Evangelicals: Nuclear weapons are 'direct affront' to God

USA Today reports that a number of prominent evangelical ministers are calling for steps toward multilateral nuclear disarmament.

The destruction one nuclear bomb can wreak is more than horrifying, says megachurch pastor Rob Bell of Grandville, Mich. It's an insult to God.

"Nuclear weapons are a direct affront to God's dream of shalom for the world," Bell said Tuesday. "Life is beautiful, and nuclear weapons are ugly."

Bell, the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and an up-and-coming voice among young evangelicals, has joined other evangelicals to issue an impassioned call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The new Two Futures Project is a coalition of prominent Christians who assert that multilateral disarmament is a biblical imperative.

Christians should be in the no-nukes vanguard, Bell and others said, as they face the choice of "a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them."

"We must eliminate these weapons, and we can eliminate these weapons," said Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, 31, a Baptist minister who founded the project.

"Who do we think we are to claim authority over life itself and the welfare of future generations? That power belongs to God alone."