On Christian Rhetoric and Christian Action

Back in September, while New Orleans recovered from Hurricane Katrina, the nation watched in horror as news reports flowed in of armed gangs roaming the city, looting at will and murdering citizens -- even firing on National Guard troops. The reports were substantially overblown, but while they were still considered valid, I looked around at my gang-ruled barrio and speculated about life in the aftermath of a Katrina-level disaster. I concluded:

I need to buy a gun and to learn how to use it.

This common-sense statement earned me a lot of blowback from commentors. At the time, the reaction deeply irritated me -- not because I thought that they were wrong or rude, but that their outrage was totally disingenuous and insincere. Throughout the history of civilization, including Christian civilization, using force to defend oneself from violence has been the completely accepted norm. Such tradition does not alone justify my decision, but it should protect me from showy displays of feigned outrage, as though my decision was a completely weird and unreasonable conclusion. For example, one commenter named George wrote:

I thought this was a rational faith and politics site - buy guns - my God have you ever read the bible and Jesus? How about Martin Luther KIng? George

John Wilks, too, tore into me good and hard in the comments and on his own blog (although I can't track down his lengthiest post on the subject; John did you take down a post?). Again, the sheer insincerity of the critiques bothered me. But that was because I did not at the time understand Christian pacifism. Christian pacifism isn't about doing particular things, but saying particular things. To the Christian pacifistic movement, one's actual behaviors are unimportant because, as Hauerwas has argued over his career, the purpose of the Church is to proclaim the Kingdom of God, not to actually create it. This low ecclesiology sees heckling as the primary mission of the Church.

Now one can take from the New Testament the understanding that the Christian shouldn't ever use force to defend oneself; turn the other cheek, yada, yada, yada. One can create a Just War Theory, but Occam's Razor suggests that Jesus was proposing an absolute pacifism, both with his words and his actions. So when I advocate the use of force for, well, anything, I'm probably just flat-out disobedient to Christ. At the Last Judgment, he can explain it to me and judge me accordingly.

The difficulty is that none of us are pacifists, including and especially those who claim to be pacifists. My view is premised on this supposition: that there is no moral distinction between:
1. committing an act of violence myself
2. hiring a third party to commit the act of violence on my behalf (e.g. a police force or army)
3. taking full advantage of a third party committing the act of violence on my behalf

John Wilks said that by drawing this distinction, I was creating a "false dilemma":

You are presenting a false dilemma. You assume that anyone who as a Christian is committed to non-violence must be a pacifist as you define pacifism (or as this dictionary or that speaker of whatever.)

Well, if there's a definition of pacifism that doesn't require pacifistic behavior but just pacifistic rhetoric, I can sign on the dotted line. John's definition of Christian pacifism apparently involves many corollaries which allow for the protection of one's family members' lives, but not property and the use of police force, but not one's own personal force. How these many escape clauses can be exegeted from Scripture, I do not know. But to his credit, John's rhetorical gymnastics permit him to be ostensibly obedient to the pacifistic commands of Christ without any actual cost. John merely shifts force over to the "state" side of the moral ledger, permitting him to make use of its protections but assume no responsibility for its actions. A tax lawyer couldn't have done a better job.

John also disapproves of my willingness to use force to defend not just my life, but my property. Jesus said, "Give him your cloak also..." etc. Okay. But the problem is, once you pay the Danegeld, your never get rid of the Dane. Give the to thief the Sudentenland, and next he'll take Czechoslovakia. Give him your stereo, and he'll come back for your food. Give him your food, he'll come back for your life. Eventually, the crocodile will eat you, regardless of your attempts to appease it. So handing over my stereo but saying "Go no further" doesn't work.

But pacifism isn't concerned with ends, but means. The consequences of decisions are less important than the means used to reach those ends, if any at all. The result is that pacifism often cannot inform public debate. I've seen this when talking with Dave Warnock, who in June considered the nightmare of Dafur and the need for concern from churches. I responded that I saw a lot of Christians deeply concerned about Dafur, but there was a limit to what we could do to save these people as "churches typically don't have armies." To this, Dave responded:

You know me well enough to know that I don't think armies are the solution to any problem. if armies were the solution then the Garden of Gethsemene would have been a very different place.

After some back and forth, I then asked the obvious question:

How can we stop the genocide in Sudan with other than military force?

Dave never answered. His pacifism prevented him from proposing a military solution, and therefore prevented him from proposing any solution. But then again, his post was entitled "Being Activists...", so perhaps his point wasn't to solve a problem, to be an activist about a problem.

More recently, I outlined at Connexions what I thought was the most practical and reasonable plan for peace between Israel and its neighbors. It was a bit bloody, as it required actions like killing terrorists. Dave found this plan "totally unacceptable". In response, I asked:

Okay, what's your idea for ending the Palestinian mass psychosis which has made them obsessed with wiping Israel off the face of the earth? If there's a better one, I'd like to know it.

Again, Dave never answered the question. This is a common clashing point in pacifist/Just War debates: pacifism can heckle, but not inform the full spectrum of public policy debates. As Mitchell Lewis (himself a professional killbot) put it eloquently:

Anybody can be a loud, hostile critic of our social structures and civic leaders. What happens when the world says (as it did with Constantine), "OK, you think you're so smart, why don't you take the reigns of society awhile." It ain't as easy as it looks.

Indeed not. But pacifists are not fond of exploring the consequences of their perspectives being translated into foreign policy or otherwise think that the resulting consequences are irrelevant to discussions on the validity of pacifism. For a few weeks, I've been chasing Tony Mitchell around the room with the practical consequences of his views in a couple of comment threads over at his blog. Tony took the absolutist view that war is always wrong -- not sometimes, not most of the time, but always wrong. My strategy in this debate was to hold up a particular war as necessary because a pacifistic response would have had catastrophic consequences, and therefore war could not always be wrong. The war I chose was the war launched by the US government in the Spring of 1861 against the newly-independent Confederate States of America. The American Civil War as an optional war. The US could have allowed the CSA to peacefully secede and that would end the military conflict before it began. The downsides would have been (1) a permanently divided America and (2) probably decades before the manumission of black slaves in the Confederacy.

Now if Tony's pacifistic perspective -- that war is always wrong -- had been implemented by the US government in the Spring of 1861, those two downsides would have taken place. This leads to my central question in the thread: In the balance, was the war therefore worth the 2% of the US population that died in the next four years?

Tony had dodged the question, arguing that (a) we shouldn't allow problems like slavery to develop in the first place and (b) the practical implications of enacting pacifism are irrelevant to determining its value.

Sure, it would nice if slavery had never developed in America, nor North and South divided over a long period of time, but how does this perspective offer advice to the Lincoln White House in the Spring of 1861? Likewise it would be nice if Nazism had never developed in Germany, but how does this perspective advise the Allied governments in the Fall of 1939? If pacifism cannot be anything more than a wagging finger saying "I told you so!", then how is the world a better place because of its voice? If absolute pacifism is untranslatable into foreign policy, then why bother listening to it?

But Tony denies that there are any lessons of history to be learned about war. He says that I'm living in the past by speculating about how past events would be different if political actors had been pacifists. This is Tony's way of avoiding inconvenient facts, like that the US government chose well not to permit the CSA to secede and that the Allies in WWII chose well not to lay down their arms and respond in a pacifistic manner to the Nazi hordes.

But again, pacifism is more about saying the right things than doing them. It's a Christianism that is concerned with one's outward appearance to the world God instead of solving problems and making the world a better place. It is a castrated ecclesiology that heckles, rather than contributes; a perspective that whines about problems but offers no solutions. It is a voice crying out in the wilderness, "Waaaaah!"

Cry me a river, pacifists. When the wolf is at the door, I'll grab a shotgun. And you know what? You will, too.

UPDATE: Dr. Joseph Cathey has a hard question for pacifists.