The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the focus of this issue of Sojourners, is the most pervasive historic fact of our time. In the United States, it has served to justify a permanent wartime economy, blacklisting and surveillance of dissenters, and military interventions against smaller and weaker nations from Vietnam to Nicaragua. In the Soviet Union it has been used to excuse a permanent state of economic austerity, the imprisonment and torture of dissenters, and military interventions from Hungary to Afghanistan. And on both sides the Cold War has provided the ideological underpinning and political momentum for a nuclear arms race that threatens the future of the entire human family.
The dramatic failure of the Reykjavik summit brought this reality home once again. The summit presented an opportunity to turn onto the path of political accommodation and coexistence. But the U.S. government rejected that prospect in favor of continuing military competition and hostility.
As the summit made clear, the greatest single obstacle to peace at this time is the Reagan administration's ironclad commitment to the Star Wars program. In the three years since he first announced it, President Reagan has promoted the Star Wars scheme with messianic intensity and clung to its promises with undying faith in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. And the president's zealous faith is proving itself contagious among the American people.
Ultimately, Star Wars is a religious and theological issue. It holds out the promise of god-like creatures in the heavens to protect us from the consequences of our own sins. In so doing it asks us to put our ultimate faith and trust in the technological products of human minds and hands.
It promises a nuclear "cheap grace" that would absolve us of the responsibility to be reconciled with our adversaries. It is no surprise that the publicity campaigns for Star Wars have been aimed especially at the religious community or that the Star Wars cause has been taken up with such enthusiasm by the religious Right.
THUS FAR PUBLIC opposition to the Star Wars program has focused primarily on its technical feasibility (or lack thereof) and its staggering financial cost. Those are important points and must continue to be pressed. The witness of thousands of scientists who have pledged not to work on Star Wars research has been especially powerful. But there is a special need now for a new level of visible public opposition to the Star Wars scheme from the American churches.
As Christians our faith, security, and hope for a peaceful world can only be placed in the one true God, who is the creator and sustainer of all life and the Lord of history. The first and most essential commandment forbids us to trust the fate of God's earth and generations unborn to the creations of finite, fallible, and fallen human beings.
Throughout the scriptures, we are reminded that peace comes not through amassing military strength and technology but through following in God's ways. Real peace and security can only come through acknowledging the humanity of our enemies, seeking reconciliation with all peoples, and doing justice to the poor and oppressed. Our only escape from total destruction lies in turning from our old ways and going in a whole new direction of peace and cooperation.
In our discussions here at Sojourners, we have come to believe that the 1987 Peace Pentecost celebration, on June 7, 1987, would be an appropriate time for local churches and Christian communities to call the nation away from Star Wars and toward the ways of peace.
On the first Pentecost, when the disciples received the Holy Spirit, they were empowered to leave their hiding place and go into the streets and public squares of Jerusalem proclaiming Christ's victory over death. On that day peoples of different nations were reconciled and a new community of peacemakers was born. For the past five years, a growing number of churches and Christian communities across the United States have taken up the tradition of Peace Pentecost as an occasion to make the Pentecost message of reconciliation concrete in our time and to take that message from the churches into the streets and public places of the land.
This year's Peace Pentecost could be a great and timely occasion for the churches and church leaders to publicly demonstrate our religious opposition to Star Wars and to proclaim a hopeful new vision of peace.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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