On September 11
If you were a pastor of a church right now, what would you be
saying after September 11?
People say that September 11 forever changed the world. That is
false. The year 33 A.D. forever changed the world. September 11
is just one other terrible event in the world's continuing rejection
of the peace God made present through the Resurrection. And therefore,
how Christians narrate this event will be different than how other
people narrate this event.
Christian willingness to kill other Christians in the name of
national loyalty is surely one of the assumptions many Christians
assume is not to be questioned. Yet no assumption has contributed
more to the accommodation of Christianity to secular ways of life
than the presumption that Christians have no problem with war. For
Christians to be nonviolent is not just another political position,
but rather at the very heart of what it means to be Christian, of
what it means to be human. I believe God created all that is with
the desire to be nonviolent. We are not meant to be killers. That
is why we have to be trained to kill. God wants us to be in love
with God and with one another in a manner that our differences challenge
our self-imposed desires. Christians in America have difficulty
responding to September 11 as Christians because we are more American
than we are Christian.
The current identification of God and country is very troubling.
Let me be as clear as I can be--the God of "God and country"
is not the God of Jesus Christ. Yet this is not a development that
began with September 11. One of the issues before American Christianity
is whether the God we worship is the God of Jesus Christ.
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by Chris Hildreth |
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American Christians simply lack the disciplines necessary to discover
how being Christian might make them different. For example, after
the Gulf War, people rightly wanted to welcome the troops home,
so they put yellow ribbons everywhere including the churches. Yet
if the Gulf War was a "just war," that kind of celebration
was inappropriate. In the past when Christians killed in a just
war, it was understood they should be in mourning. They had sacrificed
their unwillingness to kill. Black, not yellow, was the appropriate
color. Indeed, in the past when Christian soldiers returned from
a just war, they were expected to do penance for three years before
being restored to the Eucharist. That we now find that to be unimaginable
is but an indication how hard it is for us to imagine what it might
mean for us to be Christian.
The current outpouring of patriotism, I think, is an indication
of how lonely we are today. We are desperate to be part of some
common endeavor. I am often called a communitarian, but I think
that is a mistaken description. I am not for a rediscovery of community
as an end in itself. Such a rediscovery can be as dangerous as it
can be good. Rather, I try to help myself and others rediscover
what it might mean if the church constituted our primary loyalty.
A lot of us have heard you say these sorts of things before. We
were sort of surprised when you appeared in The New York Times and
you said that we ought to think of this as a police action. Two
questions: First of all, when you say "we," are you now
making policy recommendations? The second question is how do you,
as a pacifist, think about "police action" as opposed
to "military action"?
If I said "we" in The New York Times, it just means
I wasn't thinking, and I was on a linguistic holiday.
Now, I'm not going to let you off the hook that quickly, though,
because clearly the church does not undertake police actions in
that sense.
Right. When I used the "we," I identified with those
who would assume the perspective of the nation-state. I am a pacifist,
but I gladly try to help those who say they want to fight a "just
war." But the "just war" tradition is as demanding
as pacifism. For example, it is by no means clear on just-war grounds
that you can fight a just war against terrorism. Let me be clear.
The people that attacked the World Trade Center clearly wanted to
terrorize Americans. They wanted quite clearly to frighten us, quite
literally, to death. But it is not clear to me, if you are a just
warrior, that it is helpful to call how you respond a "war
on terrorism." What they did was murder. If it is murder, on
just-war grounds, you do not want to kill the perpetrator. You want
to arrest the murderers.
The question then becomes, what kinds of forms of international
cooperation do you need to develop to be able to arrest whoever
you think has been responsible for this? You may not be the arresting
agent yourself. I raise this consideration to help those committed
to just war be imaginative in terms of their own commitments.
"War" is not just "there" if you are serious
about just war. Just war is an attempt to create the institutional
form prior to a war occurring so that, if it occurs, it will be
more likely that war will be just. Now, if a war is not just, what
is it? In several interviews about September 11, I said, "Well,
you know, if the World Trade Center was terrorism, so was Hiroshima
and Nagasaki." There were no great military targets there,
and even worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the firebomb raid
on Tokyo. It was awful; we killed more people in the firebombing
of Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And when I made
that point, reporters said, "Well, that was war." To which
I responded, "Well, you know, you can murder in war."
I want to know on what grounds you use the honorific description
"war" if a war is not just. We think you can distinguish
war from murder--what are the presuppositions that allow you to
think that you can do that? And there's a very important issue of
whether just war is basically a series of exceptions from a general
stance of nonviolence, or whether it assumes that it's always about
justice in a world of war.
That latter presumption assumes war is never an attempt to establish
a world free of war, because if you want justice in the world as
we know it, you've got to be ready to kill somebody. I respect that
position, but then I want to know, what do you mean by the word
"justice"? How can you have justice? What kind of justice
are you talking about in international conflicts? Those things need
to be explored, and they're not being explored. What I think oftentimes
happens is that we get a military and a State Department whose policies
are shaped by geopolitical consideration of realist foreign policy,
and then they want to fight a just war. It's too late. It's too
late, because you've already let yourself be led into the world
in a way in which you say the first responsibility of the president
of the United States is to protect the United States' self-interest.
And what I want to know is how the United States' self-interest
is determined by justice.
continues on page three.
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