Volume 88, No.2, January-February 2002

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Duke Magazine-Faith Fires Back   <prev next >   1 2 3


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.

Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas
portraits by Chris Hildreth

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.

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