War and Peace

I am a pacifist.

I believe that participation in war is essentially incompatible with an attempt to emulate the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘Love your enemies’ and ‘Turn the other cheek’. He lived this out in radical subservience (but not obedience) to ‘authority’, spreading a message that ultimately undermines temporal power; for, to quote N. T. Wright, if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. And Jesus, a King who knows no borders, rules over a Kingdom that exists most fully at the margins of empire

Many will say that nonviolence is not ‘practical’, not ‘realistic’. But the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from his grave after a death by crufixion was not practical, not realistic. My hope, my life, is in that resurrection. Christ’s resurrection renders the impossible, possible; the fantastic, realistic; the idealistic, pragmatic.

This doesn’t mean that I condemn defensive force in the face of oppression; but there can be no such thing as a ‘just war’, because war ALWAYS fosters things like this. War inevitably leads to civilian casualties, to death and destruction. To quote the position of the United Methodist Church: “We believe war is incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ. We therefore reject war as an instrument of national foreign policy, to be employed only as a last resort in the prevention of such evils as genocide, brutal suppression of human rights, and unprovoked international aggression. We insist that the first moral duty of all nations is to resolve by peaceful means every dispute that arises between or among them; that human values must outweigh military claims as governments determine their priorities; that the militarization of society must be challenged and stopped; that the manufacture, sale, and deployment of armaments must be reduced and controlled; and that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons be condemned. Consequently, we endorse general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” That pretty much sums up my position. If the Body of Christ would stand up to the forces of militaristic nationalism around the world and be the Church like it’s supposed to, most situations that might require legitimate force to prevent further suffering would never have come into existence in the first place. In other words, it may be impossible to condemn force in certain extreme situations, but if we as Christians live the way we’re supposed to, most of those scenarios would never happen.

My faith in nonviolence is not a blind one. It is shared by people of many faiths (such as Ghandi), and backed by scholars who ground it in non-religious research (such as Gene Sharp). Nonviolence is increasingly gaining credibility as an alternative to warfare, killing, and destruction. What Walter Wink has called the ‘Third Way’ of aggressive, creative nonviolence, neither fight nor flight, has proven its worth in situations form the American South to totalitarian communist Poland before its nonviolent revolution. Thus I embrace nonviolence as an active strategy to counter oppression and injustice.

As I wrote about in this post, I wrote on my Selective Service card that I am a conscientious objector. If, God forbid, the US ever reinstates the draft, I will seek to have that designation. But this is not a decision that I can make for anyone else. I have the highest respect for Christians (such as my grandfather) who, weighing these issues, have come to different conclusions about the interplay between Christian faith and military service. I will never condemn Christians who serve in the military, though I will always oppose war. I want to make that very clear: that I have only the highest respect for those who have prayerfully arrived at different beliefs and who put their lives on the line for those beliefs every day.