Violence is Not the Answer

Before I begin, a disclaimer …

I am a trained Christian pastor, an Oblate with the Benedictine order, with a heavy focus on peace and justice. I am an outpatient mental health therapist with a therapeutic focus on trauma and education; I am opposed to violence for the sake of violence. My views in this post are as objective as I can make them. They do not reflect one political party or another. I am a Christian who leans heavily on the movement that Jesus started, and the apostles and others carried on after his death up to the time the empire took over the movement and made it a state religion. This state religion has evolved in a variety of ways over the centuries, but one thing has remained, a hierarchy that often favors the well off, creates rules and doctrines that use fear or manipulation to get people in the margins to comply. In America (and in other countries, not just Christian ones) right now, we are observing the rise of a new religious movement that has considerable political and monetary influence over our governing leaders.

Rarely in the span of history has assassination accomplished the aim of ending a violent regime. Often, assassinating a leader makes the supporting group stronger. We would see this historically most recently with Al Qaeda and Isis but can also be seen with the destabilization that occurred in Iraq after capturing and executing Saddam Hussein. This process is known as radicalization. Radicalization is the process by which an individual or a group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo. The ideas of society at large shape the outcomes of radicalization.

This week, I am going to look at three postures we must take if we want to truly embrace the attitudes of Jesus and the first followers of the movement he started. I want to look at the use of nonviolence, moral courage and finally, I want to explore Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s decision to conspire to assassinate Hitler and why I disagree with his decision.

Peace Must Be Taught

In my previous post on peace, I asked the question, “is it achievable?” Here, in this post, I was focused more on inner peace. In this week’s post, I want to focus on outer peace, specifically the use of nonviolent resistance. In the twentieth century, Martin Luther King was most famous for this approach with his work during the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, King was heavily inspired by Gandhi who utilized nonviolent resistance earlier in the twentieth century.

Peace must be taught. As I noted in my opening statement this week, I point out that the current evangelical movement heading some of the discussions in America right now, specifically the Heritage Foundation and it’s Project 2025 or Agenda 47 agenda is a new religious movement based on strict adherence to Calvinistic theology and polity. When I say new, I am not meaning new as we have been observing some form of this way of thinking for over one hundred years now. The Heritage Foundation has had influences on every president for the last seventy years.

To teach peace, is to understand our ignorance or naivete. In biblical scholarship, we look seriously at a concept known as hermeneutics. There are also different forms of criticisms in play as well that help the reader of any ancient document understand what is going on. One of the many things I never did as a pastor was to memorize scripture verses. The bible is a living document, created in an oral tradition. In a giant game of telephone, teachers, preachers, families, and communities have been telling these ancient stories for millennia, often adding their own interpretation or historical importance to the story for effect. Socrates was famous for rallying against the written word, an invention during his time. His rationale, it would deaden the language, it would sterilize the story.

To teach peace then is to teach that we really do not know what the bible says because the bible does not say anything anymore than any other book says something. This amazing book, which I consider the most important in my collection of books informs me daily of the people who came before me and how they were inspired to live their personal and spiritual lives. In Judaism, they have the notion of midrash, which means a lot of things, but is a discourse where one or more people get together to openly interpret the scriptures to better inform themselves or their communities on the way to conduct themselves. One that I found fascinating in my research for teaching Judaism looked at whether Jewish people could turn on a lightbulb on sabbath, since it was creating a small fire and establishing fires on Sabbath was forbidden.

Moral Courage

When we read the bible contextually, with a historical lens, we begin to really feel the gravity of what Jesus and his early followers did. The Roman government owned everything, including you. Execution was always an option and one used liberally. Ancient methods of execution were grand displays of macabrery. Despite the dangers, a small group of Jewish adherents, under the leadership of a man named Jesus decided to engage in a resistance movement that predicted the downfall of Rome and seriously disrupted the apple cart for not only their fellow Jewry, but for Roman government, causing many of these adherents to lose their lives.

Jesus, Mahatmas Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and many others have engaged for centuries in what is known as civil disobedience. All lost their lives engaging in it. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, civil disobedience is defined as:

civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies (Rawls 1999, 320). On this account, people who engage in civil disobedience operate at the boundary of fidelity to law, have general respect for their regime, and are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as evidence of their fidelity to the rule of law. Civil disobedience, given its place at the boundary of fidelity to law, is said on this view to fall between legal protest, on the one hand, and conscientious refusal, uncivil disobedience, militant protest, organized forcible resistance, and revolutionary action, on the other hand.

Engaging in civil obedience is tricky. I was talking to my daughter about this the other day. In my twenties, I would have been more than happy to be arrested protesting something. Now, however, with a family, a mortgage and whole lot of other responsibilities, I am less inclined. I was listening to a podcast recently where the speaker was talking about the planning of a protest. One thing I had not considered in my twenties were the people who had collected the bail money and who had lawyers on standby. “A critical application of moral courage is knowing when and how to disobey–which can be thought of as intelligent disobedience. This involves an ability to work within the system to maintain standards and uphold moral values” (Thomas and Charleff, 2017).

Bonhoeffer’s Decision

A historical figure who stood up to incredible suffering and injustice was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer has been on my mind since the 2016 election and was only amplified after the 2020 election. We can learn a lot about our posture as Christians from Bonhoeffer’s guidance and from his missteps.

Bonhoeffer was an early critic of Hitler and would eventually be convinced to engage himself in an assassination plot against Hitler. A bomb was placed in a conference room where Hitler was attending. The bomb went off and Hitler was not killed. Bonhoeffer would be arrested, placed in a prison, and eventually executed in 1945.

I disagree with Bonhoeffer’s decision. In psychology or counseling school, we learn about Heinz’s dilemma:

A woman was on her deathbed. There was one drug that the doctors said would save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

Bonhoeffer is a study of Heinz’s dilemma and I think his answer was wrong. The assassination of a leader rarely has the outcome it intended. Like the mythic Hydra, when we cut off one head, there are many others ready to take its place. Recently, America witnessed the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. What we have observed since then is classic of this experience, an emboldened victim and followers that see the victim as a martyr for the cause. I read a quote by Cornel West recently that said, “justice is what love looks like in public.” Love must be our answer and at the center of our response here. Love is our truest sense of self. Jesus said turn the other cheek. This does not mean passively letting things be and just being slapped.

For Jesus, Gandhi, and King, it meant holy resistance, having the moral courage to stand up and speak up for the ones who cannot speak. It is ok to love the sinner and hate the sin.