What a Naive Lyric

In all genres of music, there are some really inane lyrics.  Derek Webb, regarded by some as the poster child for insightful lyrics, recently released a song called “My Enemies Are Men Like Me.”  While I like the overall statement of the song, I think, the line below aggravates me beyond description:

Those two lines make two erroneous assertions, in my opinion:  that war is always wrong, and the capital punishment is never justified.

The idea that war is always wrong is not an uncommon meme.  Watch the news today and you’ll see the “peace at any cost” crowd still alive and active.  One would think that World War II would have taught them a lesson, but, it would seem, they all skipped their history classes in school.  Webb seems to fall into that trap as well.  While I readily admit that war is a terrible thing and if it can be avoided things would probably be better, I categorically reject the idea that we should never go to war.  I think one of the great lessons of WWII is that military action, when done in an appropriate and timely fashion, can avoid greater evil.  Had Europe had the will to make the hard decision to stop Hitler’s aggression, which some think could have been done with merely a show of force, an exceedingly dark time in the history of the world had been avoided.  Sadly, though, Europe seems to have been infected by the school of thought shown in Webb’s lyric.  We also see in the Bible where God not only ordained wars, but commanded  several.  The history of the Jewish people is replete with wars commissioned by God for various purposes.  As distasteful as war is, it does have a raison d’etre.

The next line seems to assert that capital punishment is never justified.  While I will readily grant that our system in the US probably needs some careful inspection, to reject capital punishment is to reject not only a long history of support in the criminal justice world, but Biblical precedent.  Societies since days untold, including the aforementioned Jewish society we read about in the pages of the Old Testament have used (and, yes, abused) captial punishment long before the intellectual “elite” decided it was unduly cruel.  For the Jew, and for the Christian, we see support for capital punishment in the pages of the Pentateuch.  While one can argue over the applicability of the Mosaic Law to Christian faith, one would be hard pressed to explain away the principle taught by Scripture on capital punishment.  Given the value we place on life, we should never rush head long to execute someone, but, if life is valuable, then those who take should be punished accordingly, up to and included the forfeiture of their own.

For Webb to make these statements is to decry, for me, a naivete of thought.  It’s one thing to spark a debate on the issue, as one ardent fan of Webb’s has tried to tell me, but it is another thing entirely to do so with such poor, twisted, and puerile logic.  While I like the phrase ” i will protest the sword if it’s not wielded well,” for me, these two lines earn Webb a D- for the song as a whole.  I just can’t stomach it, though your mileage may vary.