Pacifism

"The Deserter" by Boardman Robinson.
First published in "The Masses" by John Simkin

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor

and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray

for those who persecute you, that you may be

children of your Father in heaven."

~Matthew 5:43-45

I was inclined to believe two seemingly related things. One, that we should never repay violence with violence. We should not commit violence at all. And two, that God would never command a person to commit violence.

Now the first I think is very solidly founded on the Gospel. It may seem stupid to have to say this, but you can't LOVE YOUR ENEMY while trying to hurt or kill them! Turning the other cheek and sticking a bayonet in someone's eye are not compatible ideas. I believe that the Gospels state that, at least short of a direct command from God otherwise, one should never commit violence for any reason. Not for war, not for self-defense, not for any reason.

This is a very hard pill to swallow. This is a significant stumbling block. That's probably why almost every branch of the Christian church has chosen to ignore it, and to give its blessing to violence both for self-defense and for war. From a worldly point of view at least, it's really hard to fault them for that. But then that's the problem with the church, it is very accommodating to a worldly point of view. Jesus didn't teach a worldly point of view or else he would have said to love your neighbors and fight your enemies. He said "my Kingdom is not of this world." I take it as given that Jesus never gave people leave to commit violence for their own reasons, however legitimate they may seem. You should count the holiness of your soul as a higher priority than the integrity of your body.

However this post is not about that, actually. It's about the second of the two things I mentioned. Can or would God ever command you to commit violence? Of course if you take the Old Testament seriously, He did so all the time. The Old Testament is full of holy ass-kicking. I don't take the Old Testament nearly as seriously as most Christians: it is a limited and faulty word of God, as versus the perfect word of Jesus. Or at least it was the word of God through a glass and very darkly. As the Gospel of John states, "The Law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (so the Law was neither fully graceful nor truthful.) So I assumed that the answer is no, that God would neither command you to do violence nor condone it.

Some things have changed my mind, however. While I do believe that the Gospels tell us to never commit violence against another person on our own initiative, even for self-defense, I think God has told people to violate that rule. The thing that changed my mind was the life of Joan of Arc. Now with Joan, we must either believe that God never commanded Joan to do anything, or else He did command Joan in fact to lead up the armies of France and go kick some Burgundian butts. And I find it very hard to believe that Joan was hallucinating. This was an illiterate farm girl, who wound up commanding the armies of France and leading them to victory, and who besides showed on many occasions that God was with her. And if God was with her, then He told her to lead men into violence. I believe her, I think she is very credible.

And this is actually a much bigger barrel of fish to open than simply whether on our own initiative we should commit violence or fight back or participate in a war. Jesus' words of nonviolence are in a way much simpler than this if more unworldly. If you believe the condition of your soul is much more important than the condition of your body or whether you continue to live, then Jesus' words are very understandable if contrary to natural human instincts. To then say on top of that, "Well, but God could tell you otherwise under certain circumstances" is much more problematic in a way. This has been my problem from the earliest versions of my Christian faith many years ago: Moses and Joshua did really horrible horrible things to people, really nasty things that they said were at the command of God. Could the God of love, mercy and forgiveness have really commanded them to do that, or were they just going out on their own limb?

For Moses and Joshua, I do not know if God commanded them to do those horrible things. With Joan I feel pretty certain God did tell her to command armies that would rend and tear and murder and slaughter and all the rest. How does that make any sense?

Lets say you were living in 1915, and one fine day God commanded you to go kill a person you didn't even know. The acts which this man had committed were no different from the usual acts a person would commit in World War I, he was not particularly set apart in his evil acts. He was a nobody. He did not seem particularly important enough for God to tell you to go get a gun and go blow his brains out in cold blood. Not to mention that this would likely mean you would go to prison and maybe be executed. You might well go, "God, wtf??" You would have no way of knowing that this man, Adolf Hitler, would go on to create new forms of mass murder unimagined in your world. Forms of horror your time had never yet imagined. Knowing what we know now, we would think that this murder was not only justified, it was pretty much obligatory.

But this is not in fact what happened, which is even stranger. What happened was that Hitler went on to kill 10 million people in concentration camps in addition to millions on the battlefield, and 6 million of those who died in the concentration camps would be God's own nation, the Hebrews. Now what the hell is going on with that? Would the Jews not be right in thinking God had either abandoned them, or didn't exist at all?

I can only assume that the alternative to 6 million dead Jews would have been a hundred million dead somewhere else. That the pointless slaughter at the very dawn of the human capacity for mechanized mass destruction happened to teach us something, to keep us from doing far worse things. Why did America only finally perfect the atom bomb at the very end of the war? To keep us from thinking that we needed to go dropping the things willy-nilly? Two bombs, at the very end of a war which inaugurated mass extermination: a permanent lesson and monument to the horror Man can achieve. I can only speculate. I can only speculate that 6 million Jews died because the alternative would be a hundred million people dying. But that is just a speculation.

I can also only assume that God continually tries to make us all see reason. And that the inauguration of World War Three and the murder of most or all of the world's population would interfere with that mission. And so 10 million died plus the millions who died in the war plus the people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all so that we would not finally destroy ourselves. So that we would have a clear signpost in history: this way leads to the total death of everyone and everything.

Everything had to happen just as it did, and not one iota different, or nobody would be here now, and I would not be typing this. I would never have been born.

So I can judge that God did talk to Joan, but I can't judge what He told her to do, because I don't have that perfect insight into what it takes to save the world from itself. What if Joan had not been told to lead the armies of France? Decades, maybe centuries, of continued war? To save many lives at the cost of some, that is a judgment God can make. It is not a judgment we can make unless like Joan we talk to angels, so unless told differently, a true Christian must not kill. Not for defense, not for war, not for any reason.

If like St. Joan angels tell us differently, then we must do what we must.