Your scapegoat "pacifism": A response to Matthew Schmitz

"The Fog of War"
Matt Hinsta via Flickr/CC license

Yesterday, a deputy editor of First Things, Matthew Schmitz, posted a rather unusual piece...

Our Partial Pacifism - Which starts out with the bold statement, "I am inclined to blame pacifism for our embrace of torture."

I say it's an unusual piece because it took me numerous readings and conversations with a number of (pacifist) friends to figure out just what Schmitz was trying to get at in his brief post. My initial reaction was confusion. Granted, it was early this morning when I started reading it so my coffee hadn't perhaps kicked in yet. But I was profoundly bewildered as to how one could connect the dots of a claim like that, i.e. blaming pacifism for "our" embrace of torture. (The collective "we" obviously being the entire United States of America, which was my first red flag.)

So here's what my friends and I came up with on Schmitz's reasoning:

• There is a utilitarian "ends justify the means" frame being used to discuss torture in the post-9/11, GWOT context, especially now in light of the recent senate report on CIA torture released this week.
• We need a different moral vocabulary to make better judgments about what is and is not just conduct in war. (Implication being that torture is morally wrong, at all times everywhere. Which I of course agree!)
• The Christian just war tradition is one such vocabulary about making sound moral judgments, including that torture is wrong.
• Christian pacifism is a form of moral absolutism ("all war is evil—that it is hell, so we must stay the hell out of it") and is therefore unable to make nuanced moral judgments about action in war.
• While many/most may not embrace pacifism, "we" seem to have generally embraced the "pacifist conclusion" that "all war is hell...so we must stay the hell out of it," including in any and all attempts to make moral judgments about conduct in war.

Therefore, pacifism (albeit a partial one) is to blame for our inability to make nuanced moral judgments about conduct in war. Pardon me for being colloquial and crude, but WTF?

The anarchist genius of restorative justice?

Do "Grandpa" Zehr's lenses have an anarchist tint?
(Dr. Howard Zehr)

One of my abiding interests during and after my time studying at Eastern Mennonite University was the influence of Anabaptist-Mennonite thought and practice in the formation of the modern restorative justice movement, whose "grandfather," Howard Zehr, was my professor and mentor. (I wrote a paper about the subject, which was later published here.)

Howard has gone on record as saying his intellectual formation was influenced in part by the late Mennonite pacifist theologian, John Howard Yoder (to whom Howard was related; gotta love that Swiss-South German Mennonite gene pool!). And while I've never picked Howard's brain about the particulars of this influence, my imagination continues to look for hints and echoes of Yoder's thought in the vision for restorative justice that Howard taught me.

One thing I've picked out that Howard seems to have affirmed in my paper is the Anabaptist suspicion of the state, rooted in the early movement's historical experience of persecution in the 16th century at the hands of magisterial church-state arrangements. This suspicion of the state and its "wielding of the sword"/"carrying out justice" is one thing that  I argue influenced the formation of the restorative justice movement, and is a critique that remains implicit in restorative justice as I've received it. (More importantly and positively, I argued that it was the movement's ecclesial/social imagination that made it possible for Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. in the 1970s to come up with programs that would eventually get called "restorative justice.")

Brethren droning about drones?

Yes, this is a real toy Predator drone.
Read the customer reviews; you'll be glad you did.

A few weeks ago the Mission and Ministry board of the Church of the Brethren issued a resolution against drone warfare. It's on its way to the Annual Conference this summer, where it could potentially be adopted by the highest governing body of our denomination. Until this morning, I hadn't had a chance to read or think this resolution over, but I did so today in conversation with my NuDunker pals over e-mail and also with one of my pastoral mentors.

It's a good resolution, and I deeply resonate with much of what it's about. It makes appeals to Scripture as well as historical statements from the Brethren peace tradition, such statements themselves arising out of particular challenging issues of the past such as the draft in the days before conscientious objector status. It also makes some pretty strong calls upon "districts, congregations, and individual members"within the denomination to wrestle seriously with the issue.

As a pacifist, I've watched with a growing sense of dread at the development of this country's drone warfare program. It's one thing that totally demystified me about Obama in terms of his foreign policy vis-a-vis his predecessors. Drone warfare will soon begin to impact us more locally here in Iowa, as an Air National Guard base in Des Moines is transitioning from flying F-16 fighter jets to piloting drones (not completely unopposed). I have a friend and fellow Brethren who's worked on that base for years, so I'm trying to be pastoral first and foremost here. And yet...

Drone warfare should be deeply troubling for a number of reasons, some of which are illustrated in this excellent piece on what drones are doing to us, as a society:

• Increasing fear in communities (our own, as well as those we're dropping bombs on)
• Increasing impersonal engagements of conflict
• Avoiding the roots of conflicts
• Diminishing key virtues (namely: empathy, solidarity, courage, justice, nonviolent peacemaking)

These points, couched in virtue/human flourishing language, resonate with what I learned in a graduate peacebuilding program. So yes, this resolution is timely and important. But I have a few cautionary notes to strike...

Cap or Katniss? Violence in The Avengers and Hunger Games

It's strange business, being an Anabaptist-Christian pacifist who grew up loving comic books and videogames, both practices that are largely predicated on the myth of redemptive violence. Recently this has been brought to mind by two movies: "The Hunger Games" and "The Avengers." In this post I'll be focusing solely on the movies and not the prior art from which they're being adapted, and this is largely a "viewer response" commentary. Caveat: I'm currently near the end of the entire Hunger Games book trilogy and have a few thoughts that seem relevant from a theopolitical view, so some of what I say toward the end borrows from my having read the fuller story.

[Spoiler notice: I'm not going to give any major plot spoilers here, but I will discuss particulars of scenes and snippets of plot. So if even that counts as a "spoiler" and you have yet to see these movies and plan to, perhaps you shouldn't read on...]

First off, these two movies certainly share the view that violence is a necessary means. Neither espouse any pacifist ethic in any substantive way. What struck me, rather, is how violence functions in each movie and the response it elicited from the theater audiences that I was a part of in each instance.

Chronicles of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence (cont.)

The view from my classroom window; Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

The picture at the right is what I saw every weekday for three weeks, as I taught "Intro to Conflict Transformation" at Meserete Kristos College in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia. One prominent feature of this city is its being host to an Ethiopian air force base, on the opposite side of town from where we were at the college. So oftentimes during class, we would see and hear (and feel) the low-flying fighter jets passing over the college on their way to the landing strip a few miles away.

This is the memory that immediately came to mind when I saw the following story on Global Post...

US building drone bases in East Africa
Drone News: The Obama administration is setting up more drone bases in Ethiopia and Seychelles to target Al Qaeda affiliates in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia.

The emergence of unmanned drones as weapons of war first became deeply troubling to me a few years ago when I saw the PBS Frontline special, Digital Nation, which near the end interviews drone pilots with cozy middle class lives in the US, who go to work in an office and operate computers just like so many other middle class Americans, but they just happened to be flying remote controlled planes halfway around the world, dropping real bombs, killing real people (which have a propensity to kill civilians). I still shudder thinking of that segment. So that the use of drones is spreading to other areas of the globe in the name of the forever war called, "The War on Terror," is an unsettling development.

"World's coming to an end, Newman..."

Reuters photo that's haunted me for 10 years

These words I announced to my colleague, Newman, on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Minutes before I had been sitting at my cubicle desk at a large financial services company in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, where I had been employed only since May. I was 22 years old. I don't recall which came first, my not being able to load pages on the internet or hearing hysterical chatter on my radio from a syndicated shock jock out of Chicago. From the former I remember eventually being able to get half of Yahoo! News' home page to load on my office computer, enough to see a photo of the Manhattan skyline with one of the World Trade Center towers smoking, and a headline indicating it had been struck by a plane. The shock jock, broadcasting from a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, was talking frantically about the possibility of his building being attacked. Something was very, very wrong. My stomach sank, and my head spinning. With what little I knew, I walked over to Newman's desk for my first post-9/11 social interaction: "The world's coming to an end, Newman..."

It's become an annual ritual for Newman and I to touch base on 9/11. (I'll send him a link to this post when it's done.) We usually compare notes on what we're up to in life and how much our kids have grown. It's a moment to remember that, while a certain understanding of the world which we had known certainly did come to an end on Sept. 11, 2001, life itself on planet earth has continued.

So John Howard Yoder, Gene Sharp, and Bashar al-Assad walk into a bar...

...and they all order "Peace."

(Or the boring title: "Christological-theopolitical pacifism and strategic nonviolence in conversation.")

Syrian protests in Washington D.C.
(Photo by Elvert Barnes via Flickr)

On the heels of my intellectual-existential catharsis last week about theology and peacebuilding, I had a conversation with one of my fellow graduate students at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding, Mohammed, who is Syrian. He's been here in the States since last year and has watched with horror and heartbreak over these recent weeks at the events unfolding in his home country, as Bashar al-Assad's regime violently cracks down on protesters. Mohammed referred to this crack-down as "the mowing machine," a grimly apropos metaphor for the ruthless and bloody attacks on protesters which have left a trail of dead. (To which the protesters have not responded with organized violence, unlike rebels in Libya.)

When Mohammed and I spoke, I was in the midst of reading this article: The Syrian revolution as Gene Sharp sees it (GlobalPost), to which I promptly sent him a link, especially after he spoke so glowingly of the scholar and advocate of nonviolent resistance. Sharp's name also came up earlier this year when our peacebuilding program was discussing the revolution in Egypt, which one of our alumni saw up close and personal. As I read through Sharp's reflections on the situation in Syria, it got me thinking about the connections and departures between strategic nonviolence and Christian pacifism.

The spiritual disciplines of being troubled and peaceable

It’s been a troubling year. The Arab Spring protest movements that went (relatively) nonviolently in Egypt have devolved into bloody and protracted conflicts in numerous other countries across the Middle East. Then in early May, the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was killed by the US military and buried at sea, only to return as a 500 foot monster wreaking havoc on the United States. (Okay so that last bit is obviously not true, but the Onion article offers golden social commentary.) As I watched fellow Americans dancing in the streets in early May, I became troubled and began offering theopolitical and pacifist Christian commentary. This commentary was lost on many of my non-Anabaptist friends, both Christian and non. One piece of criticism that I welcomed was that my arguments didn’t allude to or reference Scripture, so I promised my friends to follow up my pacifist grumblings with biblical-theological reflections to help non-Anabaptist, non-pacifist Christians see the world in ways which trouble us as we should be troubled.

Last week I wrapped up a class at Eastern Mennonite Seminary called “Biblical Foundations for Justice and Peace,” taught by Mark Thiessen Nation, one of the leading scholars of influential late 20th century theologian, John Howard Yoder. Mark began the class with something surprising: He showed us a music video by Tom Jones (yes, of “What’s New Pussycat?” fame). As he introduced this video, my Gen-X sensibilities were offended (Tom Jones?!), but I must now say this song is profound...

This song speaks to the ways in which the Lord troubles us and the ways in which humans often resist that movement of God’s Spirit. The church has certainly closed its eyes, “slept too long and...too deep” and not allowed “the tears of (our) brother” to move our hearts. We “let things stand that should not be.” Into this sin-induced coma, God sends dreams, visions, and inspires songs which are “ringing (like) a bell in the back of our mind(s).” Our souls are stirred, we are troubled. And the purpose for this divine disturbance from our slumber? “To make (us) human, to make (us) whole.” In Christian biblical anthropology, Jesus is the true, whole human. Jesus is our vision for fullness of life to which his disciples gravitate toward and invite others into Christ’s “gravitational pull” toward fullness, shalom, life abundant. Which brings us to biblical-theological pacifism...

Anabaptist party-poopers, sports, shopping, and the military

Who's laughing now, Evil Bert?

Last night when the news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed, I was happily asleep. My wife was upstairs working late and so heard the news. When she came down to get ready for bed, she turned the lights on, nudged me, and asked, "Are you going to get up and watch the president's speech?" I groaned quizzically. "Bin Laden's dead," she answered. I pondered this in my half-consciousness. "How do they know?" I groaned, probably incoherently, rolling away from the light and falling back asleep before I could hear her answer.

But I woke this morning remembering what she had told me. We had to pull off a one-car-family maneuver this morning, so I found myself sitting in our car in the parking lot of the city high school where my wife works, waiting for her to come back out to so we could complete the logistical gymnastics with the car. In those intervening thirty minutes, I was curious to hear the news but nervous that it would just make me ill. My reading material was the Bible, so I first made a good faith effort at reading some 1 Samuel, as part of my march through the Old Testament. The chapters I read this morning had to do with Israel desiring a king, the prophet/judge Samuel grumbling about it, God telling him "fine, go ahead with it," and Saul's being anointed and confirmed as Israel's first non-God king. Not surprisingly, Saul goofs up right off the bat.

But my curiosity got the best of me after a few chapters. I closed the Bible and turned on NPR. That lasted for about five minutes and I had to turn it off. A journalist was interviewing a 19 year-old boy at Ground Zero about his "Where you were when bin Laden died" story. (Which is precisely the nature of this very post.) Anyway, this young man, who has lived more than half of his entire life in the post-9/11 shadow of fear cast as the face of Osama bin Laden, was openly emotional, voice wavering and even faltering when chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" rose up in the background. People were described as literally swinging from light-posts near Ground Zero, celebrating the apparent victory in the U.S.'s so-called "war on terror." It was too much for me.

Military porn, military infidelity

Scrolling through my Facebook news feed tonight produced two links that worked together to create quite a series of knots in my Christian pacifist guts...

First, a handful of my family members and friends, all of whom I respect and love, serve in various branches of the United States military. Most, if not all of them would call themselves Christian. One of these men, with whom I've discussed Bonhoeffer and Christian pacifism, posted on his Facebook wall the video which follows the break. I caution against watching the video, which I would classify as "military porn." I reluctantly did so and became very sad at first and then furious at the end, when I heard the quote: "We've all been taught 'Thou shall not kill.' Now hear this: Fuck that shit." Wow. At least they're honest.

Bonhoeffer the assassin?

The face of an assassin?

Check out my theology prof, Mark Thiessen Nation, who has been hard at work with a few colleagues, debunking the myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's involvement in the plots to assassinate Hitler in WWII.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging a Myth, Recovering Costly Grace by Mark Thiessen Nation

• contrary to the prevailing assumptions, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not arrested, imprisoned or executed because of involvement in plots to kill Hitler
• it is more accurate to say that he was arrested, imprisoned and executed because of the grace-filled, costly discipleship about which he wrote and which he consistently lived from 1932 to his death on April 9, 1945

Attendance at this university lecture last Wednesday was high, and the response has been pretty positive. I've heard and read Mark's thoughts on this in a few different places so it wasn't all news to me, but it's certainly worth listening to if you're interested in Christian pacifism, theology, and history.  Sadly, I didn't get to stick around for the whole thing, as I was running out the door to my grandfather's funeral proceedings in Iowa (at which I delivered a tweaked version of my last post, a eulogy for him).

Christian pacifism in the 21st century

Lisa with the late Glen Lapp, in Afghanistan

Lisa Schirch's name has come up before on this blog. She was one of the first professors I studied with upon coming to Eastern Mennonite University over two and a half years ago. Recently having "retired" from her faculty position at EMU, Lisa is now focusing most of her energy on being the director of the 3D Security Initiative, which, according to its website, "(promotes) conflict prevention and peacebuilding investments and strategies in U.S. policymaking." Lisa is a Mennonite, Christian pacifist, yet her work often takes her into the halls of power in Washington, D.C. - where 3D's office is based - and also gets her audience with the military. For the past few years, she's been making trips to Afghanistan to teach peacebuilding and work with local and national issues on the ground there.

For this work and the convictions which fuel it, Lisa is often criticized from all angles. From within her own tradition, fellow Mennonites blast her for working with the military. Anabaptist theologians get nervous that she's not "theological enough" in her peacebuilding work. From fellow Americans outside the Mennonite tradition, she is criticized for her "irresponsible" pacifism, enjoying the freedoms that the State has fought/still fights so hard to secure and maintain. Check out this wonderful confessional and challenging piece that Lisa recently had published, and then read on after the link for some further reflections:

Confessions of a modern day pacifist: What should pacifism look like today?
by Lisa Schirch, in The Mennonite

Progressive-Conservative leapfrog in the national narrative

A few of my peacenik friends on Facebook posted this article from Slate, which I'm thankful for in a sense but also suspicious of.  First, the article:

It's Good To Be King: Don't ridicule Glenn Beck's tribute to MLK. Celebrate it
by William Saletan

I'm thankful for the article because it helps me deal with some of the frustrations I was having with Glenn Beck's rally in D.C. this past weekend. These were small frustrations for me because I was avoiding all media coverage of it like the plague, not wishing to witness the options of either 1) joyful adulation/approval or 2) righteous indignation/fear the media was presenting and hoping to elicit in their loyal customers. This article attempts to cut through those options, which I think it does rather well. The thesis of the article is nicely summed up by the author himself:

This [i.e. Beck's rally] is how conservatives embrace progress. First they resist it. Then they lose to it. Then they assimilate it. They frame it as a fulfillment of longstanding values. They emphasize common threads between reformers and founders. They reinterpret the nation's origins to match the new ethos.

The article does a nice job illustrating how this playing out at the Beck rally, especially in its use of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so helps take a longer sociocultural view of what's going on at this rally, or in the Tea Party movement in general. So read on for why I'm still suspicious...