Just War

When is violence acceptable, from a moral standpoint? It's a difficult moral question. Christians are taught by Jesus to turn the other cheek...and yet the most potent nonviolent leader was Mahatma Gandhi, not a Christian. Christians haven't been, as a group, overwhelmingly successful at living Christ's words.

So is it okay to hit someone in self-defense? Turning the other cheek would seem to suggest that the Christian answer is no; yet most of us if pressed would say that yes, it is okay to defend one's self, one's loved ones, one's property, to one degree or another, with violence.

Ah, degree: How much violence is okay in self-defense? Many of us would say the bare minimum necessary: gunning someone down for threatening you with a pea-shooter would be excess, but hitting someone who threatened to hit you might be all right. (There are certainly some who claim gunning down anyone who makes any kind of threat is okay, but I'll call those outliers, because I can't believe they even attempt to reconcile their viewpoint with Jesus's message.)

And what constitutes self-defense? A verbal threat? A threat backed up by a weapon or raised fist? Do you have to be in imminent jeopardy before it constitutes a threat sufficient to justify violent retaliation?

All these questions apply as well to nations as they consider war. Does a nation turn the other cheek? (Historically, no.) What threat is sufficient to justify war, i.e., what constitutes just war?

Just as I can't reconcile in my own mind my own likelihood of defending myself with violence with Jesus's instruction to turn the other cheek, I don't see that from a Christian viewpoint, there is really any such thing as just war. I think we just have to accept that as a human weakness, and strive--with personal self-defense as well as national self-defense--to try to seek peace to whatever ability we can manage. We cannot be perfect followers of Christ, but we can try to do the best we can.

Some argue with regard to war that one must consider the greater good. That was presumably what motivated Dietrich Bonhoffer, the theologian and clergyman who was executed for his part in a plot against Hitler. The evil of Hitler is indisputable. One can certainly understand how a Christian theologian could believe he was serving the greater good by attempting to eliminate Hitler.

Hitler = evil. We can agree on that one. What about Saddam Hussein? Evil enough that it serves a greater good to eliminate him? Certainly he did evil things to his people: does that justify war against him?

Note, though, that Bonhoffer didn't foment a war against Hitler: he didn't put any lives on the line in order to remove Hitler beyond those who, with him, chose to participate in the plot.

And that's the point where I find fault with the concept of just war: it involves the loss of lives beyond those who willingly choose to risk their lives to eliminate evil. Does anyone have the right to give up anyone else's life, from a moral standpoint? I think not.

As I said above, we humans are imperfect, and as a result there will be wars. But those of us who call ourselves Christians had better think long and hard about supporting any war that we are not personally fighting. Because no matter how just we find the cause, the blood of the innocents is still on our hands.

Slip-Sliding Away

Am I the only one who sees the slippery slope this nation appears to have started on its way down? First, the so-called Patriot Act, which permits the government to treat its own citizens as criminals; then the charge by our friends in the religious right that the filibuster is a test of one's Christian faith (edging toward state religion?); now the national ID card--papers, please? You must have your government papers!

Never again, said the Jews in the wake of the Nazis. Time for all of us to note the similarities to the rise of the Third Reich, and demand "Never again!" before our own freedoms disappear.