My father was a proud veteran of World War II. He fought for three years in the South Pacific. He hardly ever talked about his experiences, but I think the movies "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line" give some sense of what he experienced.

He was wounded. He contracted malaria. He saw his best friend (named Ted) die. As far as I know to his dying day in 1984 he believed he had done the right thing.

He only talked with me once about his time in the Army. That was during the summer of 1971, just prior to my senior year in high school. My sister had married a military man, and that summer we gathered to celebrate the birth of my niece.

My father and my brother-in-law both tried to persuade me to seek entrance into one of the military academies. My father told me that his Army experience had been very good. He expected I would have a good experience, too.

In remembering that conversation now, I am struck with the significance of the year 1971. The United States was engaged, deeply engaged, in the Vietnam War. And my father wanted me to go into the military.

Something else happened during that summer. I became a Christian. The church I began attending taught me two things from the beginning. The Bible is the authoritative Word of God. And, the United States is an especially favored country in God's sight. I heard sermon after sermon about God's support for America.

In time, though, I became convinced that these two beliefs -- the authority of the Bible and God's support for American military actions -- could not be held together. I ultimately had to choose between them.

My father had joined the Army as a Christian -- the son of a pastor. He apparently felt there was no tension between Christian faith and patriotism.

However, both he and my mother always encouraged me to think for myself, to base my moral convictions on my own commitments and not simply blindly to follow their values.

I don't know what precisely moved me in a different direction from my parents and my first church on faith and warfare. I do know that I was clearly taught in churches I attended that my ethics should be determined most of all by the teaching of scripture. Maybe, as well, simply being a college student during the years of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis made me aware that the U.S. government was capable of lies and corruption.

I do know that in time my heart and mind united in the conviction that I must obey God as I heard God and not human government, should their demands diverge.

At that point, the reasons for such a conviction began to stream into my awareness. At the heart of these reasons from the state was a priority on Jesus' words and deeds -- love your enemies, go the second mile, do not retaliate, be merciful as God is merciful.

I came to see that the Old Testament, rather than contradicting Jesus' approach, actually provides the basis for his stance. The story of the prophets' disenchantment with nationalism and patriotism, their message that God was not behind the military actions of their nation, the vision of people from all nations coming to Mt. Zion in order to beat their swords into plowshare -- these elements of Old Testament faith provided a clear support for the conviction that one can, should, in fact must, look upon one's nation with great suspicion when that nation is issuing a call to warfare.

It became clear to me that for many Christians the basic issue tends to be how one thinks of one's nation. If one identifies first of all with one's nation, like my father did, one will automatically accept one's nation's call to arms and seek to understand one's faith in light of that acceptance.

On the other hand, if one views one's nation more critically and may (as the prophets did) imagine dissenting from the nation's demands, one will find it thinkable to say no to the call to arms.

I think about my father often. And about his father, the pastor. I wonder what they would think of my path. I imagine they would be pretty surprised and confused. I would love to discuss the Bible with them. I like to think they would have listened to me with care and recognized at least some of themselves in my faith and practice. I also like to think I could have helped them see some things a bit differently.

For the Christian, it should not be "my country right or wrong."