Dressing Our Children in Battle Songs
Photo by Rashid Sadykov on Unsplash
I still remember the chant, small voices rising in unison: I’m in the Lord’s army… yes, sir!
It was Sunday School in the 90s and were there to learn about Jesus, but aside from parables and prayers, they gave us weapons and told us we were a part of God’s army. We suited up in our minds—breastplate, helmet, shoes, sword—and we marched, tiny feet on linoleum floors.
No one ever paused to ask what it meant to teach a child to wage war in the name of faith. For impressionable minds, this ideology takes root and lingers. Even as an adult evangelical, I carried it with me, praying as if I were still that child, asking God to prepare me for battle so that I might know peace. Yet I never thought to question what kind of peace requires a weapon.
The notion of being in the Lord’s army traces back to Ephesians 6, with its call to “put on the armor of God.”
For many of us who preach and teach, these are familiar words. What is less often acknowledged, however, is that the “armor of God” in Ephesians 6 is modeled after Roman military gear—the very armor worn by soldiers who enforced the Pax Romana. Rome called it a “golden age,” a time of prosperity and order. But this so-called was not built on compassion or kinship—it was secured through silence and submission, carried on the groaning backs of the conquered. At the empire’s center, some enjoyed the spoils of war, but life on the margins was marked by poverty and fear. Crushing taxes drained what little the poor had.
When the Christian message is tangled with domination and dominion, power and control, our spirits wither, worn down by a gospel that mistakes might for salvation.
The Roman historian Tacitus saw through empire’s illusion: “They create a desolation and call it peace,” he once said—a mantra as old as empire itself. Centuries earlier, the prophet Jeremiah also cried out against empire’s façade. “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jer. 8:11)
This is what empires do. They cloak domination in the language of destiny. They call conquest divine. And those who speak against it are not simply dismissed as naïve, but branded as rebellious and dangerous. Rome did it. So did Britain. And we still see it today. In the United States, we’re told safety is secured by bases, bombs, and borders. But militarism is not just policy, it is theology. It shapes what we worship, what we fear, and even what we teach our children to sing.
Dr. King once warned that a nation spending more on war than on its people is not simply misguided; it is dying. The same may be true for our churches. Even if not invested in war directly, much of our theology is steeped in violence. We hear it in Sunday school songs, see it in images of a triumphant Christ wielding a sword, and witness it in political leaders who stoke division with violent rhetoric. After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing personality and defender of traditional Christian values, Trump’s message to his largely evangelical base has remained consistent: fight. He blamed society’s habit of demonizing opponents for the violence, even as his own words have repeatedly dehumanized critics, calling them “invaders,” "vermin," “scum” and "enemies from within."
Similarly, right-wing extremist and Trump supporter Vance Boelter, known for his anti-abortion views, sent a chilling text after assassinating Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home. “Dad went to war last night,” he wrote.
When the Christian message is tangled with domination and dominion, power and control, our spirits wither, worn down by a gospel that mistakes might for salvation.
For those of us who preach and teach, the challenge is urgent: how do we name this distortion from the pulpit—and dare to change it? How do we form our communities in a peace that looks nothing like empires—in both language and action?
When we return to Ephesians 6, it is striking to see how a text meant to resist empire has been reimagined as an invitation to imitate it. What was once a call to stand firm against oppression has too often been twisted into a script for embodying the very powers it sought to oppose.
The writer takes instruments of war and transforms them into metaphors for something entirely different: the belt becomes truth, the breastplate becomes justice. Even the sword—once a symbol of conquest—is no longer made of steel, but of Spirit. In other words, the text is reimagining violence into virtue, declaring that empire will not have the final word. Their swords are not sacred. Instead, these are our defenses: truth, justice, peace.
And the real battle? It’s not against flesh and blood, but against rulers and authorities—against the very systems that exploit, marginalize, and destroy. The “devil’s schemes” mentioned are not just abstract forces floating in some spiritual realm; they are the ideologies that uphold empire, legitimize violence, and silence dissent. For preachers and teachers today, the question is how to help our communities see this shift: from empire’s weapons to God’s virtues, from domination to peace.
And at the heart of these “schemes” lies militarism itself—the conviction that strength is measured in firepower and that justice can be delivered by the sword. Like Rome, American culture is steeped in military imagery. The United States built its own version of Pax—Pax Americana—on dominance enforced by force and fear. This isn’t only foreign policy; it is etched into the American imagination. There is a devotion to guns in the United States that feels almost sacred. The U.S. has more guns than people, making it the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. And access to these weapons is relatively easy, with regulations and loopholes that allow firearms to circulate widely.
It’s precisely here that Ephesians becomes so striking. The vision of a Roman soldier’s armor—once a symbol of brutal imperial power—is reimagined, not to glorify war, but to subvert it. In this way, the armor of empire is turned on its head.
So perhaps—contrary to the ways it’s often been taught in children’s ministry and beyond— this passage is not about pretending we’re in an actual army preparing for war, but about refusing to play by empire’s rules. About making us a people who carry peace where others carry war. Who hold faith where others cling to fear. Who refuse to bow to the gods of violence.
The invitation is clear: this armor doesn’t make us conquerors; it makes us steady disciples, able to stand firm when the world demands our allegiance to systems that oppress, divide, and destroy.
This is part of the resistance we are called to: To unlearn the scripts we’ve been given. To stop dressing our children in battle songs. To believe in a kind of peace that doesn’t need a sword to survive. And for those of us who lead, this matters profoundly. Every Sunday school lesson, every hymn we choose, every metaphor we lift up in a sermon teaches our people something about what peace is and how it comes. We can either reinforce the empire’s lie—that peace is won by might—or we can form communities that live into Christ’s truth: that peace is communion. It is fellowship, shared life, the breaking of bread.
To teach communion is to unteach empire. And this is not a side project, but the vocation of leaders in Christ’s church: to form people in truth, justice, and faith, and to bear witness—in worship and in public life—that Christ’s peace will not bow to empire.
Because we weren’t made for conquest, we were made for kinship.
