In my small Christian school where I went until I was 10, we were taught that prayer is a private, holy act to give thanks to the lord or seek solace for the sick and suffering. It was the 1960s and the Vietnam war was raging, but we never prayed for victory and “overwhelming violence against those who deserve no mercy.” We were a “do unto others” bunch and in today’s political parlance I guess that made us “woke.”
Mark Twain—America’s first global celebrity—was “woke” too, nearly a century before the word existed. He knew that every patriotic prayer for victory is actually two prayers: one spoken aloud in the light of the chapel, and one whispered in the dark machinery of war. One for our own survival. One for our adversary’s demise.
Twain wrote his short story, “The War Prayer” at 70. He was newly widowed and grieving not only for himself, but for his country. The US had liberated the Philippines from Spanish rule but was fighting bloody battles to subjugate the island under new American rule. Twain wrote, “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
When Twain gave “The War Prayer” to his publishers, they rejected it. Twain famously said, “I have told the whole truth in that. Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He was right. It took 13 years after his death for the world to read his “whole truth.” Today, as we watch our leaders use religion to justify a war of choice, Twain’s warning has never been more urgent.
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood before a worship service at the Pentagon, quoting Psalm 144, “Almighty God, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” It was a stirring performance of righteous piety. But as Hegseth prays for “overwhelming violence” and “wisdom in every decision,” Twain stands at his shoulder to translate what that “wisdom” actually produces.
Hegseth asks to “let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness.” Twain clarifies the cost in his prayer: “Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds… to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.” Hegseth prays for “unbreakable unity” in the name of Jesus Christ. Twain reminds us that such victory requires us to “wring the hearts of unoffending widows with unavailing grief” and “blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage.”
Hegseth wears Deus Vult—’God Wills It’—tattooed on his muscled bicep, and an Arabic “Kafir” (Infidel) inked on his forearm. He is the modern version of the soldiers Twain describes whose “faces are alight with martial dreams.” Twain strips away such patriotic bombast—“golden seas of glory”—as he calls it, to reveal the “hurricane of fire” that others must suffer as a result. To pray for a blessing upon our side of a war is, by necessity, to pray for the ruin of the other side.
America has already seen the unspoken consequence of “The War Prayer”: the mangled bodies of at least 172 Iranian children, parents and teachers at the Shajareh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) School in Minab, innocents slaughtered by a US Tomahawk missile on the first day of the war.
At the end of “The War Prayer,” Twain’s warnings are labeled by the crowd as rantings of “a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.” Today, as our leaders ask God for “violence against those who deserve no mercy,” we must stop and ask: who is the real lunatic? Twain describing the blood, or Hegseth praying for more to be spilled?
I look back at that 10-year-old, “woke” girl, praying in the chapel, seeking solace for the sick and suffering. She had no doubt then. And I have no doubt now, at almost 70 — the same age as Twain when he wrote The War Prayer.
So we both cry to the heavens, “Not in our name. Not in God’s name.”
“The War Prayer” (abridged)
by Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism … on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun … nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. …
Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! … The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said …
Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work….
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. … he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. …
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” …
“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ … When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
