Wealth & Money Quote by Belva Lockwood

Lockwood’s line lands like a courtroom objection: not to war in the abstract, but to the polite bookkeeping that makes war feel like someone else’s problem. By targeting “gives money,” she shifts moral scrutiny from generals and presidents to donors, taxpayers, churchgoers - the respectable classes who can denounce violence while underwriting its infrastructure. Warships and arsenals aren’t battlefield heat-of-the-moment decisions; they’re planned, funded, procured. Her point is that modern war is a supply chain, and conscience lives in the invoice.

The phrase “claim to be called Christian” is doing heavy work. Lockwood isn’t debating theology; she’s challenging social identity. Christianity here functions as a public badge of virtue in a nation where being “Christian” often doubles as being “decent,” “patriotic,” “trustworthy.” She weaponizes that badge, turning it into a standard that indicts complicity. If you finance the tools of mass killing, you don’t get to wear the label as moral cover. It’s an argument about hypocrisy, but also about power: a reminder that moral language can be used to police the behavior of those who think morality is mainly for others.

Context sharpens the edge. Lockwood was a pioneering lawyer and political figure in the late 19th-century U.S., when militarization, imperial ambition, and industrial capital were tightening their grip. Her absolutism reads less like naive pacifism than like strategic moral leverage: an attempt to make militarism socially expensive by making it spiritually illegitimate.