As late-afternoon sunlight filtered through redwood-paned windows at St. Columba’s Church on a recent Wednesday, a small group of residents gathered to discuss combat. The open-invite conversation engaged six Anglican principles of just war, written on an easel pad: (1) Just cause, (2) Legitimate authority, (3) Last resort, (4) Right intention (5) Probability of success,  and (6) Protection of non-combatants. The church’s social justice ministry, which led the event, opened with a star-studded overview of Christian scholarship on war, summarizing works by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius. Father Vincent Pizzuto emphasized that the just-war doctrine is “unquestionably a concession to the gospel’s call for pacifism.” Yet because these principles were conceived as the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity Rome’s state religion, scholars had to square national security with the Bible’s strict non-violence. Alongside the principles, two Anglican tenets guide military behavior once war starts: proportionality (destruction inflicted must be strictly proportional to the injury suffered or the threat posed) and discrimination (non-combatants and civilians must be fiercely protected from direct attack). Inevitably, the conversation turned to current military interventions by the United States. Participants considered Iran and Ukraine, asking whether U.S. military involvement in these operations is just, or solely concerned with territorial expansion. One read aloud Pope Francis’s judgment that modern weapons have made the just-war criteria nearly impossible to satisfy. Fr. Pizzuto agreed that the framework strains against a world its authors couldn’t have imagined. “I don’t think anyone—certainly not Augustine—could have conceived of nuclear weaponry or biological weapons,” he said. No one left with a tidy answer. “I’m not sure there’s ever been a war that followed these principles,” one attendee said. “Can we think of one?” Another said the point was practical: to vote for leaders “who are going to think about these kinds of things before we get into a war.” For Fr. Pizzuto, the discussion underscored the church’s role as a state’s conscience. “Rather than the church getting co-opted into the regimes, the wars, the colonizations—all it did in history as it became imperial Christianity—[we should] once again take a stance as a marginalized group, with a voice to challenge the imperial powers of today, according to the light of the gospel,” he said. “I think that’s our job.”