Haeurwas, "HOW MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BECAME NONVIOLENT"

HOW MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BECAME NONVIOLENT

By Stanley Hauerwas

ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS | 8 DEC 2010

KING KNEW THAT THE WILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT SUFFERING WITHOUT RETALIATION MUST BE BASED ON THE CONVICTION THAT THE UNIVERSE IS ON THE SIDE OF JUSTICE.

From ABC's Religion and Ethics page at http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/12/08/3088112.htm

Of all the stupid claims that Christopher Hitchens makes in his God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, surely the stupidest is his claim that on account of the commitment of Martin Luther King Jr to nonviolence, in "no real as opposed to nominal sense ... was he a Christian." Wherever King got his understanding of nonviolence from, argues Hitchens, it simply couldn't have been from Christianity because Christianity is inherently violent.

The best response that I can give to such a claim is turn to that wonderfully candid account of the diverse influences that shaped King's understanding of nonviolence in his Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, and then demonstrate how his Christianity gave these influences in peculiarly Christ-like form.

King reports as a college student he was moved when he read Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience. Thoreau convinced him that anyone who passively accepts evil, even oppressed people who cooperate with an evil system, are as implicated with evil as those who perpetrate it.

Accordingly, if we are to be true to our conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system. In the early stages of the boycott of the buses in Montgomery King drew on Thoreau to help him understand why the boycott was the necessary response to a system of evil.

Thoreau was not the only resource King had to draw on. He had heard A.J. Muste speak when he was a student at Crozer, but while he was deeply moved by Muste's account of pacifism, he continued to think that war, though never a positive good, might be necessary as an alternative to a totalitarian system.

During his studies at Crozer he also traveled to Philadelphia to hear a sermon by Dr Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, who had just returned from a trip to India. Dr. Johnson spoke of the life and times of Gandhi so eloquently King subsequently bought and read books on or by Gandhi.

The influence of Gandhi, however, was qualified by his reading of Reinhold Niebuhr and in particular Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr's argument that there is no intrinsic moral difference between violent and nonviolent resistance left King in a state of confusion.

King's doctoral work made him more critical of what he characterizes as Niebuhr's overemphasis on the corruption of human nature. Indeed King observes that Niebuhr had not balanced his pessimism concerning human nature with an optimism concerning divine nature.

But King's understanding as well as his commitment to nonviolence was finally not the result of these intellectual struggles. No doubt his philosophical and theological work served to prepare him for what he was to learn in the early days of the struggle in Montgomery.

But King's understanding of nonviolence was formed in the midst of struggle for justice, which required him to draw on the resources of the African-American church.

King was, moreover, well aware of how he came to be committed to nonviolence not simply as a strategy but as, in Gandhi's words, his experiment with truth. For example, in an article entitled, "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" for The Christian Century in 1960, King says by being called to be a spokesman for his people, he was:

"driven back to the Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. This principle became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method. The experience of Montgomery did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read. As the days unfolded I became more and more convinced of the power of nonviolence. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life. Many issues I had not cleared up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action."

In the same article King observes that he was also beginning to believe that the method of nonviolence may even be relevant to international relations. Yet he was still under the influence of Niebuhr, or at least at this stage in his thinking he could not escape Niebuhr's language.

Thus, even after he argues that nonviolence is the only alternative we have when faced by the destructiveness of modern weapons, he declares:

"I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism. Moreover, I see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser of evil in the circumstances. Therefore I do not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts."

That would not, however, be his final position. In an article entitled, "Showdown for Nonviolence," that was published after his assassination, King says plainly:

"I'm committed to nonviolence absolutely. I'm just not going to kill anybody, whether it's in Vietnam or here ... I plan to stand by nonviolence because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice but also my dealings with people with my own self. I will still be faithful to nonviolence."

King, the advocate of nonviolence, became nonviolent. Which means it is all the more important, therefore, to understand what King understood by nonviolence.

In a 1957 article for The Christian Century entitled, "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," King developed with admirable clarity the five points that he understood to be central to Gandhi's practice of nonviolent resistance. The next year saw the publication ofStride Toward Freedom, in which he expanded the five points to six.

The six points of emphasis are: (1) that nonviolent resistance is not cowardly but is a form of resistance; (2) that advocates of nonviolence do not want to humiliate those they oppose; (3) that the battle is against forces of evil not individuals; (4) that nonviolence requires the willingness to suffer; (5) that love is central to nonviolence; and, finally, (6) that the universe is on the side of justice.

Though these points of emphasis are usefully distinguished, they are clearly interdependent. This is particularly apparent given King's stress in Stride Toward Freedom that nonviolence requires the willingness to accept suffering rather than to retaliate against their enemies.

King approvingly quotes Gandhi's message to his countrymen - "Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood" - and then asks what could possibly justify the willingness to accept but never inflict violence. He answers that such a position is justified "in the realization that unearned suffering is redemptive."

King identified Gandhi as the primary source of his understanding of the "method" and "philosophy of nonviolence." But he could not help but read Gandhi through the lens of the gospel, as his use of the word "redemption" makes clear.

Gandhi read Tolstoy, who convinced him not only that the Sermon on the Mount required nonviolence, but equally importantly, Gandhi says he learned from Tolstoy that the willingness to suffer wrong is finally a more powerful force than violence.

Gandhi's understanding of satyagraha, the belief that truth and suffering have the power to transform one's opponent, was Gandhi's way to translate Tolstoy in a Hindu idiom.

King read Gandhi and learned as a Christian how to read the Sermon on the Mount or, put more accurately, he learned to trust the faith of the African-American church in Jesus to sustain the hard discipline of nonviolence. In King's own words:

"It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than the doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negro to protest with the creative weapon of love. As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in is struggle for freedom."

Gandhi's "method," moreover, gave King what he needed to challenge Niebuhr's argument that a strong distinction must be drawn between nonresistance and nonviolent resistance.

Niebuhr had argued that Jesus's admonition not to resist the evildoer in Matthew 5:38-42 means any attempt to act against evil is forbidden. Niebuhr, therefore, maintained that Gandhi's attempt to use nonviolence for political gains was really a form of coercion.

Through his study of Gandhi, King says he learned that Niebuhr's position involved a serious distortion because:

"true pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart."

King is quite well aware that such a commitment entails a massive metaphysical proposal. The willingness to accept suffering without retaliation must be based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.

King acknowledges that there are devout believers in nonviolence who find it difficult to believe in a personal God, but "even these persons believe in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness." For King, however, it is the cross that is:

"the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is the symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation."

Love, therefore, becomes the hallmark of nonviolent resistance requiring that the resister not only refuse to shoot his opponent but also refuse to hate him. Nonviolent resistance is meant to bring an end to hate by being the very embodiment of agape.

King seemed never to tire of an appeal to Anders Nygren's distinction between eros, philia, and agape to make the point that the love that shapes nonviolent resistance is one that is disciplined by the refusal to distinguish between worthy and unworthy people.

Rather agape begins by loving others for their own sake, which requires that we "have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution."

Such a love means that nonviolent resistance seeks not to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win a friend. The protests that may take the form of boycotts and other non-cooperative modes of behavior are not ends in themselves, but rather attempts to awaken in the opponent a sense of shame and repentance.

The end of nonviolent resistance is redemption and reconciliation with those who have been the oppressor. Love overwhelms hate, making possible the creation of a beloved community that would otherwise be impossible.

Accordingly nonviolent resistance is not directed against people but against forces of evil. Those who happen to be doing evil are as victimized by the evil they do as those who are the object of their oppression.

From the perspective of nonviolence King argued that the enemy is not the white people of Montgomery, but injustice itself. The object of the boycott of the buses was not to defeat white people, but to defeat the injustice that mars their lives.

The means must therefore be commensurate with the end that is sought. For the end cannot justify the means, particularly if the means involve the use of violence, because the "end is preexistent in the means." This is particularly the case if the end of nonviolence is the creation of a "beloved community."

It should now be apparent why nonviolent resistance is "not a method for cowards; it does resist." There is nothing passive about nonviolence since it requires active engagement against evil.

Courage is required for those who would act nonviolently, but it is not the courage of the hero. Rather it is the courage that draws its strength from the willingness to listen.

For the willingness to listen is the necessary condition for the organization necessary for a new community to come into existence. A people must exist whose unwillingness to resort to violence creates imaginative and creative modes of resistance to injustice.

King learned not only what nonviolence is but to be nonviolent because he saw how nonviolence gave a new sense of worth to those who followed him in Montgomery. Stride Toward Freedom begins, therefore, with the lovely observation that though he must make frequent use of the pronoun "I" to tell the story of Montgomery, it is not a story in which one actor is central.

Rather it is the "chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

King's account of nonviolence reflected what he learned through the struggle in Montgomery. He never wavered from that commitment. If anything the subsequent movement in Birmingham, the rise of Black Power, and the focus on the poor only served to deepen his commitment to nonviolence.

But these later developments also exposed challenges to his understanding of the practice of nonviolence that should not be avoided, and to which I will turn in my next article (which can be read here).

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His most recent book is Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Eerdmans, 2010). In 2001 he was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine.

SEE ALSO

• Related Story: The Dilemma of Martin Luther King Jr, ABC Religion and Ethics,  10/12/2010 14:42
• Related Story: The sacrifices of war, ABC Religion and Ethics,  11/11/2010 12:55
• Related Story: War as the Sacrifice of the Refusal to Kill, ABC Religion and Ethics,  12/11/2010 11:11
• Related Story: The Sacrifice of Christ and the Sacrifices of War, ABC Religion and Ethics,  14/11/2010 09:00
• Related Story: Naming God, ABC Religion and Ethics,  24/09/2010 14:19
• Related Story: Just how realistic is just war?, ABC Religion and Ethics,  27/10/2010 13:03
• Related Story: Why war is a moral necessity

10 Minutes with … Stanley Hauerwas

From Religion News Service Blog at religionnews.com

(RNS1-NOV4) Ethicist Stanley Hauerwaus is an expert on just war theory and believes Christians have been too passive about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For use with RNS-TEN-MINUTES, transmitted Nov. 4, 2009. Religion News Service photo courtesy of Duke Divinity Schoo.

November 4, 2009

NEWS FEATURE

10 Minutes with … Stanley Hauerwas

By Kevin Eckstrom

DURHAM, N.C. (RNS) Remember that book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”? Let’s just say that Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has been hugely influential, but that doesn’t mean his salty tongue has made him a lot of friends along the way.

Hauerwas, a self-described Christian pacifist, is an expert on just war theory. As Hauerwas sees it, not only did Iraq and Afghanistan fail to meet the criteria of a just war, but neither did World War II. Now, as the Obama administration weighs its options in Afghanistan, Hauerwas remains decidedly pessimistic not only about American prospects, but also American morality.

Hauerwas, 69, talked about his view on war and peace, his dismal assessment about the state of America’s churches, and why President Obama isn’t likely to come calling. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What should President Obama do about Afghanistan?

A: Afghanistan was understood to be part of the war against terror, and that was a decisive mistake because as soon as you said we are at war, you gave Osama bin Laden what he wanted—he became a warrior, and not just a murderer. I would be much happier with a whole reconsideration of our involvement there—not as a war, but as a police function, and how the police might intervene to arrest bin Laden. I know that sounds utopian, but just try thinking you’re going to win a war in Afghanistan. I can’t imagine anything more utopian than that. Ask the British. Ask the Russians. It’s never going to happen.

Q: With seven years of hindsight, was Afghanistan ever a just war?

A: Afghanistan has the possibility of being limited in a way that might make it a bit more justifiable, but it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.

Q: How would you assess the church’s response to the Iraq war?

A: Awful. Christians—and it started with Sept. 11, as soon as we said we are at war—Christians said “that’s us.” We never asked the hard questions about the war on terror, and that is, I think, why Iraq happened. It has everything to do with the inability to distinguish between the Christian “we” and the American “we.”

Q: So does the church need a service of repentance?

A: The church has lost its ability to be a disciplined community because we’re now, religiously, in a buyer’s market. Christianity has to bill itself as very good for your self-realization, and that’s killing us because we’re not very good for your self-realization. We’re good for your salvation, which is not the same thing. Hopefully God is making sure that we’re not going to survive in the position we’re currently in.

Q: What kinds of questions should be we asking now about Afghanistan?

A: We need to ask them to tell us the truth. Tell us that we’re engaged in an unwinnable business here, but we have these kinds of political stakes and we want to achieve those, and people are going to die for ambiguous political ends. Just tell us the truth.

Q: What should be the church’s role in the debate over Afghanistan?

A: Let’s start with people in our congregations who are connected with the military, and ask them how they can justify that. Let’s start there. I have high regard for people in the military, but very seldom are they asked to justify what they’re doing.

Q: So every Christian is called to be a pacifist?

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: So how do you respond to people who say that’s unrealistic?

A: Try lifelong monogamous fidelity in marriage. Do you think that’s realistic? Yet we do it. I’m not terribly cowed by the charge of being unrealistic.

Q: If Obama were to call you for advice on Afghanistan, what would you say?

A: I’d say you have to tell the American some really hard truths, namely that the war on terror was a mistake and we’ve got to start, as Americans, learning to live in a world that we don’t control. That’s not going to make you very popular.

Q: So you’d be politically toxic to the president of the United States?

A: Yeah, I would be. Just like (former Obama pastor) Jeremiah Wright. I hope I’m absolutely as toxic as Jeremiah Wright.

Q: Why?

A: Because I think what I’m saying is what Christians should be saying.

Q: The hard truths?

A: Absolutely.

Are we about to go to war against Iran?

Wow, is this really going to happen .... what is GWB doing?

Report: U.S. "Preparing the Battlefield in Iran"

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has launched a "significant escalation" of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country's nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic's government, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

An Iranian flag flies outside the building containing the reactor of Bushehr nuclear power plant, south of Tehran.

White House, CIA and State Department officials declined comment on Hersh's report, which appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Hersh told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that Congress has authorized up to $400 million to fund the secret campaign, which involves U.S. special operations troops and Iranian dissidents.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have rejected findings from U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran has halted a clandestine effort to build a nuclear bomb and "do not want to leave Iran in place with a nuclear program," Hersh said.

"They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program," Hersh said.

The new article, "Preparing the Battlefield," is the latest in a series of articles accusing the Bush administration of preparing for war with Iran.

He based the report on accounts from current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. Watch Hersh discuss what he says are the administration's plans for Iran

"As usual with his quarterly pieces, we'll decline to comment," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told CNN.

"Bush's War" on Frontline

This is a MUST WATCH!..

You can view it on PBS, or on PBS Online, HERE.

Hidden Costs of War

This article in the New York Times is important, and also disturbing .. and points out just one of the most dramatic of the many hidden costs of (perpetual?) war:

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles

By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Published: January 13, 2008

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army....

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven”....

Read it all HERE.

merton on nonviolence

I could quote Thomas Merton every day of the year, ... there is so much there for the picking, the following quote was on the "God's Politics" blog ... and I am very aware of how much we need to re-examine and lift up some theologies of nonviolence, of peacemaking, and reconciliation as it seems war is becoming more and more entrenched. We seem to be reaching a point of nearly perpetual war in the Middle East and elsewhere. Merely singing, "ain't goin' to study war no more" will not be enough, and church people need to grapple with the complexities of war in this 21st century. I commend Rowan Williams' book, "The Truce of God" which takes a thoughtful, full, deep and complex approach to war, peacemaking, and issues today. I will write on Williams' book in a later post, but until then, here is Thomas Merton's quote:

Very often people object that nonviolence seems to imply passive acceptance of injustice and evil and therefore that it is a kind of cooperation with evil. Not at all. The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance... But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evil-doer but at evil in its source.

- Thomas Merton
from Passion For Peace

Stanley Hauerwas on September 11

From Duke.edu a campus reflects on September 11th


Stanley Hauerwas


September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response


I want to write honestly about September 11, 2001. But it is not easy. Even now, some months after that horrible event, I find it hard to know what can be said or, perhaps more difficult, what should be said. Even more difficult, I am not sure for what or how I should pray. I am a Christian. I am a Christian pacifist. Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if I were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist. But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of terror? Pray for peace? I have no use for sentimentality.

Indeed some have suggested pacifists have nothing to say in a time like the time after September 11, 2001. The editors of the magazine First Things assert that “those who in principle oppose the use of military force have no legitimate part in the discussion about how military force should be used.”¹ They make this assertion because according to them the only form of pacifism that is defensible requires the disavowal by the pacifist of any political relevance. That is not the kind of pacifism I represent. I am a pacifist because I think nonviolence is the necessary condition for a politics not based on death. A politics that is not determined by the fear of death means no strong distinction can be drawn between politics and military force.

Yet I cannot deny that September 11, 2001, creates and requires a kind of silence. We desperately want to “explain” what happened. Explanation domesticates terror, making it part of “our” world. I believe attempts to explain must be resisted. Rather, we should learn to wait before what we know not, hoping to gain time and space sufficient to learn how to speak without lying. I should like to think pacifism names the habits and community necessary to gain the time and place that is an alternative to revenge. But I do not pretend that I know how that is accomplished.

Yet I do know that much that has been said since September 11, 2001, has been false. In the first hours and days following the fall of the towers, there was a stunned silence. President Bush flew from one safe haven to another, unsure what had or was still to happen. He was quite literally in the air. I wish he might have been able to maintain that posture, but he is the leader of the “free world.” Something must be done. Something must be said. We must be in control. The silence must be shattered. He knew the American people must be comforted. Life must return to normal.
So he said, “We are at war.” Magic words necessary to reclaim the everyday. War is such normalizing discourse. Americans know war. This is our Pearl Harbor. Life can return to normal. We are frightened, and ironically war makes us feel safe. The way to go on in the face of September 11, 2001, is to find someone to kill. Americans are, moreover, good at killing. We often fail to acknowledge how accomplished we are in the art of killing. Indeed we, the American people, have become masters of killing. In our battles, only the enemy has to die. Some in our military are embarrassed by our expertise in war making, but what can they do? They are but following orders.

So the silence created by destruction was soon shattered by the need for revenge—a revenge all the more unforgiving because we cannot forgive those who flew the planes for making us acknowledge our vulnerability. The flag that flew in mourning was soon transformed into a pride-filled thing; the bloodstained flag of victims transformed into the flag of the American indomitable spirit. We will prevail no matter how many people we must kill to rid ourselves of the knowledge Americans died as victims. Americans do not die as victims. They have to be heroes. So the stock trader who happened to work on the seventy-second floor becomes as heroic as the policemen and the firemen who were doing their jobs. No one who died on September 11, 2001, gets to die a meaningless death. That is why their deaths must be revenged.

I am a pacifist, so the American “we” cannot be my “me.” But to be alienated from the American “we” is not easy. I am a neophyte pacifist. I never really wanted to be a pacifist. I had learned from Reinhold Niebuhr that if you desire justice you had better be ready to kill someone along the way. But then John Howard Yoder and his extraordinary book The Politics of Jesus came along. Yoder convinced me that if there is anything to this Christian “stuff,” it must surely involve the conviction that the Son would rather die on the cross than for the world to be redeemed by violence. Moreover, the defeat of death through resurrection makes possible as well as necessary that Christians live nonviolently in a world of violence. Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but rather the way Christians must live in a world of violence. In short Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.

But what does a pacifist have to say in the face of the terror September 11, 2001, names? I vaguely knew when I first declared I was a pacifist that there might be some serious consequences. To be nonviolent might even change my life. But I do not really think I understood what that change might entail until September 11. For example after I declared I was a pacifist, I quit singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” I will stand when it is sung, particularly at baseball games, but I do not sing. Not to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” is a small thing that reminds me that my first loyalty is not to the United States but to God and God’s church. I confess it never crossed my mind that such small acts might over the years make my response to September 11 quite different from that of the good people who sing “God Bless America”—so different that I am left in saddened silence.

That difference, moreover, haunts me. My father was a bricklayer and a good American. He worked hard all his life and hoped his work would not only support his family, but also make some contribution to our common life. He held a war-critical job in World War II, so he was never drafted. Only one of his five bricklaying brothers was in that war, but he was never exposed to combat. My family was never militarized, but as Texans they were good Americans. For most of my life I, too, was a good American, assuming that I owed much to the society that enabled me, the son of a bricklayer, to gain a Ph.D. at Yale—even if the Ph.D. was in theology.

Of course there was Vietnam. For many of us Vietnam was extended training necessary for the development of a more critical attitude toward the government of the United States. Yet most of us critical of the war in Vietnam did not think our opposition to that war made us less loyal Americans. Indeed the criticisms of the war were based on an appeal to the highest American ideals. Vietnam was a time of great tension, but the politics of the antiwar movement did not require those opposed to the war to think of themselves as fundamentally standing outside the American mainstream. Most critics of Vietnam (just as many that now criticize the war in Afghanistan) based their dissent on their adherence to American ideals that they felt the war was betraying. That but indicates why I feel so isolated even among the critics of the war in Afghanistan. I do not even share their allegiance to American ideals.
So I simply did not share the reaction of most Americans to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Of course I recoil from murder on such a scale, but I hope I remember that one murder is too many. That Americans have hurried to call what happened “war” strikes me as self-defeating. If this is war, then bin Laden has won. He thinks he is a warrior not a murderer. Just to the extent the language of war is used, he is honored. But in their hurry to call this war, Americans have no time for careful discriminations.

Where does that leave me? Does it mean, as an estranged friend recently wrote me, that I disdain all “natural loyalties” that bind us together as human beings, even submitting such loyalties to a harsh and unforgiving standard? Does it mean that I speak as a solitary individual, failing to acknowledge that our lives are interwoven with the lives of others, those who have gone before, those among whom we live, those with whom we identify, and those with whom we are in Christian communion? Do I refuse to acknowledge my life is made possible by the gifts of others? Do I forsake all forms of patriotism, failing to acknowledge that we as a people are better off because of the sacrifices that were made in World War II? To this I can only answer, “Yes.” If you call patriotism “natural,” I certainly do disavow that connection. Such a disavowal, I hope, does not mean I am inattentive to the gifts I have received from past and present neighbors.

In response to my friend I pointed out that because he, too, is a Christian I assumed he also disdained some “natural loyalties.” After all he had his children baptized. The “natural love” between parents and children is surely reconfigured when children are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. Paul says:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.²

Christians often tend to focus on being united with Christ in his resurrection, forgetting that we are also united with him in his death. What could that mean if it does not mean that Christians must be ready to die, indeed have their children die, rather than betray the Gospel? Any love not transformed by the love of God cannot help but be the source of the violence we perpetrate on one another in the name of justice. Such a love may appear harsh and dreadful from the perspective of the world, but Christians believe such a love is life-giving not life-denying.

Of course living a life of nonviolence may be harsh. Certainly you have to imagine, and perhaps even face, that you will have to watch the innocent suffer and even die for your convictions. But that is no different from those that claim they would fight a just war. After all, the just warrior is committed to avoiding any direct attack on noncombatants, which might well mean that more people will die because the just warrior refuses to do an evil that a good may come. For example, on just-war grounds the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were clearly murder. If you are serious about just war, you must be ready to say that it would be better that more people died on the beaches of Japan than to have committed one murder, much less the bombing of civilian populations.

This last observation may suggest that when all is said and done, a pacifist response to September 11, 2001, is just one more version of the anti-American sentiments expressed by what many consider to be the American Left. I say “what many consider” because it is very unclear if there is a Left left in America. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the support to the war on terrorism given by those who identify as the “Left.” Yet much has been made of the injustice of American foreign policy that lends a kind of intelligibility to the hatred given form on September 11. I am no defender of American foreign policy, but the problem with such lines of criticism is that no matter how immoral what the American government may have done in the world, such immorality cannot explain or justify the attack on the World Trade Center.

American imperialism, often celebrated as the new globalism, is a frightening power. It is frightening not only because of the harm such power inflicts on the innocent, but because it is difficult to imagine alternatives. Pacifists are often challenged after an event like September 11 with the question, “Well, what alternative do you have to bombing Afghanistan?” Such a question assumes that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. My only response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better—a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.

Indeed I fear that absent a countercommunity to challenge America, bin Laden has given Americans what they so desperately needed—a war without end. America is a country that lives off the moral capital of our wars. War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives we lead are worthy of such sacrifices. They kill and die to protect our “freedom.” But what can freedom mean if the prime instance of the exercise of such freedom is to shop? The very fact that we can and do go to war is a moral necessity for a nation of consumers. War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the “American way of life.”

What a gift bin Laden has therefore given America. Americans were in despair because we won the cold war. Americans won by outspending the USSR, proving that we can waste more money on guns than they can or did. But what do Americans do after they have won a war? The war was necessary to give moral coherence. We had to cooperate with one another because we were at war. How can America make sense of what it means for us to be “a people” if we have no common enemy? We were in a dangerous funk having nothing better to do than entertain ourselves with the soap opera Bill Clinton was. Now we have something better to do. We can fight the war against terrorism.

The good thing, moreover, about the war on terrorism is it has no end, which makes it very doubtful that this war can be considered just. If a war is just, your enemy must know before the war begins what political purpose the war is to serve. In other words, they need to know from the beginning what the conditions are if they choose to surrender. So you cannot fight a just war if it is “a war to end all wars” (World War I) or for “unconditional surrender” (World War II). But a “war on terrorism” is a war without limit. Americans want to wipe this enemy off the face of the earth. Moreover, America even gets to decide who counts and does not count as a terrorist.

Which means Americans get to have it any way they want it. Some that are captured, for example, are prisoners of war; some are detainees. No problem. When you are the biggest kid on the block, you can say whatever you want to say, even if what you say is nonsense. We all know the first casualty in war is truth. So the conservatives who have fought the war against “postmodernism” in the name of “objective truth,” the same conservatives that now rule us, assume they can use language any way they please.

That Americans get to decide who is and who is not a terrorist means that this is not only a war without clear purpose, but also a war without end. From now on we can be in a perpetual state of war. America is always at her best when she is on permanent war footing. Moreover, when our country is at war, it has no space to worry about the extraordinary inequities that constitute our society, no time to worry about poverty or those parts of the world that are ravaged by hunger and genocide. Everything—civil liberties, due process, the protection of the law—must be subordinated to the one great moral enterprise of winning the unending war against terrorism.

At the heart of the American desire to wage endless war is the American fear of death. The American love of high-tech medicine is but the other side of the war against terrorism. Americans are determined to be safe, to be able to get out of this life alive. On September 11, Americans were confronted with their worst fear—a people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments. Some speculate such people must have chosen death because they were desperate or, at least, they were so desperate that death was preferable to life. Yet their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to September 11 to shop.

Ian Buruma and Vishai Margalit observe in their article “Occidentalism” that lack of heroism is the hallmark of a bourgeois ethos.³ Heroes court death. The bourgeois is addicted to personal safety. They concede that much in an affluent, market-driven society is mediocre, “but when contempt for bourgeois creature comforts becomes contempt for life itself you know the West is under attack.” According to Buruma and Margalit, the West (which they point out is not just the geographical West) should oppose the full force of calculating antibourgeois heroism, of which Al-Qaeda is but one representative, through the means we know best—cutting off their money supply. Of course, Buruma and Margalit do not tell us how that can be done, given the need for oil to sustain the bourgeois society they favor.

Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based on the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we seldom are faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in a.d. 33.
Mark and Louise Zwick, founders of the Houston Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, embody the life made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They know, moreover, that Christian nonviolence cannot and must not be understood as a position that is no more than being “against violence.” If pacifism is no more than “not violence,” it betrays the form of life to which Christians believe they have been called by Christ. Drawing on Nicholas Berdyaev, the Zwicks rightly observe that “the split between the Gospel and our culture is the drama of our times,” but they also remind us that “one does not free persons by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them: one frees persons by attaching them to their destiny.” Christian nonviolence is but another name for the friendship we believe God has made possible and constitutes the alternative to the violence that grips our lives.

I began by noting that I am not sure for what I should pray. But prayer often is a form of silence. The following prayer I hope does not drown out silence. I wrote the prayer as a devotion to begin a Duke Divinity School general meeting. I was able to write the prayer because of a short article I had just read in the Houston Catholic Worker by Jean Vanier.⁴ Vanier is the founder of the L’arche movement—a movement that believes God has saved us by giving us the good work of living with and learning to be friends with those the world calls retarded. I end with this prayer because it is all I have to give.

Great God of surprise, our lives continue to be haunted by the spectre of September 11, 2001. Life must go on and we go on keeping on—even meeting again as the Divinity School Council. Is this what Barth meant in 1933 when he said we must go on “as though nothing has happened”? To go on as though nothing has happened can sound like a counsel of despair, of helplessness, of hopelessness. We want to act, to do something to reclaim the way things were. Which, I guess, is but a reminder that one of the reasons we are so shocked, so violated, by September 11 is the challenge presented to our prideful presumption that we are in control, that we are going to get out of life alive. To go on “as though nothing has happened” surely requires us to acknowledge you are God and we are not. It is hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather he came to make us disciples, citizens of your new age, a kingdom of surprise. That we live in the end times is surely the basis for our conviction that you have given us all the time we need to respond to September 11 with “small acts of beauty and tenderness,” which Jean Vanier tells us, if done with humility and confidence “will bring unity to the world and break the chain of violence.” So we pray give us humility that we may remember that the work we do today, the work we do every day, is false and pretentious if it fails to serve those who day in and day out are your small gestures of beauty and tenderness.

Notes

1 “In a Time of War,” First Things (December 2001).
2 Romans 6:3–5.
3 New York Review of Books, January 17, 2002, 4–7.
4 “L’arche Founder Responds to Violence,” Houston Catholic Worker, November 16, 2001.

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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101:2, Spring 2002.
Copyright � 2002 by Duke University Press.