This has been a very difficult time for Christian peacemakers, for those of us who
believe that following Jesus leads us to the path of nonviolence. Despite the great
challenges to that commitment since the terrorist attacks, I still identify myself as a
Christian peacemaker. But since Sept. 11, I think we have to go deeper in that commitment.
I’ve been part of the peace movement for more than three decades.
But the U.S. government’s "war on terrorism" presents far more difficult
challenges than the other wars and interventions I’ve fought against. In those other
wars—declared and otherwise, from Vietnam to Central America, from Chile to the
Congo—there was no worthy goal to be pursued, and any notion of "defending"
America was nothing but propaganda. In fact, I believe that most American foreign policy
since World War II has been wrong. In the name of anti-communism, the United States
violated its professed values by backing a succession of ugly regimes that killed tens of
thousands of their own people, trampling on every human right we hold dear. Our government
backed the wrong people in South Africa until the very end. We have never really stood up
for Palestinian rights against our ally Israel, and we made the Persian Gulf safe not for
democracy but for our own oil interests. For 50 years, U.S. nuclear weapons policy has
been based on a willingness to exterminate hundreds of millions of people. U.S. weapons
sales have fueled conflicts around the world. Under both Republican and Democratic
presidents, U.S. foreign policy has been morally flawed at its core. That’s what I
believe, and I’ve protested it with 20 arrests in 30 years, all for nonviolent civil
disobedience.
But the current challenge is much more complicated. The Sept. 11
terrorists murdered almost 4,000 people in one day, and they did so with a cruel
intentionality. That those people were civilians mattered nothing to the mass murderers.
While President Bush’s morally simplistic "good vs. evil" rhetoric is
unacceptable (America has hardly been "good," given the above litany of
grievances), an inability to see the stark face of evil in the events of Sept. 11 is a
moral failure. Our postmodern and politically correct world has a hard time naming evil,
but Christians shouldn’t. This was a horrific crime against humanity.
Although I’ve opposed the language and tactics of war in this
campaign against terrorism, the task of preventing further terrorist violence against
innocent people is a very worthy goal, and the self-defense of Americans and other people
is clearly at stake here. If there is a good—and even necessary—purpose in
defeating terrorism, and if the lives of my neighbors and my family are indeed at risk,
how do I respond?
While the terrorists use and manipulate American global injustices to
justify their crimes and to recruit the angry and desperate for their violent purposes,
they have no interest in the global justice and peace that many of us have lived and
fought for—indeed, they are its enemies. Their vision for the world is absolutely
oppressive; they would destroy democracy, deny human rights, repress women, and persecute
people of other faiths and even those of their own religion who disagree with them. Even
worse, they blaspheme the name of God by doing their violent work in the name of religion.
To dismiss them as merely Islamic fundamentalists or marginal extremists is not enough;
these terrorists are educated, well-financed, and coldly calculating ideologues who will
quickly and massively kill whenever it suits their clear purpose—which is taking
power over Islam and the entire Muslim world. We must be realistic at this moment and
confront the fact that terrorists are even now planning further violence against innocent
people, on as massive a scale as their weapons and capacities will allow. They are people
who seem not to be bound by conscience or limits on the destruction they seek.
SO HOW DO WE stop them? How do we prevent them from killing more
innocents? And most poignantly, how do advocates of nonviolence try to stop them? For
nonviolence to be credible, it must answer the questions that violence purports to answer,
but in a better way. I oppose a widening war that bombs more people and countries,
recruiting even more terrorists, and fueling an unending cycle of violence. But those who
oppose bombing must have an alternative.
I’ve advocated the mobilization of the most extensive
international and diplomatic pressure the world has ever seen against bin Laden and his
networks of terror—focusing the world’s political will, intelligence, security,
legal action, and police enforcement against terrorism. The international community must
dry up the terrorists’ financial networks, isolate them politically, discredit them
before an international tribunal, and expose the ugly brutality behind their terror. But
when the international community has spoken, tried and found them guilty, and authorized
their apprehension and incarceration, we will still have to confront the ethical dilemmas
involved in enforcing those measures. The terrorists must be found, captured, and stopped.
This involves using some kind of force.
To accept any use of force is a very difficult thing for those of us
committed to nonviolent solutions. Is any kind of force consistent with nonviolence? If
so, what kind? What limitations are required? What ethical considerations must be brought
to bear?
Since Sept. 11, I’ve talked to a wide range of Christian
peacemakers. Some are delving into Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s painful decision, as a
pacifist, to join the plot to assassinate Hitler. Others are rereading French theologian
Jacques Ellul, who explained his decision to support the resistance movement against
Nazism by appealing to the "necessity of violence" but wasn’t willing to
call such recourse "Christian." Many are going back to Gandhi and asking what he
meant when he said that nonviolent resistance is the best thing, but that violent
resistance to evil is better than no resistance at all.
Some believe that there can be no resistance to terrorism, either
because of American foreign policy sins or because of their principled pacifism. Others
are only willing to deal with "root causes" and continue to oppose
the American foreign policy that, in their view, is behind this terrorism. They point out
the true fact that the United States has been guilty itself of sponsoring or supporting
"state terrorism"—a painful reality I’ve observed most recently in the
Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, occupied by Israeli Defense Forces.
But many practitioners of Christian peacemaking, including me,
can’t accept such a nonresponse to horrific terrorism, despite the history of U. S.
foreign policy. Gandhi said that if a lunatic is loose in the village and threatening the
people, you first deal with the lunatic, and then the lunacy. I believe we must find a way
to deal with the threat of terrorism—a threat that must not be avoided or minimized
by those committed to nonviolence. We cannot turn away from this. But how do we confront
this crisis?
The "just war" theory has been used and abused to justify far
too many of our wars. This crisis should not turn us to the just war theory, but rather to
a deeper consideration of what peacemaking means. In the modern world of warfare, where
far more civilians die than soldiers, war has become ethically obsolete as a way of
resolving humankind’s inevitable conflicts. Indeed, the number of people, projects,
and institutions experimenting in nonviolent methods of conflict resolution has been
growing steadily over the past decade with some promising results.
I AM INCREASINGLY convinced that the way forward may be found in the
wisdom gained in the practice of conflict resolution and the energy of a faith-based
commitment to peacemaking. For example, most nonviolence advocates, even pacifists,
support the role of police in protecting people in their neighborhoods. Perhaps it is time
to explore a theology for global police forces, including ethics for the use of
internationally sanctioned enforcement—precisely as an alternative to war.
Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was engaged in that very task
near the end of his life. He was asking whether those committed to nonviolence might
support the kind of necessary force utilized by police, because it is (or is designed to
be) much more constrained, controlled, and circumscribed by the rule of law than is the
violence of war, which knows few real boundaries. If that is true for the function of
domestic police, how might it be extrapolated to an international police force acting with
the multinational authorization of international law? Yoder’s work in this area was
never completed, but perhaps now it should be. I recently heard New Testament theologian
Tom Wright provocatively suggest that the ethics for global policing possibly might be
extrapolated from Romans 13.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, author of the seminal The Peaceable
Kingdom and other works, says, "I just don’t feel like I’ve found a
voice about all this yet." Hauerwas doesn’t like it when people tell pacifists
to "just shut up and sit down" during a time like this. He believes that
pacifists cannot be expected to have easy policy answers for every difficult political
situation that are often created, in part, by not listening to the voices of nonviolence
in the first place.
Nevertheless, he believes the advocates of nonviolence can and should
offer alternatives that reduce the violence in any conflict. As a professor of ethics, he
is quite willing to call governments to observe the principles of a "just war,"
such as the recognition that soldiers killing each other is morally preferable to soldiers
murdering civilians. And Hauerwas favors the use of international courts and global police
to resolve conflicts. But he doesn’t agree with the conventional wisdom that says
"The world changed on Sept. 11." Hauerwas says, "No, the world changed in
33 A.D. The question is how to narrate what happened on Sept. 11 in light of what happened
in 33 A.D."
Walter Wink, a biblical scholar at Auburn Theological Seminary, offers
a crucial critique of how—in the war against terrorism—the "myth of
redemptive violence" is again being used to try to prove to us how violence can save
us. He remains convinced that it cannot. Nonetheless, he admits to being glad when the
"bad guys" lose in Afghanistan and women, among others, are liberated from
Taliban tyranny. He too would greatly prefer the course of international law and police.
We simply haven’t trained the churches, or anybody else for that matter, in the
crucial theology and practice of active nonviolence, says Wink. That must now become our
priority. Wink would no doubt agree with the approach of Fuller Theological Seminary
professor Glen Stassen, who speaks convincingly of the "transforming
initiatives" that can be taken to reduce violence in any situation of conflict.
Exploring what practical nonviolent initiatives can be undertaken to open up new
possibilities is more important to Stassen than merely reiterating that one doesn’t
believe in violence.
John Paul Lederach, who teaches at Notre Dame and Eastern Mennonite
University, is perhaps doing more to open up those possibilities than any other
contemporary Christian thinker or practitioner of nonviolence. In this terrorism crisis,
he has many creative insights into how a network like bin Laden’s might be de-fanged
and defeated without bombing an entire country. In particular, Lederach speaks of the need
to form "new alliances" with those closest to the "inside" of a
violent situation. In this case, he feels that Islamic fundamentalists who don’t
share the terrorist’s commitment to violence might be the most instrumental group in
defeating them. Undermining violence from within, Lederach feels, can often be more
effective than attacking it from without.
In this crisis, Christians must continue to defend the innocent from
military reprisal, prevent a dangerous and wider war, and oppose the unilateralism of
superpowers. But we must also help stop bin Laden, his networks of violence, and the
threat they pose to everything we love and value. All that presents difficult questions
for peacemakers, but it is a challenge we dare not turn away from.
No one has all the answers. Humility is a good trait for Christian
peacemakers, while self-righteousness is both spiritually inappropriate and politically
self-defeating. This much is clear: Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, not just
peacelovers. That will inevitably call us to face hard questions with no easy
answers. In the end, Christian peacemaking is more a path than a position.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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