Pacifism and Power: Thoughts on How to be the Church

"A pastor finds the guts to speak the truth because he or she has found this biblical basis for pastoral care: Jesus Christ, “in whom we have boldness and confidence.” Lacking such confidence, pastors become fearful creatures. After all, pastors have a front row seat to observe the lies by which people live, the shallowness, the quiet desperation, or raging anger by which people react to a life without significance. Self-protection makes cowards of us all."

– Stanley Hauerwas in Resident Aliens

Hauerwas writes that real ethics (a way of being rather than merely a set of rules) requires the possibility of suffering for ourselves and our loved ones, that (as Luther believed) idolatry is a question of what we are willing to sacrifice our children for (me: the nation? the economy? ‘progress’? nothing?), that having nothing worth dying for leads to dying for nothing. He claims that by denying or ignoring the power that the church and its leaders have, we inadvertently use power to destructive ends, and that being true to the gospel (living the right story) requires faithful (often odd and risky) exercise of power.

I signed up for a class on Hauerwas because I’ve been impressed by the quotations I’ve heard here and there, but I hadn’t read any amount of his work until this week. The people who have told me I’d like him were right. The following is a combination of thoughts inspired by Hauerwas’s book Resident Aliens and of comments I made earlier this year in response to blogs accusing pacifists of cowardice (for failure to combat evil) and hypocrisy (for participating in the ‘violence’ of caring enough to argue about something).

Conflict and confrontation are not the same thing as violence.

Avoiding conflict makes you a doormat.

Avoiding confrontation makes you passive-aggressive. This diminishes the appearance of conflict while actually perpetuating it. Passive-aggression is in itself a form of violence because it hinders the possibility of reconciliation. It denies both parties the opportunity to heal and/or grow through accountability and forgiveness, nursing a grudge in the self-justifying illusion that one’s side of the story is the whole story and valuing the grievance over the relationship and the person or people on the other end.

Refraining from violence is an active decision that assumes strength (or rather, power - the capacity to act for good or ill) and requires strength of character. Call it pacifism or peaceableness, such a decision is NOT weakness though it certainly may look like folly to the wisdom of this world. Pacifism combats evil by seeing and naming things for what they are (truth) and deciding to live accordingly (integrity) as though there are things worth working, risking, and suffering for. Pacifism means willingness to die for the truth if necessary.

Does living pacifism suppose the ability to fight? Is pacifism a way of fighting, not an ineffectual “Can’t we all just get along?” but a different way of identifying ‘enemy’ and defining victory? War, poverty, alienation, ignorance, greed, numbness, apathy, racism, sexism, pretension, pettiness, illusions, excuses are all manifestations of evil and therefore the enemy. None of these is eliminated either by killing people or by pulling the bedcovers tighter over one’s head and trying to find a happy place. Victory can only be achieved through healing and reconciliation, which requires active confrontation of causes of violence (physical and otherwise) and active building and nurturing of people and communities that are good.

God could have eliminated human sin by wiping us out and starting over, or by some ‘shock and awe’ tactics that would leave us all quaking in our boots. Surely a sufficient show of power and making examples of the worst miscreants would straighten up the misguided human race. Instead, God let people kill His son. What kind of a story is that?

Jesus ministered to the world and defeated evil and death by 1) showing up and 2) dying. He got involved in people’s personal lives, said things that made him very unpopular with the powers that be, disregarded all kinds of social conventions, argued, cried in public, loved people who didn’t deserve it, was really friends with (not just ‘nice’ to) men and women who were not especially advantageous to his image and career development, and trusted God’s work to ordinary, imperfect people who didn’t always (or even often) understand what was going on.

Was this an anomaly or an important demonstration to Christians of who we are to be and how we are to live? Should the church be about helping people feel good and stay out of trouble (handing out spiritual anesthetics and sedatives) or about forming people who are capable of living and dying well?