What About Us?
The Earliest Christian Attitudes to Military Service
If you've spent any time in church as a soldier, veteran, or military family member, you've probably felt it. That moment when the conversation turns to violence, war, or state power—and suddenly the room gets quieter when you speak. When your pastor preaches peace but can't quite look you in the eye. When you wonder if you're supposed to leave the military parts of yourself in the lobby before entering the sanctuary.
And "us" means all of us. Not just the trigger-pullers. The mechanics who kept the vehicles running. The clerks who processed the paperwork. The medics, the supply sergeants, the water purification specialists. Every MOS, every rate, every AFSC. If you served, you served—whether you kicked doors or filled out forms. The question isn't about how close you got to the danger. It's about whether your service belongs in the conversation at all.
You're not imagining it. And you're not the first to ask the question.
In Luke 3, when soldiers came to John the Baptist asking "What about us? What should we do?" they weren't asking if they should quit. They were asking how to live faithfully as soldiers. John didn't tell them to desert. He told them how to serve with integrity: don't extort, don't accuse falsely, be content with your wages. Luke 7 confirms these same soldiers were baptized. Jesus himself was baptized right alongside them in the Jordan River.
You don't get any earlier than that.
For over a century, biblical scholars have told a different story. They've insisted that the earliest Christians were pacifists who rejected military service entirely, that any Christian who remained a soldier was compromising the faith, that the New Testament's silence on soldiers leaving their posts means they must have left. The dominant academic tradition—from Adolf von Harnack in 1905 through recent works—has treated early Christian attitudes toward military service as essentially incompatible.
There's just one problem: these scholars missed what you probably noticed immediately.
They missed the military realities.
When civilian academics read passages involving soldiers, they tend to treat them as theological abstractions—symbols of state power, figures in moral thought experiments. They rarely investigate what actual soldiers faced: economic pressures, rank distinctions, the difference between garrison duty and combat deployment, the social location of a Roman auxiliary versus a centurion. They overlook the specific questions soldiers would have asked and the specific answers they would have needed.
This isn't about bad intentions. It's about interpretive blind spots that come from distance. If you've never served, never deployed, never navigated the tension between military discipline and personal conviction, you might not notice what the text actually says—and doesn't say—about soldiers.
Here's what a closer look reveals: The New Testament never tells soldiers to leave military service. Not once. John the Baptist didn't. Jesus didn't. Paul didn't. When the centurion demonstrates faith that amazes Jesus (Luke 7), there's no "now go and resign your commission." When Cornelius becomes the first Gentile Christian (Acts 10), Peter doesn't tell him to quit. The Ethiopian eunuch, a military official, is baptized and goes on his way still serving his queen (Acts 8).
The silence isn't absence of permission. It's presence of acceptance.
Scholars have treated this silence as if it doesn't count—as if absence of condemnation for soldiers is less significant than absence of explicit approval. They've built elaborate arguments for why early Christians must have opposed military service, even while acknowledging the texts don't actually say that. They've minimized evidence that doesn't fit their thesis and magnified evidence that does.
But you don't need a PhD to see what's there. You need to read the text as someone who understands what it's like to serve.
Can Christians serve in the military? The earliest Christian witnesses—the New Testament authors themselves, writing in the first century when memories of Jesus were fresh—said yes through their silence and yes through their inclusion. They baptized soldiers. They praised soldiers' faith. They never made soldiers choose between Christ and their service.
Does this mean every Christian should serve? Of course not. Does it mean Christians in uniform never face moral tensions? Absolutely not. Does it mean every military action is righteous? Obviously not. But it does mean that when you walk into church in uniform, when you mention your deployment, when you talk about your service—you're not bringing something incompatible with Christian faith. You're bringing part of who you are, and that belongs there.
The question "What about us?" deserves a better answer than a century of scholarship has offered. It deserves the answer the earliest Christians actually gave: You belong. Your service can be faithful. You don't have to choose.
We wrote a book about it. But you already knew the truth.
Want to go deeper? The full scholarly argument—complete with analysis of a century of biblical scholarship and detailed exegesis of New Testament passages—is available in our book. Or start with the decal that asks the question every military family knows by heart.
