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Hundreds of churches across the nation rang their bells Thursday in observance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
While almost all the churches rang their bells for peace amid a world still fraught with nuclear warheads, it is not likely that they did so with the same stance on the 1945 bombing.
According to a new poll by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, Americans are still largely supportive of the decision 64 years ago to drop atomic bombs in Japan.
That holds even truer for white Protestants, Catholics and evangelical Christians – around 70 percent of which said the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing to do.
"Sixty-four years after the dawn of the atomic age, one in five Americans (22 percent) think President Harry Truman made a mistake dropping the bomb," commented Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Around 61 percent of American voters, meanwhile, said they support the decision, which killed around 140,000 in Hiroshima and around 80,000 in Nagasaki.
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When it came to white Protestants, Catholics and evangelical Christians, only around 15 percent said they believed the decision to bomb was wrong.
"Voters who remember the horrors of World War II overwhelmingly support Truman's decision," Brown noted.
"Support drops with age, from the generation that grew up with the nuclear fear of the Cold War to the youngest voters, who know less about WW II or the Cold War," he added.
While Americans largely may not be against the 1945 bombing, one Baptist leader says all Americans should still be able to support proposals for a nuclear weapons-free world.
“There is no conflict today in which the use of a nuclear weapon could conceivably be justified as necessary or proportional,” argues Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, founder and director of the Two Futures Project, a new movement of anti-nuke Christians that has been endorsed by a number of prominent evangelicals.
Furthermore, a nuclear bombing today would have far-reaching consequences that would negatively affect the entire world, he says, not simply the nation that is hit.
“When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, national economies were isolated and devastated by war. This meant that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for all their destructiveness, had localized consequences,” Wigg-Stevenson wrote in a column that appeared Thursday in Christianity Today magazine.
“Today, the current downturn notwithstanding, we live in a globalized economy characterized by financial interdependence. It is nearly impossible to overestimate the economic fallout from the use of even one nuclear weapon today,” he continued. “A nuclear attack would strike at the heart of global prosperity, causing massive suffering far beyond the sphere of immediate nuclear conflict.”
That said, Wigg-Stevenson urged believers to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two events involving massive suffering and loss of life, “situated within the vast tapestry of suffering and death that was World War II.”
“Whether the bombings averted further tragedy by shortening that conflict is a debate that historians can and should continue. But, in the interest of ensuring that Hiroshima and Nagasaki go down in history as the first and last uses of nuclear weapons in war-a goal we can all agree on-we'd do well to let our historical disagreements stay historical,” he concluded.
On Sunday, Aug. 9, churches will again be ringing their bells – the second time in observance of the bombing of Nagasaki.
While around 220,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months after the two bombings, tens of thousands more died from radiation poisoning in the years following.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, there are nine countries in the world today that possess nuclear weapons. Combined, they possess a total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, some of which are more powerful that the explosive devices that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
