Power Without Restraint: War as a Masculine Failure

By Rev. Carlos Malavé

The history of humanity is, in large part, a history of wars. And if we look honestly at who has started, financed, and perpetuated them, we find a consistent pattern: men with power and no accountability. This is not an accusation against the male gender as a whole, but rather an acknowledgment that unchecked ambition for power, territory, and resources, when concentrated in male hands without moral or institutional limits, produces destruction on a massive scale.

From the pharaohs of Egypt to the dictators of the twentieth century, from Alexander the Great to Vladimir Putin, war has been the preferred instrument of men who could not, or would not, satisfy their thirst for dominance by peaceful means. The cost is paid by others: young soldiers sent to die, women raped as a weapon of war, displaced children, destroyed communities. Those who decide on war are rarely those who suffer it in their own flesh.

This is not to say that women are perfect or incapable of violence. But it is significant that in the centuries where women have had greater participation in political power, rates of armed conflict have tended to decline. The exception does not invalidate the general pattern.

The Christian tradition has recognized this problem since its earliest centuries. Tertullian, one of the first theologians of Christianity, was blunt: “The Lord, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.” For Tertullian, organized violence was incompatible with following Christ. Centuries later, Erasmus of Rotterdam (a Christian humanist of the sixteenth century) wrote with bitter irony about war in his work The Complaint of Peace: peace weeps because men reject her time and again in favor of military glory and territorial conquest.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who resisted Nazism and paid with his life, wrote that “war is the substitution of God by the power of man.” Though Bonhoeffer arrived at complex conclusions about armed resistance, he never ceased to view war as a profound spiritual and moral failure.

Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian prophet of the twentieth century, was even more direct. He denounced the Vietnam War not only as a political mistake but as an expression of the same spirit of domination that fuels racism and poverty: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King understood that militarization was not a neutral phenomenon, it was the institutionalized expression of a will to power that destroys the most vulnerable.

The Apostle James said it plainly in his letter: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill; you covet but you cannot get what you want.” (James 4:1-2). War, in the biblical vision, is born of greed, that insatiable desire to have more, control more, dominate more.

The Church has had its own history stained by war, the Crusades, the conquest of the Americas, the European religious wars. But in its best prophetic expression, the Christian faith has always pointed in another direction: toward shalom, the integral peace that is not simply the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. That shalom is incompatible with the unbridled ambition for power that has fueled wars throughout the centuries.

If the world continues to organize itself around structures of concentrated power, without accountability and without the full voice of those who suffer most from war, we will keep repeating the cycle.

This should confront us with a question that is not only political, but profoundly spiritual: Are we willing — men and women alike — to renounce power as domination and embrace it as an opportunity for service and the flourishing of life?

Rev. Carlos Malavé is the founder and president of the Latino Christian National Network, an organization that aims to provide a space for respectful dialogue among Latino Christian leaders of different traditions and theological perspectives. Previously, Malavé served as the executive director of Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT) for 11 years. CCT is the broadest organization working for the unity of the church in the U.S.

Malavé is a member of the steering committee of the Circle of Protection, a coalition of church bodies and related ministries representing the diversity of Christianity in this country. Malavé previously served as assistant stated clerk at the Office of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and as pastor in Puerto Rico and Southern California. He holds a M.A. in family life education from Loma Linda University and an M.Div. from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is married to Aixa Malavé and has three children.