Courage under fire: Hollywood is selling us a bill of goods in suggesting that a war becomes good through the bravery and loyalty of its combatants. (culture in context).

YOU NEED JUST ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE A PACIFIST in the latest film version of The Four Feathers--coward. Earlier adaptations of A. E. W. Mason s 1902 swashbuckler about a soldier resigning, his commission to avoid combat in Her Majesty's most recent imperial campaign at least entertained the possibility that pacifism could be moral. But in the shadow of America's own neo-imperialist designs on the Middle East this position is unimaginable. After 9/11 Hollywood can only see warriors and cowards, and the citizen or soldier who fails to rally round the flag is no warrior.

Not that Hollywood has ever paid much homage to the conscientious objector (C.O.). The camera prefers the "man of action"--the soldier, cop, or masked avenger who picks up a sword, gun, or grenade and dashes into battle. The tortured conscience of the C.O. may produce a fine essay, but it's hard to photograph. And such a conscience has a nasty way of undermining the patriotic spirit animating a nation's war machine. If the C.O. is a hero, how can our cause be just?

Some important films have tipped their hat to the courage of those who chose their conscience over king or empire. Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons praised Thomas More's readiness to die for his convictions and took home six Oscars. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi lauded its hero's nonviolent resistance to the British Empire and won eight golden statuettes.

But Hollywood likes it less when conscience rejects war or encourages others to do the same. Pacifists get some respect in Friendly Persuasion, William Wyler's 1956 Civil War drama about Indiana Quakers, and Witness, Peter Weir's 1985 tale about Pennsylvania Amish. Still, American movies generally treat those who will not bear arms as naive idealists and curiosities--like Jeremy Irons' Father Gabriel in The Mission--and cinema's best remembered pacifists usually end up picking up their gun.

In Sergeant York would-be pacifist Gary Cooper becomes WWI's most celebrated war hero after killing 20 German soldiers, and in High Noon Quaker Grace Kelly reluctantly takes up arms to defend hubby Cooper from the "axis of evil" coming in on the noon train. Indeed, Charles Bronson's vigilante serial killer in Death Wish (and Death Wish sequels 2-5) is supposed to be a conscientious objector. Obviously this is one draft resistor who has burned his Pax Christi card.

Catholics, too, have long seen pacifists and C.O.s as oddities. In WWI there were only four Catholics among the nation's 3,989 conscientious objectors, and in WWII Catholics made up just 223 of the 11,887 who claimed C.O. status. A "just war" church since the days of Augustine and Ambrose, traditional Catholic morality had long taught that ordinary citizens were not to judge the rightness or wrongness of a war. That was the job of the prince, prime minister, or president. Shakespeare's Henry V is only repeating good "just war" thinking when King Hank's soldiers tell him that it is not their task to judge whether the king's cause is just. Their duty is to fight obediently and loyally, and to avoid committing war crimes like rape, pillage, or the slaughter of innocents.

UNTIL VATICAN II AND VIETNAM, VERY FEW AMERICAN Catholics imagined that pacifism or conscientious objection could be a Catholic response. Pius XII had rejected the very idea of a Catholic C.O., and draft boards regularly rejected the odd Catholic applicant for C.O. status, assuming that only a Quaker, Amish, or Mennonite could claim that his religious beliefs forbid participation in war. But Gaudium et Spes called for a reevaluation of the just war theory, offered Catholicism's first recognition of pacifism as a legitimate Christian response in more than 1,600 years, and gave a nod to the notion of Catholic C.O.s.

As America's first televised (but not last colonial) war brought the horrors of Vietnam and napalm into our living rooms, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigan brothers joined a growing chorus of Catholic pacifists decrying the injustice and immorality of that "police action." And as the Cold War seemed to bring the whole planet to the brink of nuclear annihilation, Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II often sounded like pacifists and conscientious objectors themselves, crying out again and again, "No more war!"

The U.S. bishops came out in support of both universal and selective conscientious objection in their 1983 pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, accepting that good Catholics could (like a number of the bishops themselves) be pacifists, and that "just war" Catholics had the right and duty to resist any unjust war their nation might wage.

For a while American films like Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July also gave voice to an anti-war sentiment, without ever praising the pacifist or C.O. But in the past decade Hollywood has gone back to war and reworked a just war ethic that relieves citizens and soldiers of the duty to judge the morality of their nation's wars.

In films like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Windtalkers, and The Four Feathers, the moral universe of the soldier is shrunk to the men in his platoon. His only ethical duty is to defend this small "band of brothers."

Like Henry V's troops, the modern Hollywood soldier cares not for the justice of the king's cause or the politics of his leaders. All generals and presidents are mad men. As Jack Durrance (Wes Bentley) argues in The Four Feathers, he fights for the mud-covered comrade dug in on his left and his right.

Such an ethic may fly for the soldier in combat. Courage and loyalty may be enough for the GI stuck in a trench. But it is a dangerous and irresponsible code for the citizen in the theater or at the ballot box. We are not in the Middle Ages, and we cannot hand over our conscience to our king, president, or member of Congress. It is not enough to be obedient, brave, or loyal--we must be responsible and just.

The men in Das Boot were brave and loyal, but their cause and war was unjust. Henry V's soldiers went to war to avenge the insult of a gift of tennis balls, and in The Four Feathers Harry Faversham's friends battled to defend a colonial empire. No amount of courage or loyalty will make that right. Hollywood is selling us a bill of goods in suggesting that a war becomes good through the bravery and loyalty of its combatants. Zealots and terrorists can be brave and loyal--but they are not just, nor is their cause.

IN THE PAST FEW MONTHS A SYMPHONY of religious voices have chimed in against the president and his plans for a preemptive and--if need be--unilateral war against Iraq. The World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the Canadian Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic bishops, the presiding bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Church, the Church of the Brethren, and the president's own church--the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society--have called such a war unjust.

This judgment from our churches places American Christians and Catholics in a spot Hollywood scriptwriters seem to know little about--a place where taking up arms is not the solution, a place where "supporting our boys" is not an adequate moral response. In an age when even "just war" Catholics are morally obliged to resist a patently unjust war, this sweeping condemnation of the White House's proposed war against Iraq creates a set of duties for us as citizens and/or soldiers that cannot be absolved or met by being loyal, brave, or obedient.

Before Augustine and Ambrose, Christianity had been a pacifist church for three centuries, and most Christians believed that going to war violated their conscience. In the twinkling of an eye the church embraced just war theory and only clergy were pacifists. Today, American Catholics and mainstream Christians may find themselves summoned to embrace conscientious objection in numbers we haven't seen since the conversion of Constantine. What sort of movie would that make?

PATRICK MCCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.