During the two decades beginning with Paul Ramsey's War and the Christian Conscience and The Just War, including Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, and concluding with the United States Catholic bishops' The Challenge of Peace, the just war idea underwent a remarkable recovery and entry into American public debate over the uses of military force. As the cases of Ramsey and the US Catholic bishops testify, much of the effort to recover and apply just war thinking to contemporary issues was Christian in motivation, and though both Ramsey and the Catholic bishops also addressed the secular policy community and engaged people within that community, much of the debate took place within the spheres of Christian ethics and Church reflection on social justice.

In recent debates the picture in religious circles regarding the use of just war reasoning is more mixed. The US Catholic bishops have reiterated their understanding of the tradition and they have entered into the policy forum using this as their basis in statements on recent uses of US military force. At the same time, the just war idea has been taken up in evangelical Christian circles in the USA and applied in policy debates. But the ‘mainline’ Protestant churches have responded variously. Some have not accepted it at all, others have accepted it only in part, others have sought to ‘go beyond’ it, or have taken up the call for ‘positive peacemaking’, defined in opposition to the idea of just war.