What is the importance of the Vietnam War in the novel, Wheat That Springeth Green?

Set largely in 1968 against the backdrop of the increasingly unpopular American involvement in the Vietnam War, war represents the modern world’s embrace of violence and its rejection of the Catholic Christian message of peace. For Joe, mired in the complacency and spiritual emptiness of his midlife crisis as pastor, the Vietnam War is largely something he watches on television. But Joe comes increasingly more involved in pacifist activism. He refuses to use his church to hold a service to pray for Congressional passage of a munitions bill that would help a local industrial plant. But it is the moral dilemma of one of his parishioners, who plans to head to Canada to avoid the draft, that compels Joe to examine his own faith and the theology behind the idea of a just war and to reject war itself.