Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.
A period of consensus in American religious historiography has ended, but students of American religion representing a variety of perspectives have recently come to regard Abraham Lincoln, once a subject of great dispute among religionists, as one of the most important and profound of America's theologians and religious leaders, if not the religious center of American history. It is primarily as a spokesman for and symbol of a religious interpretation of American destiny that Lincoln has been placed at this pinnacle, and he has had an especially prominent place in the recent discussion of American civil religion.
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