Should Americans Turn Over Their Guns to the United Nations?
Jan. 5, 2013
And he [Jesus] said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one (Luke 22:35-36).
These words of Jesus have always been hard sayings for Christian pacifists. Here, Jesus told His disciples to arm themselves. They were to prepare themselves for the time after His crucifixion, when they would travel the highways of the Mediterranean world, bringing the gospel. They were not to go on those roads unarmed. They had a right in God's eyes to defend themselves with the best defensive weapon available: a sword.
In this sense, Jesus articulated the position of Sword Owners of Rome's Empire [SORE].
Jim Wallis will have none of it. He does not like Christians with guns, or anyone with guns except the state. On January 3, he wrote:
And the tragedy in Newtown that hurt us all so deeply, especially so many American parents, does have the capacity to start a national conversation on guns, mental health, and our culture of violence in America. The only way to honor and memorialize the deaths of those 20 precious children is to refuse to allow old special interests to block that conversation and the changes that must come from it. These three issues will be priorities for us this New Year.
He mailed this out on January 3. It arrived in my mail box in the afternoon. But it has no date on the article. You can read it here. At the bottom of the page, we read this: Unless otherwise noted, all material © Sojourners 2012. The webmaster forgot to update the copyright date.
I don't believe that we need a national conversation on guns, mental health, and America's culture of violence. It's clear to me that if this nation is suffering from a culture of violence, as well as people with mental health problems, the wisest course of action for sane people is to buy an extra gun or two, which is what a lot of Americans have been doing ever since Newtown.
THE NEW SOCIAL GOSPEL
Who is Jim Wallis? I have written articles refuting him for over seven years. He has yet to respond. He is just too busy doing book tours, you understand.
He is the most prominent Leftist in the American evangelical world. He favors the welfare state. He has devoted his adult life to proclaiming the Social Gospel inside the walls of a handful of "progressive" evangelical churches, rather than inside the mainline Protestant denominations, which the Social Gospel and theological liberalism have shrunk to the point of invisibility since about 1960, the year John D. Rockefeller, Jr. died. He had bankrolled the Social Gospel for 40 years through his Sealantic Foundation, which shut down about 30 years ago. His father had put up seed money for the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which became the National Council of Churches in 1950.
Wallis is unknown to the millions of evangelicals whom he is trying to convert to the New Social Gospel, which is the old Social Gospel plus evangelism's slogans. On the other hand, he is the darling of the humanist Left. He writes for the Huffington Post. He writes for the Washington Post. The humanist Left uses him to comfort its members in their delusion that the evangelical churches are finally moving from prayer meetings and pot luck suppers to organized protests against federal welfare cuts. They aren't.
Wallis is a spiritual advisor to President Obama, an unofficial office that was held by his predecessor Tony Campolo, who was supposedly Clinton's spiritual advisor. He faded from public view after the Lewinsky scandal, leaving the position open. Wallis has filled it.
He proclaims himself as a defender of non-violence. He is in fact a repeated defender of violence, but by the United Nations Organization or some unnamed equivalent international organization. He thinks that the UN should be an international peacekeeper by force of arms. He likes blue helmets.
WALLIS ON 9-11 AND THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE
In early 2002, in the aftermath of 9-11, he went through a crisis in full public view. He was so appalled by the terrorists, that he took up the call for justice. This meant violence. It was violence of a specific kind: a police action.
First, he had to establish his bona fides as a promoter of nonviolence. He began with a long statement of his credentials.
I've been part of the peace movement for more than three decades. But the U.S. government's "war on terrorism" presents far more difficult challenges than the other wars and interventions I've fought against. In those other wars--declared and otherwise, from Vietnam to Central America, from Chile to the Congo--there was no worthy goal to be pursued, and any notion of "defending" America was nothing but propaganda.
Notice that he failed to mention World War II. Liberals always fail to mention World War II, as well as World War I. Both were fought by Democrat Presidents who had campaigned on a platform of neutrality and peace. When the shooting started, the liberals lined up on the side of war.
But most curious is the absence of any explicit mention of Korea. That was the first war that any American President started without a declaration of war by Congress. Truman called this a police action under the United Nations. He did not originate the phrase. A reporter called it that, and he agreed. Here is the transcript of that exchange.
THE PRESIDENT. Yes, I will allow you to use that. We are not at war. Q. Could you elaborate sir, a little more on the reason for this move, and the peace angle on it?THE PRESIDENT. The Republic of Korea was set up with the United Nations help. It is a recognized government by the members of the United Nations. It was unlawfully attacked by a bunch of bandits which are neighbors of North Korea. The United Nations Security Council held a meeting and passed on the situation and asked the members to go to the relief of the Korean Republic. And the members of the United Nations are going to the relief of the Korean Republic to suppress a bandit raid on the Republic of Korea.
Q. Mr. President, would it be correct, against your explanation, to call this a police action under the United Nations?
THE PRESIDENT. Yes. That is exactly what it amounts to.
Why is this so important? Because this is Wallis' position, as elaborated by the President who created America's national security state -- a man beloved today by the liberal establishment.
Wallis said that he opposed all post-World War II foreign policy.
In fact, I believe that most American foreign policy since World War II has been wrong. In the name of anti-communism, the United States violated its professed values by backing a succession of ugly regimes that killed tens of thousands of their own people, trampling on every human right we hold dear.Under both Republican and Democratic presidents, U.S. foreign policy has been morally flawed at its core. That's what I believe, and I've protested it with 20 arrests in 30 years, all for nonviolent civil disobedience.
This was all about his bona fides. This was necessary for this shift, which was introduced by the mandatory "but."
But the current challenge is much more complicated. The Sept. 11 terrorists murdered almost 4,000 people in one day, and they did so with a cruel intentionality. That those people were civilians mattered nothing to the mass murderers. While President Bush's morally simplistic "good vs. evil" rhetoric is unacceptable (America has hardly been "good," given the above litany of grievances), an inability to see the stark face of evil in the events of Sept. 11 is a moral failure. Our postmodern and politically correct world has a hard time naming evil, but Christians shouldn't. This was a horrific crime against humanity.
I see. A "crime against humanity." I thought it was a crime against 4,000 American citizens, including the passengers. It was a crime committed on American soil, except for Flight 93 over Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which was a crime committed above American soil.
Although I've opposed the language and tactics of war in this campaign against terrorism, the task of preventing further terrorist violence against innocent people is a very worthy goal, and the self-defense of Americans and other people is clearly at stake here. If there is a good--and even necessary--purpose in defeating terrorism, and if the lives of my neighbors and my family are indeed at risk, how do I respond?
He responded with verbiage. He bloviated.
First, he presented them in the worst possible light: they were not liberals.
While the terrorists use and manipulate American global injustices to justify their crimes and to recruit the angry and desperate for their violent purposes, they have no interest in the global justice and peace that many of us have lived and fought for--indeed, they are its enemies. Their vision for the world is absolutely oppressive; they would destroy democracy, deny human rights, repress women, and persecute people of other faiths and even those of their own religion who disagree with them.
These men were really evil.
But there was a major problem in terms of a liberal's theory of justice. They were all dead.
So, he used them as examples. They did not act alone. Well, maybe they did. No one was sure. But they acted as representatives of a dark evil:
Even worse, they blaspheme the name of God by doing their violent work in the name of religion. To dismiss them as merely Islamic fundamentalists or marginal extremists is not enough; these terrorists are educated, well-financed, and coldly calculating ideologues who will quickly and massively kill whenever it suits their clear purpose--which is taking power over Islam and the entire Muslim world. We must be realistic at this moment and confront the fact that terrorists are even now planning further violence against innocent people, on as massive a scale as their weapons and capacities will allow. They are people who seem not to be bound by conscience or limits on the destruction they seek.
Now what? The murderers were all dead but Something Had to Be Done!
This raised difficult questions. Do what? By whom?
SO HOW DO WE stop them? How do we prevent them from killing more innocents? And most poignantly, how do advocates of nonviolence try to stop them? For nonviolence to be credible, it must answer the questions that violence purports to answer, but in a better way. I oppose a widening war that bombs more people and countries, recruiting even more terrorists, and fueling an unending cycle of violence. But those who oppose bombing must have an alternative.
Yes, they did. An alternative was basic. What might this be?
It was time to bloviate.
I've advocated the mobilization of the most extensive international and diplomatic pressure the world has ever seen against bin Laden and his networks of terror--focusing the world's political will, intelligence, security, legal action, and police enforcement against terrorism. The international community must dry up the terrorists' financial networks, isolate them politically, discredit them before an international tribunal, and expose the ugly brutality behind their terror.
If I understand this correctly, there had to be action by "the world." The problem is, "the world" is kind of amorphous. Who, exactly, represented the world?
So, "the world" had to cut off their funding. How? It then had to try them in an unnamed international court.
Then what?
But when the international community has spoken, tried and found them guilty, and authorized their apprehension and incarceration, we will still have to confront the ethical dilemmas involved in enforcing those measures. The terrorists must be found, captured, and stopped. This involves using some kind of force.
Ah, there's the rub. What kind of force? Imposed by whom? Under which legal authorization?
To accept any use of force is a very difficult thing for those of us committed to nonviolent solutions. Is any kind of force consistent with nonviolence? If so, what kind? What limitations are required? What ethical considerations must be brought to bear?
This is difficult indeed. The question was, at this point: What is an ethically correct solution to this difficult problem? Wallis did not know. So he asked around.
Since Sept. 11, I've talked to a wide range of Christian peacemakers. Some are delving into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's painful decision, as a pacifist, to join the plot to assassinate Hitler. Others are rereading French theologian Jacques Ellul, who explained his decision to support the resistance movement against Nazism by appealing to the "necessity of violence" but wasn't willing to call such recourse "Christian." Many are going back to Gandhi and asking what he meant when he said that nonviolent resistance is the best thing, but that violent resistance to evil is better than no resistance at all. Some believe that there can be no resistance to terrorism, either because of American foreign policy sins or because of their principled pacifism. Others are only willing to deal with "root causes" and continue to oppose the American foreign policy that, in their view, is behind this terrorism. They point out the true fact that the United States has been guilty itself of sponsoring or supporting "state terrorism"--a painful reality I've observed most recently in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, occupied by Israeli Defense Forces.
So, the pacifist Left did not know what to do. I can understand this.
But many practitioners of Christian peacemaking, including me, can't accept such a nonresponse to horrific terrorism, despite the history of U. S. foreign policy. Gandhi said that if a lunatic is loose in the village and threatening the people, you first deal with the lunatic, and then the lunacy. I believe we must find a way to deal with the threat of terrorism--a threat that must not be avoided or minimized by those committed to nonviolence. We cannot turn away from this. But how do we confront this crisis?
So, WWGD? "What would Gandhi do?" Wallis did not say.
The "just war" theory has been used and abused to justify far too many of our wars. This crisis should not turn us to the just war theory, but rather to a deeper consideration of what peacemaking means. In the modern world of warfare, where far more civilians die than soldiers, war has become ethically obsolete as a way of resolving humankind's inevitable conflicts. Indeed, the number of people, projects, and institutions experimenting in nonviolent methods of conflict resolution has been growing steadily over the past decade with some promising results.
War is obsolete ethically. Then what is not obsolete ethically? We need specifics.
I AM INCREASINGLY convinced that the way forward may be found in the wisdom gained in the practice of conflict resolution and the energy of a faith-based commitment to peacemaking. For example, most nonviolence advocates, even pacifists, support the role of police in protecting people in their neighborhoods. Perhaps it is time to explore a theology for global police forces, including ethics for the use of internationally sanctioned enforcement--precisely as an alternative to war.
Ah, ha! The police! That's it! What the world needed was a police action! Right?
Then he cited the Mennonite pacifist, John Howard Yoder. Problem: Yoder never came up with an answer.
Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder was engaged in that very task near the end of his life. He was asking whether those committed to nonviolence might support the kind of necessary force utilized by police, because it is (or is designed to be) much more constrained, controlled, and circumscribed by the rule of law than is the violence of war, which knows few real boundaries. If that is true for the function of domestic police, how might it be extrapolated to an international police force acting with the multinational authorization of international law? Yoder's work in this area was never completed, but perhaps now it should be.
Perhaps now it should be. Then again, perhaps not. It's difficult to say.
Everything is difficult to say.
I recently heard New Testament theologian Tom Wright provocatively suggest that the ethics for global policing possibly might be extrapolated from Romans 13.
It might be. Then again, it might not.
This was getting nowhere fast. Still, he kept going.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, author of the seminal The Peaceable Kingdom and other works, says, "I just don't feel like I've found a voice about all this yet." Hauerwas doesn't like it when people tell pacifists to "just shut up and sit down" during a time like this. He believes that pacifists cannot be expected to have easy policy answers for every difficult political situation that are often created, in part, by not listening to the voices of nonviolence in the first place.
Pacifists cannot be expected to have easy policy answers, he said. I understand completely. Then let's hear some of the difficult policy answers. He had one: the United Nations.
Nevertheless, he believes the advocates of nonviolence can and should offer alternatives that reduce the violence in any conflict. As a professor of ethics, he is quite willing to call governments to observe the principles of a "just war," such as the recognition that soldiers killing each other is morally preferable to soldiers murdering civilians. And Hauerwas favors the use of international courts and global police to resolve conflicts. But he doesn't agree with the conventional wisdom that says "The world changed on Sept. 11." Hauerwas says, "No, the world changed in 33 A.D. The question is how to narrate what happened on Sept. 11 in light of what happened in 33 A.D."
Narrate what happened? Narrate? A bunch of terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into buildings, except for Flight 93. What's to narrate?
Walter Wink, a biblical scholar at Auburn Theological Seminary, offers a crucial critique of how--in the war against terrorism--the "myth of redemptive violence" is again being used to try to prove to us how violence can save us. He remains convinced that it cannot. Nonetheless, he admits to being glad when the "bad guys" lose in Afghanistan and women, among others, are liberated from Taliban tyranny. He too would greatly prefer the course of international law and police.
I get it. "I oppose violence." Wink, wink.
We simply haven't trained the churches, or anybody else for that matter, in the crucial theology and practice of active nonviolence, says Wink. That must now become our priority. Wink would no doubt agree with the approach of Fuller Theological Seminary professor Glen Stassen, who speaks convincingly of the "transforming initiatives" that can be taken to reduce violence in any situation of conflict. Exploring what practical nonviolent initiatives can be undertaken to open up new possibilities is more important to Stassen than merely reiterating that one doesn't believe in violence.
When in doubt, bloviate!
Then he reached the end of his essay.
In this crisis, Christians must continue to defend the innocent from military reprisal, prevent a dangerous and wider war, and oppose the unilateralism of superpowers. But we must also help stop bin Laden, his networks of violence, and the threat they pose to everything we love and value. All that presents difficult questions for peacemakers, but it is a challenge we dare not turn away from.
Got it? Clear?
No one has all the answers. Humility is a good trait for Christian peacemakers, while self-righteousness is both spiritually inappropriate and politically self-defeating. This much is clear: Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, not just peacelovers. That will inevitably call us to face hard questions with no easy answers. In the end, Christian peacemaking is more a path than a position.
Wallis never again wrote anything on the ethics of a proper response to 9-11. You can see his bibliography here.
Fast forward 8 years. He became Mr. Anti-Afghanistan war. I read it in the Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/afghanistan-no-more-excus_b_861268.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/aid-not-war-in-afghanistan_b_882289.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/new-video-10-years-in-afg_b_994423.html
Wallis had a big problem from day one: "You can't beat something with nothing."
DARFUR
Terrorism keeps spreading. Is has spread to Darfur. Wallis had a solution; the blue helmets of the United Nations. That was Harry Truman's solution, back before there were blue helmets. So, 50,000 American troops died.
Efforts to secure the cooperation of other key National Security Council nations must be increased. Strong actions should be taken against Sudan, including rigorously enforcing sanctions, and targeting sanctions against top government officials. Stronger actions could include a no-fly zone over Darfur and a possible naval blockade. We had complete agreement that only a large and strong multi-national peacekeeping force, with the authority to use "all necessary means," would suffice to end the genocide in Darfur - and that Sudan must be compelled to accept it.
He writes in the passive voice: "must be compelled to accept it." Compelled by whom? How? Funded by whom? Under what authority? The passive voice neatly skirts these questions.
Police actions are wars. They are just undeclared wars fought by people in blue helmets.
CONCLUSION
Once again, we find that Wallis the peace-loving, nonviolent theologian has both a theology and a method of violence: disarm Americans, and arm the people in blue helmets.
Get yourself a spare sword or two.