments and between Northern Ireland’s political parties. Perhaps miraculously, the peace has largely held, despite the centuries of hostility.
It’s the same old theme, since 1916
In your head, in your head, they’re still fightin’
With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dyin’– The Cranberries, “Zombie”
Since then, we’ve seen 9/11; the War on Terror; the US invasion of Afghanistan; the Darfur genocide; the Second Gulf War and subsequent Iraqi civil war; the Houthi insurgency in Yemen; multiple fatal border clashes between India and Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China; the Israel-Lebanon wars of 2006 and 2025; the Syrian civil war; the Boko Haram uprising; the Sudanese civil war; civil war in South Sudan; the Ethiopian civil war, government collapse and gang takeover in Haiti; Kurdish conflicts across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran; the Rohingya ethnic cleansing; a military takeover in Myanmar; the October 6 terror attacks on Israel; multiple wars between Israel and Hamas; Russian invasions of Georgia, Chechnya, and (repeatedly) Ukraine; a 12-day war between Israel and Iran.2
It’s the same old theme in 2018
In your head, in your head, they’re still fightin’
With their tanks and their bombs and their guns and their drones
In your head, in your head, they are dyin’– Bad Wolves, in their 2018 tribute cover of “Zombie”
Our troubles are not over.
On Saturday, September 6, 2025, Donald Trump posted a meme about going to war in Chicago. I suspect that he thought this demonstrates his toughness. I’m certain that he believes the criminals and illegal immigrants in Chicago are a problem, an enemy, and has little regard for them. The imagery and quotes place him in the role of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the “bloodthirsty, sadistic and amoral warmonger” who serves as the secondary antagonist of Apocalypse Now. I suspect that he thought this was funny.
On Wednesday, September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot through the neck and killed. Gretchen Felker-Martin, an author for DC Comics, responded with, “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk.” I’m certain that she views Charlie Kirk as a problem, an enemy, and had little regard for him. Someone on the left, whom I love and respect, said her comment was a joke. I don’t know if they thought it was funny.
In the days since Wednesday, September 10, 2025, I’ve continued to read reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death. In one series of comments on Facebook, one poster expressed grief over the fact that Kirk was killed for his politics, while another said it was time to start killing Democrats in response. They did not seem to see the incongruity. Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Andrew Tate called it a “Civil War.” Alex Jones said, ‘This is a war.” Fox News host Jesse Watters said, “They are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?” Other right-wing voices called for extermination, terror, hell, Air Force strikes, vengeance, extinction, destruction.
When we talk about going to war, this is what we’re saying we want. These are the metaphors we evoke, the consequences we call for. Cranberries’ “Children slowly taken,” U2’s “broken bottles under children’s feet, bodies strewn across the dead end street,” “and mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart,” Delirious’ “blood roll[ing] down upon our fields,” “fathers los[ing] their only son,” “when flesh is torn from young, and old and children run in bloody fields.”
What in the hell is wrong with us? I mean this literally, because war is an outbreaking of hell upon this earth. It seeks to end, deliberately and repeatedly and on a massive scale, the lives of human beings made in the image of God for whom Jesus died. It takes humanity’s greatest virtues – some of the greatest and most awe-inspiring demonstrations of courage, honor, sacrifice, bravery, skill, and ingenuity – and directs it solely toward the goal of overpowering and destroying the enemy’s courage, honor, sacrifice, bravery, skill, and ingenuity. It destroys in minutes or hours the work of years or decades. It takes endlessly complex and fascinating individuals with ideas and hopes and loves and sins and flattens them into the faceless, objectified other whose existence must be ended. It is the ultimate in reducing people to a means to an end: persons endowed by their Creator become cannon-feed, casualty numbers, propaganda statements, obstacles. It breaks bones, rends flesh, leaves hearts fruitlessly pumping as every contraction serves only to pour more lifeblood onto the ground. In a world in which so many struggle to merely to find enough food and shelter to survive, it takes the best of our treasure and technology and blasts it away on the battlefield. It turns wives into widows, parents into childless, children into orphans. It leaves survivors maimed physically and psychologically. It leaves scars that will never heal this side of eternity.
I am not a pacifist. I believe that, in a fallen world, war is sometimes the lesser of two evils. But it is evil. C.S. Lewis writes,
The idea of the knight – the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause – is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is this feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage – a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.3
This is one of the few times I disagree with Lewis – completely, wholeheartedly, and vigorously. Lewis fought in the trenches of World War I and wrote these words during the height of World War II, when his country’s existence was threatened by one of the most evil regimes the world has known. I live in a country protected by two oceans, whose military adventures in my lifetime have been borne entirely by a small group of professional volunteers, and whose existence hasn’t been substantially threatened since 1865. Maybe his firsthand experience means that he’s right and I’m wrong. Or maybe his firsthand experience means that he, like all of us, lives in a time and a culture, and his time and culture and the idea of “God and country” (as if the two can be compared) and the demands of fighting two world left him, like David, unaware of the stains left by spilling blood and fighting battles.
Or, maybe, having lived through those horrors, Lewis could see beyond them to the wholeheartedness which rises to fight through them. But that is a very different thing than for social media warriors and draft-dodging politicians and armchair pundits to invoke those same horrors here and now. As H.P. Lovecraft said about his fictional horrors, “Do not call up that which you can not put down.”
And we pray for peace to flood our hearts again
Only God can save our nation now
And we long for joy to fill our streets again
Only God can save our nation now– Delirious?, “White Ribbon Day”
And murder and attempted murder is all of that on the personal scale – taking the wholesale destruction of war and handing it out retail. Democratic Rep. Kathy Giffords was shot in the head in 2011. Republican Rep. Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball game in 2017. In June 2022, a man turned himself in over a plot to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In October 2022, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house and hospitalized her husband. Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts last year. Health insurance CEO Brian Thomson was murdered in December. Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was set on fire. Two aides at the Israeli embassy were murdered in May. Pro-Israeli marchers were firebombed in June. Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in June, and state Sen. John Hoffman and wife were severely injured. In July, an ICE facility was attacked. In August, someone motivated by anti-vaccine sentiment shot up the CDC headquarters.4 Jesus’s teaching equates anger with murder in the heart; how have we killed in our hearts this past decade?
And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
– U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
In August 1998 – after a rash of school mass shootings, shortly before Columbine, and well before Sandy Hook, Charleston, Las Vegas, Parkland, Uvalde, Tree of Life, Nashville, Annunciation, Evergreen – military psychologist David Grossman wrote, “Trained to Kill.” He argued that humans, like most animals, have a deep-seated psychological aversion to killing others of our own species but that modern American culture systematically desensitizes us through depictions of violence in news and entertainment media such as movies, TV, and video games. He describes the results:
A friend of mine, a retired army officer who teaches at a nearby middle school, uses the movie Gettysburg to teach his students about the Civil War. A scene in that movie very dramatically depicts the tragedy of Pickett’s Charge. As the Confederate troops charge into the Union lines, the cannons fire into their masses at point-blank range, and there is nothing but a red mist that comes up from the smoke and flames. He told me that when he first showed this heart-wrenching, tragic scene to his students, they laughed.
I am not a military psychologist. I do not know if Grossman’s argument about desensitization holds up under scrutiny or not. But we are desensitized. Donald Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could stop political opponent Hillary Clinton. Maybe he thought that this, too, was funny. He fantasized about political opponent Liz Cheney getting shot in war. He shared a video that showed him ruthlessly killing figures representing news media. Donald Trump Jr. joked about the attack that left Paul Pelosi hospitalized. He thought it was funny. Rep. Paul Gosar shared a video that showed him killing figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rep. Dan Crenshaw showed a campaign ad that envisioned him launching a superhero-style attack on members of Antifa. I suspect they thought this demonstrates their toughness. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested executing any mentally ill homeless people who refuse help. On the left, Brian Howard’s killer Luigi Mangione seemed at times to be viewed as a folk hero. Pro-Palestine advocates valorized Hamas after Hamas killed 1,200 people on October 6; pro-Israelis seem to turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands of dead since then.
We need to resensitize our hearts. In polite society we recognize that certain topics are taboo, and that stigma keeps us from dwelling on them or glorying in them. That revulsion squelches the temptation to laugh or make light and, we hope, keeps us far away from the act itself. Why is killing people not one of these topics? We need to feel the horror of ending lives in God’s image so that that horror pulls us back from the cliff that our society seems determined to hurtle toward.
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall– U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fightin’– The Cranberries, “Zombie”
And maybe you feel that my examples are being too hard on one side or the other, that I’m omitting offenses I should have included or being unfair in what I did list. At this moment, I don’t especially care. Because one of the perverse things about war is that, while flattening opponents into an objectified “other” to be destroyed, it insists that anyone “on our side” is a co-combatant to be protected, never criticized. The Cranberries’ O’Riordan rejected this idea that the IRA represented her and her family: “It’s not Ireland, it’s some idiots living in the past.” The only way I see forward is for us to say that these – Jesus won’t let me call people “idiots,” so let’s say this unwholesome, foolish talk – that calls up these horrors and makes light of war and murder isn’t us, our families, our churches, regardless of where we see it. Right now, this is where I see it. And, if you ever see me making light of this or see me turning a blind eye to it, please let me know.
The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won on
Sunday, Bloody Sunday– U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
Of course, as a Christian, I do believe there’s a war – but one that’s “not against flesh and blood.” Turning others, whether nationalist, unionist, MAGA, progressive, into the enemy is often just Satan’s way of making us forget who the real enemy is. In “White Ribbon Day,” the most openly religious of the three songs, Martin Smith presents Jesus’ blood shed on the cross, God’s love as seen in the Father’s gift of his Son, as the answer to blood shed in war and the question of God’s justice in the face of fathers left childless. And this is our hope. Humanly speaking, we keep repeating “the same old scene” of undead hatreds. But, in Christ, we see God taking all that violence and hatred and evil upon himself, washing it away by his blood, reconciling us to him and also providing a way to live in peace and love with each other. And, as the white ribbon marches of February 1996 gave a foretaste of Protestants and Catholics in unity at Belfast, we look forward to the white ribbon day when when AR-15s and Mauser .30-06 rifles are beaten into plowshares and people of every faction, language, ethnicity, and nation are in unity at the throne of the Lamb.
And can it be that You are just
When flesh was torn for young and old?
And here we stand, saved by Your blood
We’ll stand with courage
We’ll live and die for white ribbon day– Delirious?, “White Ribbon Day”
Footnotes
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See “Post-bomb peace rally draws thousands” and Wikipedia articles ↩
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Mere Christianity, p. 119 ↩
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Many of these examples were from “A Deeper Strain of Political Violence,”, Grayson Logue ↩