God only knows: the conflicting demands of wartime prayers.

• Author: Allen, Jodie F.
• Position: Culture & Reviews

You gotta feel a little sorry for God these days. The hotline from the White House has been hopping off the heavenly hook; the pope has been urging his flock to "persevere in unceasing prayer"; cries of "Allahu Akbar" echo from the streets of Gaza to those of Baghdad. And, this just in, In Touch Ministries distributed a booklet to U.S. soldiers in Iraq urging them to pray for--George W. Bush. One suggested prayer: "Pray that the president and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding."

Being omnipotent, God has no problem fielding all these calls. He can probably even take time out to mediate a dispute in the Louisiana legislature over whether painting a giant U.S. flag with "God Bless America" in 37-foot-tall letters on the roof of the New Orleans Superdome would cut the value of the naming rights to the stadium. Still, even He must be experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance.

President Bush, of course, frequently invoked God's blessing on our incursion into Iraq. (The president's close friend, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, says "Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time.") But even as the president broadcast his invasion message, there came a televised Saddam Hussein assuring his nation that "God's victory will be ours soon." Saddam added a message from the Almighty that had apparently sneaked by U.S. signal blockers: "God has ordered you ... to cut their throats."

Meanwhile, a taped message from Osama bin Laden noted that he was "following anxiously the preparations of the crusaders to conquer the former capital of Islam and steal their wealth," and called upon the Muslim world "to fight for the sake of God, not for nationalism or any infidel regime, including Iraq."

Of course, the ways of God are not the ways of man. And while the divine injunction "Thou shalt not kill" seems straightforward, religious scholars point to numerous Old Testament texts to demonstrate that, as one Christian pastor wrote recently in The Columbus Dispatch, "God loves and protects the innocent and the weak. He often does so by declaring war on tyrants and oppressors.

That being so, surely the mandate of heaven was conferred on the White House in its chosen war. That does not mean, however, that the president and his most ardent supporters call upon heaven with one voice. For instance, the animosity to Saddam shared by evangelical Christians and Jews might seem odd, given that Jews, along...