There’s a kind of moral clarity that almost feels undeniable when you first hear it. War is terrible. Violence destroys. Peace is better. So naturally, the answer must be less force, less escalation, less conflict. The problem lies in the fact that we don’t have the imperial data to back up the claim. There’s something deeply human in that instinct, and even something recognizably Christian. But it doesn’t take long before you realize it doesn’t quite carry the weight we want it to. When that instinct becomes the main way we interpret conflict, it can start to point us in the wrong direction.

You can hear that instinct in the way Pope Leo XIV has been speaking recently about recent conflicts and the public stances he has taken on war. When he calls for ceasefires or insists that war doesn’t really solve anything, he comes off to be detached. For Leo, there’s a deeper theological vision behind it. He assumes that even in a fallen world, people can still be reached—that reason still carries weight, that restraint can actually slow things down, that appealing to a shared humanity isn’t a wasted effort.

His belief is grounded in a long tradition of Christian thought about human dignity and moral responsibility. The question, though, isn’t whether it’s sincere. It’s whether it’s enough.

What’s actually driving this disagreement sits below politics. It’s not really about strategy or policy. It’s about how we understand human nature after the fall. In the Catholic tradition—especially in thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas—evil isn’t something that stands on its own. It’s understood as a distortion of what was originally good. Human nature, in that framework, isn’t erased by the fall—it’s damaged. The will is weakened, not destroyed.

That means people can still respond to grace, and at some level, still respond to reason. And if that’s true, then dialogue isn’t pointless. Restraint isn’t meaningless. There’s at least a real possibility that conflict doesn’t have to keep escalating.

Seen from that angle, it’s not surprising that this tradition tends to lean toward peace through restraint.

But the problem isn’t that any of that is wrong. It’s that it doesn’t always get applied with enough care. What’s true when you’re dealing with individual people doesn’t always scale up. It doesn’t automatically apply to regimes or movements or ideologies. Scripture itself seems to recognize that gap. In Romans 13, authority is described as bearing the sword. Not just persuading, not just appealing, but restraining. There’s an acknowledgment there that some forms of evil don’t yield to reasoning. A framework that helps you understand how people are restored doesn’t necessarily tell you how systems of violence are stopped. When those categories get blurred together, things start to slip.

This is where the evangelical tradition, especially in its Reformed strands, tends to press harder. Think of John Calvin and the way he talks about sin. It’s not just distortion. It’s something that takes hold. It shapes people. It directs them. Not just weakness, but something closer to bondage. And that means evil doesn’t stay contained inside individuals. It spills outward. It organizes itself. It builds structures that don’t respond easily to moral appeals because they’re not just neutral people making detached decisions.

The problem is not that any of this is incorrect; the problem is, it’s not always carefully applied. What is true at the level of the person, isn’t always true at the level of regime, movement, or ideology. The world and even the New Testament recognizes the difference: at the level of the person, there is conversion, but at the level of the regime, the descriptive text of Romans 13, for example, has authority as bearing not merely the cross, but the sword. There is an admission in these texts that evil at this level will not be dissuaded except through force. A metaphysics that helps you understand how people are saved doesn’t always translate to a world where evil is restrained or destroyed. And it’s at the moment that these two things slide from one verse to another, that the sentence starts to break down.

What the evangelical tradition has done more consistently, and especially the Reformation, is to elevate the analysis of what is left of man after the fall even further. For Calvin, for example, sin is not just a corruption, weakness, a distortion, but an active force, actively shaping man, directing man, often “containing” man. This is not a world in which the wounded but basically hopeful vision of the original goodness of man can always be relied upon. The world, in this vision, is not a neutral place, with a lot of reasonable people who make bad decisions. Instead, the options are to hope that something held together by darker or unconscious forces can at least be prevented from break out. Evil, in this metaphysical vision, cannot be dialogued away, and is frequently not “saved” by appeals to shared humanity.

Here, another category must be recognized and, if not named, at least acknowledged. If you keep it the same way, evil rises from the personal to the corporate level; it incorporates into something that can only be named as a kind of public being or public will. At that point, you need another category, even if we don’t always name it clearly. Evil doesn’t stay personal. It becomes corporate. It embeds itself in institutions, in ideologies, in movements that take on a life of their own. Once it reaches that level, it doesn’t depend on individual reflection to keep going. It sustains itself. It pulls people into it. It can even convince those inside it that what they’re doing is necessary or even good. When you’re dealing with that kind of reality, you’re not just correcting something. You’re trying to restrain it.

That’s part of why Jonathan S. Tobin’s argument tends to stick with people. He puts words to something many would rather leave unsaid. War is horrific—there’s no getting around that—but there are moments when it brings an end to situations that wouldn’t have ended any other way. The defeat of Nazi Germany is the clearest example. The Holocaust didn’t stop because someone offered a more compelling moral case. It stopped because a regime bent on destruction was confronted and defeated. That doesn’t make war good. It just means we can’t ignore the role it sometimes plays.

Once you take that seriously, calls for an immediate ceasefire start to look more complicated. On the surface, they promise relief. They sound humane, even morally cleaner. And in some cases, they may be. But if the underlying threat isn’t addressed, a pause can just give those same forces time to regroup. The issue isn’t only that calls for peace might fall short. It’s that they can end up shifting the weight of suffering onto the people who are already most vulnerable. The suffering doesn’t disappear—it just gets moved around.

You can see some of this tension in Pope Leo’s recent trip to Algeria. Reports noted that he honored figures at the Martyrs’ Memorial, but didn’t use that moment to clearly speak about Islamist persecution of Christians. He also didn’t visit Tibhirine on the anniversary of the monks who were kidnapped and killed there. There may be reasons for that. There usually are. But the overall impression still matters. There seems to be more comfort speaking in general terms about peace than speaking directly about the forces that make peace so fragile.

That’s not a small thing. It reveals how a particular view of evil quietly shapes what we emphasize, and what we avoid. This is true even if its the Poe. If evil is seen mainly as something that can be calmed or managed, the language begins to shift. It gets broader. More polished. But also less exact. And over time, it can start to feel detached, like it’s hovering above the situation instead of actually addressing what’s happening on the ground.

This is usually where things start to drift. You might call it moral equivalence, or just a flattening of the situation, but the result is the same. Once everyone is treated as if they share the same level of responsibility, the distinction that actually matters starts to fade. The line between aggressor and defender gets harder to see. It can sound thoughtful, even balanced, but it often misses what’s really going on. Not all uses of force are the same, and not everyone is aiming at the same outcome. Some are trying to impose control, while others are trying to keep it from happening. When that distinction gets blurred, you don’t end up with a clearer picture. You end up with a fog.

At some point, you have to stop and ask what we really mean when we talk about peace. If it’s just a pause in the violence, then restraint will always look like the right answer. But if peace is meant to last, if it’s meant to actually protect people in the face of real and ongoing threats, then things look different. In that kind of world, the use of force isn’t automatically a failure of peace. In some cases, it’s part of what makes a real and lasting peace possible.

That’s where the idea often tied to Donald Trump, peace through strength, comes in. Whatever someone thinks about Trump personally, that instinct is built on a different set of assumptions. It takes deterrence seriously. It assumes some actors need to believe there are real consequences. It recognizes that certain threats don’t go away unless they’re confronted. That doesn’t mean every use of force is justified. But it does mean that taking force entirely off the table leaves something out.

There’s a kind of hard-earned realism underneath that way of seeing things. It begins with admitting something we’d rather not. In the West, we think the world has our shared values. It does not. Not everyone is interested in coexistence. Some people, and some systems, are after control, and determined to inflict evil in the world,. with the Iranian regimne being a prime example. . And there are kinds of evil that aren’t waiting around to be reasoned with. They have to be confronted. In those moments, restraint on its own doesn’t create peace. Sometimes it just leaves a vacuum that invites more aggression. Strength, then, isn’t about domination. It’s about holding the line so that what’s worth protecting doesn’t get swallowed up.

None of that makes war any easier to accept—and honestly, it shouldn’t. War is always a tragedy. The cost is real, and more often than not it lands on people who never asked for it. That instinct to push back against war is a good one. It’s something worth holding onto.

But it can’t be the only thing guiding us. At some point, we have to deal with the harder question: what kind of peace is actually possible in a world where evil isn’t just confusion or weakness, but something intentional, organized, and unwilling to go away?

If we assume that everyone will eventually respond to moral appeal, we may be building on something that isn’t really there. And when that happens, the people who end up paying the price are usually the ones already at risk. A vision of peace that can’t account for that starts to drift. It becomes something we say we believe in, but not something we can actually hold onto when things get difficult.

In the end, this isn’t really about personalities or politics. It’s about how seriously we take the depth of the fall. If human beings are still largely open to persuasion, then restraint might be enough. But if evil can harden into something larger, something embedded and resistant, then that changes what faithfulness requires. At that point, the question isn’t whether we believe in peace. It’s whether our theology is strong enough to deal with the kind of evil that makes peace so hard to achieve.

If we assume that everyone in the world is neutral and can be reasoned with, purified, or converted, we are acting as if we value something that empirically does not exist. In that world, the only peace possible is the peace of the nation closest to annihilation at the hands of their enemy. This is neither an agent of reconciliation nor an arbiter, but a shadow of a former self. In the end, this isn’t really about personalities or politics. It’s about how seriously we take the depth of the fall. If human beings are still largely open to persuasion, then restraint might be enough. But if evil can harden into something larger, something embedded and resistant, then that changes what faithfulness requires. At that point, the question isn’t whether we believe in peace. It’s whether our theology is strong enough to deal with the kind of evil that makes peace so hard to achieve.

If you begin with the assumption that people are basically neutral—that, given enough time, they can be talked through, corrected, or eventually won over—you’re starting from a place that doesn’t really line up with how things play out in the real world. It sounds hopeful, even generous. But it’s not consistently true. And when you follow that line of thinking all the way through, the kind of “peace” it leads to isn’t really peace at all. It’s what happens when one side is simply worn down—when there’s nothing left to push back with. That’s not reconciliation. It’s not justice. It’s closer to a quiet kind of giving way.

And honestly, this isn’t about personalities or political instincts because it runs deeper than that. It’s about how seriously we take the fall man, and what we believe it’s done to human nature. We must return to a true theologicl anthropology. If people are still, for the most part, open to persuasion, then restraint might go a long way. But if evil can take root, grow, and become something bigger than any one person—something organized, something that sticks around—then we’re dealing with a different kind of reality. And that changes what faithfulness looks like. It can’t just be about affirming peace as an ideal. It has to include a sober honesty about the world as it actually is.

So the real question isn’t whether we believe in peace. It’s whether our theology can carry the weight of a world where peace is this hard to hold onto.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)