I’ve talked with some more people about my reaction to Yoder, and one point where most people seem to disagree with me is the idea that all states are inherently coercive. Or that they are, but coercion isn’t the same as violence. It’s true that the boundaries of “violence” are pretty blurry; on a basic level it can mean any action that causes pain to someone else, which Jesus clearly did not rule out. Limiting it to the physical seems like a meaningless distinction, since there is all sorts of emotional harm that people can inflict on each other.

When I think about it though, the coercion aspect is only part of what’s bothering me. The real issue is one of faith. Living in any state or community requires sacrifices. You sacrifice some of your income to the IRS, you sacrifice your impulses to the law, and sometimes you sacrifice your beliefs about what’s right to the majority vote, or whatever body you see as having legitimate authority. And every sacrifice requires faith. Or at least you hope it does, because the only other reason to make those sacrifices is fear. It doesn’t necessarily mean faith in the supernatural; but it does mean faith in the communal entity, in its laws and norms and authorities. It’s not surprising that the earliest states were essentially theocratic; believing that your ruler was a god, or something near to it, certainly made that faith uncomplicated.

People in social-guardian jobs, like soldier and police officer, make bigger sacrifices than most, and require greater faith than most. Some of them probably just have depressed limbic systems and need to live on the edge of death to feel alive. But the subcultures of those professions seem to build a strong culture of faith and loyalty. Sometimes it takes on a form resembling the old theocratic standard of mystical nationalism: crosses on shields and hung from guns, a messianic sense of your country’s place in the world, and so on. Sometimes it’s a more modest Burkean faith in home, family and community. Sometimes it becomes a faith to the guardian institution itself, as in “the blue religion” of police officers. Such a faith is necessary; the only alternative, really, is that you risk your life because you don’t really care about it.

Most Christians affirm the goodness of the things that the guardians fight for. But what seems out of sync to me is the amount of faith required. The intensity of faith needed for guardian jobs might explain not only why pacifism is a hard sell, but also why the more reasonable constraints of just-war theory often don’t seem to hold in practice. The ambivalent image of the state running from Augustine through Niebuhr — that it’s the best we can do in this sinful, fallen world — is not the stuff that inspires the soldier in the trenches. Recently I talked about the Founding Fathers issue with a man in my church who teaches U.S. history, and he pointed out that while the Fathers were putting together their Enlightenment-inspired tracts about human rights and the consent of the governed, America was full of evangelical and apocalyptic Christians who saw America playing a prophetic role in the Christian drama. It’s a sign of how out of touch Jefferson was that he thought that in the 19th century the whole society would become Unitarian.

What I don’t see Yoder taking into account, in all his high-level theorizing about statecraft, is the extent to which any policy you want to enact depends on the faith of the mass of low-level soldiers and cops. Even if we could somehow have an unarmed police, it would still be a dangerous job — in fact, one would think that in the early stages of disarmament it would be more dangerous than it is now. Lawmakers are depending on the faith that police officers have in the state that they work for, which is necessarily stronger than even the survival instinct. And it really bothers me to think of taking advantage of a faith that we ourselves don’t really share.

I think part of the problem here is that Yoder seems to see violence simply as an indulgence. If you must indulge in violence, he seems to be saying, we can at least try to direct it toward a reasonably good end. But while it’s true that men seem to love war in a primitive way, I think most people who’ve been through it would agree that war is hell, which is why fighting them requires faith. For the families and friends of the fighters, it’s at least as much of a sacrifice.

However, I think the abuse-of-faith issue is a problem even when it doesn’t mean dying. Consider the following thought experiment. Suppose you’re a missionary in the deepest Amazon jungle. You hear through the native grapevine about a nearby tribe that everyone hates because it is so violent. They go headhunting, kidnapping women, abusing captives, etc. So, intrepid soldier of Christ that you are, you head off to try to talk to them.

When you get there, for whatever reason — your appearance, your technology, or some omen — the tribe thinks you’re a god. They kneel and bow before you, and though you try to tell them they’re mistaken, you don’t know their dialect well enough to make yourself understood. And then you realize you have an opportunity. The next time they organize a war party, you could stand up and block their way, and they wouldn’t dare go past you. You can end their violence by fiat. You just have to hope that once you learn their language well enough to explain, they’ll understand your motives were pure.

Of course, you see that there are a lot of problems with this plan. It would be practicing deception — even if you are technically not lying — and encouraging idolatry. The tribe may not be so understanding once they find out, and in fact decide you are totally untrustworthy and not listen to the stuff about Jesus. And they might be harmed by being pacified in some way that you can’t yet see. Maybe their region is especially poor in resources and they raid so they can eat. Maybe a neighboring tribe will take advantage of their quiescence to stage a surprise attack.

But the alternative would be extremely hard. In order to convince them you’re not a god, you have to act as unlike a god as possible, and never use your power. You have to sit by while they launch raiding parties and haul back women to rape. And if something happens in front of your face and you react in a normal human way — say, jumping up and yelling “Stop!” — you will be obeyed for the wrong reasons.

What do you do?

This is all rather far-fetched, of course, but I think it’s the Constantinian temptation in a nutshell. The original sin, according to Yoder and practically every other theologian before the 18th century, was that humans sought to be like gods. And when Constantine declared Christians to be a protected group, most people obeyed him because they were used to thinking of the emperor as a god.

The emperor is an extreme case, but really a great many Christians find themselves with powers that, properly speaking, they should not have. American voters have, in their measure, all the powers of the American imperium, as well as the power of life and death over many of our citizens. And to some extent, using those powers may be unavoidable. Even Paul, when arrested, called upon his special rights as a Roman citizen, although in his letters he denounced any preferential treatment based on nationality.

So I don’t have a precise answer to this, but I do think this is an aspect of Christian political activism that’s been lacking from the discussion.

I received some helpful comments to my last post, including Lee’s link to this paper by John Howard Yoder, which Lee discussed briefly here. By coincidence, my churchmate Kent recently delivered a lecture on Yoder which he posted on his blog, providing a longer summary of the same subject.

As the old-timers around here know, I liked Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, though it left a number of questions hanging. The paper under discussion, however — called “The Theological Basis of the Christian Witness to the State” — I found more troubling.

Yoder follows the anti-Constantinian line in sharply differentiating church and state, but asserts Christ’s lordship over both. As in TPOJ, he compares Romans 13′s reference to the state as a minister of God’s justice to Old Testament events where God used the violence of some foreign power, such as the Assyrians, to punish the sins of Israel, but in turn punished the foreign powers for their violence. Thus, both church and state have roles in salvation history:

Jesus made it clear that the nationalized hope of Israel had been a misunderstanding, and that God’s true purpose was the creation of a new society, unidentifiable with any of the local, national, or ethnic solidarities of the time. This new body, the church, as aftertaste of God’s loving triumph on the cross and foretaste of His ultimate loving triumph in His Kingdom, has a task within history. History is the framework in which the church evangelizes so that the true meaning of history is the fact that God has chosen it for His framework service. Now the whole vengeance-upon-vengeance mechanism takes on meaning as a subordinate vehicle to the redemptive purpose; it is to maintain peace so that all men may come to knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2). The interplay of violence upon violence, vengeance upon vengeance, whether in international wars such as Isaiah 10 had in mind or in the relatively more regulated processes of the state’s judiciary and police machinery, has the ultimate purpose of preserving the fabric of the human community as the context within which the church’s work can be carried on.

… It need hardly be said that such a set of concepts as the New Testament applies to this problem cannot meaningfully apply except to a fellowship of believers characterized by obedience in nonresistance. A church which is identical with society … cannot be nonresistant, cannot be willing to lose her life to find it, cannot have a fully prophetic function vis-a-vis the state, cannot clearly distinguish between her fate and that of the “powers” she acknowledges.

Here I think Lee’s question is extremely pertinent: “[D]oes the Church’s having an influence on society depend on a prior recognition by the State of the Church’s exalted status as the bearer of God’s new way of life?” I would put that more bluntly: why the hell would anyone in government go along with a narrative that says their main function is to serve a church that they don’t believe in? It sounds a lot like the Muslim concept of “dhimmitude,” only instead of just inconveniencing the infidels with taxes and other minor burdens, it expects the dhimmis to perform dangerous jobs like policing on behalf of the privileged group.

This goes to the heart of the problem with Yoder’s Old Testament analogy: the foreign armies or governments perform the will of God only because they don’t know what they’re doing. If the Assyrians had really known what was going on, they would have put away their swords and evaded God’s wrath. Similarly, if I were to write to President Bush (to get back to the question that started all this) and honestly tell him all this, he either would (most likely) write me off as a crackpot and do what he was going to do anyway, or (less likely) believe me, and feel he’d have to resign the presidency. Either way, we wouldn’t get any closer to peace in Lebanon.

But Yoder (and this really bothers me) doesn’t really favor being honest that way. Instead, he thinks Christians should call on “middle axioms,” certain values that Christians and their predominant culture have in common, and urge leaders to follow them. Yoder goes on to enumerate some of them, saying that they “agree to a large extent with those of a historian like Butterfield, a political analyst like George Kennan or Walter Lippmann, a military analyst like Hanson Baldwin.”

However, the sticking point, which Yoder admits, is that even following this much “already demands an act of faith”:

To ask the western powers to avoid the use of atomic weapons, to stay out of alliances with dictatorships like Franco’s, and to respect human values within their own forces, puts them at a disadvantage against a ruthless enemy who will use any weapon, who will mistreat his prisoners of war, and whose “human wave” tactics show absolutely no concern for the soldier as a man. This disadvantage is the price of relative justice; descending to the level of the enemy in such matters would rob the West of the last semblance of a pretext for survival. … Violence is always, apparently, the shortest and surest way. And in the long run the appearance always deceives. Had the western powers gambled on freedom and justice since 1945, if in Asia they had sought not satellites but the growth of a third camp, and if in trouble spots like Indo-China and Sumatra they had proceeded as in the Philippines, beating the communists to land reform, the shape of our world today would be far better, perhaps even in China itself. But such a strategy would have demanded faith in freedom and justice, which the champions of freedom and justice no longer had.

I would venture to say that fifty years on, the situation has not improved in that regard. Yet Yoder has no solution to this loss of faith, because his theological framework doesn’t allow it. It’s not the church’s job to cultivate faith in anything but God; so if the country loses faith in its own ideals, what can we say?

I also wanted to touch on Yoder’s attitude toward democracy, which he does not go into in the paper but which Kent summarizes thus:

As Christians we know that the “will of the people” does not carry the same authority as the voice of God speaking through Torah, the prophets, and Jesus Messiah. We know that the majority is not often moral. And being “wise as serpents” we also recognize that even democracies—at least those on a large national scale—are always managed by a ruling elite, who make most of the decisions without consulting us ordinary folk. (How many of you were consulted about the free trade agreement between Mexico, the US, and Canada called NAFTA? I know they never gave me a call!) Yet while we remain realistic about the limits of large-scale democracy, we are eager to use the tools of citizenship, consent theory, democratic representation, rights to assembly, free speech, petition, and nonviolent protest to battle the inevitable injustices that arise from inherent concentrations of wealth and power (a central insight of Reinhold Niebuhr’s, by the way.) Our freedom in Christ allows us to use any democratic tools that come to hand on behalf of the peace and prosperity of our neighbors and even our enemies.

“Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into Exile” God commanded Jeremiah in Babylon, and this word from Yahweh is at the heart of Yoder’s political ethic for Christians through all time and in all nations, Lebanon as well as Israel, Iraq as well as the good ol’ USA. Democracy is to be affirmed, Yoder says, because it offers so many more ways to hold the rich and powerful accountable to the most marginal and weak in our society. Treatment of the “least of these” is the litmus test that separates the sheep from the goats, and democracy can help us advocate for those lost sheep. Yet Yoder also warns about the dangerous and self-righteous arrogance of military crusades that would impose democracy by force on others. This Yoder essay, written in 1984, somehow rings a bell for me today.

It’s true, of course, that power in our country is unequally distributed. But I don’t think this really does credit to the role of the electorate in government. The power of any one voter is vanishingly small, but as a group, we are as much a part of the government as the judicial branch. And in California, where every election brings us a battery of propositions, we are legislators also. The president doesn’t pay attention to our letters because he thinks we’re wise advisors; he pays attention because we can fire him.

If you look at it that way, there really isn’t a whole lot of daylight between Yoder’s position and the Lutheran one. The princes of Luther’s era also “used the tools” that they inherited to do what they thought was right — in their case, the tools being things like armies and judicial fiat. The only real difference seems to be that while Luther felt it was OK for Christians to wield the sword of the state in a just manner, Mennonites apparently feel it’s OK to hire other people to bear the sword according to their direction.

Because make no mistake about it: any time you pass a law, you are backing it up with the sword. Notice that in my first Yoder quote above, he mentions “the state’s judiciary and police machinery” in the same category as international wars. Near the end of the paper he oddly remarks that, “In a highly christianized culture it is an available alternative to have unarmed police and no capital punishment,” and I am totally confused as to whether he means “christianized” in a Constantinian sense or not. But either way, that is clearly not the society we live in now; so every law is backed up with violence.

I think I’m beginning to see why Hauerwas split with Yoder here. I think the Stanmeister is next on the reading list.

Thanks to all those who commented on my post on protest. I’ve been chewing on the subject, and have been further exercised by debating somebody on the Ben Witherington thread and by discussing it with my small group last Thursday. I haven’t got any answers, but the discussion has helped me clarify what my questions are.

I think one factor that I didn’t make clear in the first post, was that the Middle East project wasn’t just an incidental thing that somebody happened to set up. Pastor Jennifer wound up her sermon on James by mentioning it with the clear implication that this was one of those “works” that shows that your faith is alive. So the question wasn’t just whether Christians are permitted to write to politicians, but whether such an activity is actually an appropriate “ministry” for the church to engage in.

The larger problem I realized I was having, though, is that I don’t understand the current Mennonite position on political involvement. The traditional anti-Constantinian line, to which some churches still hew, is that government is part of the old world passing away, and the church itself is the only polity in which Mennonites have much of an interest. In more recent times, many Mennonite churches have become more politically involved, while still hewing to the anti-Constantinian separation of church and state.

The problem I have with this in-between attitude is that it seems to demand political activism without a positive vision of what government ought to be. I believe that it’s just irresponsible heckling to criticize a political leader without offering alternatives. But what is the alternative? Anti-Constantinians, by definition, don’t expect governments to be Christian; and unlike the Old Testament prophets who criticized their leaders, we don’t expect them to be Jewish. Honestly, even though I’ve been going to this church for about 20 months, I still don’t understand what the basic guiding principles for political engagement are.

What I have heard people invoke is “justice,” but it never seems to be defined. In fact, AKMA once again wrote an acute post on this subject, showing that I’m not the only person in the world who’s been wondering about this. He writes:

Indeed, if we rely not on the careful reasoning (or in hymnic context, the literary finesse) but simply on the sense that “of course, we all support justice,” we risk engendering the impression that we’re trying to arm-twist people into accepting social-progressive imperatives for societal behavior by putting the word “justice” into their mouths and ears without inculcating a corresponding understanding of what’s at stake. When we do articulate our convictions about the shape of a just life, though, we necessarily set our case in a context within which it might be controverted by people who envision a different sense for “justice”; I regard that as a good thing, since it encourages participants in theological life to offer their best cases for the Name by which they are called and for the hope that is within them.

I think that sense of arm-twisting was what I was trying, somewhat incoherently, to express in my earlier post. There are necessarily a lot of steps between an abstraction (“justice”) and a particular (“a cease-fire in Lebanon”) and I keep feeling like the church leaps right over them.

I also sometimes hear the compounded phrase “peace and justice,” but that simply doubles the problem. As I implied in the earlier post, to me Christian pacifism is a powerful act of faith precisely because it is so dangerous; so it seems like about the last piece of orthopraxis that you’d want to push on a nonbeliever.  Yet a lot of people at church seem to inform their politics with it.

All this is intra-Mennonite stuff, so I’m probably boring everybody else in the readership. But I’d be interested to know what the Mennos out there think.

At church on Sunday we received a sermon on the famous passage of James that “faith without works is dead.” Taking advantage of this theme, somebody set up a table in the social hall where we could sign up to pray and fast this week for peace in the Middle East, and also provided paper, pens and a template for writing a letter to President Bush. I split the difference: I said I’d pray and fast, but I declined to write to the president.

I’m not sure I could have explained exactly why if someone had asked me, but no one asked me. I was thinking about this, however, when I read Pastor John Wright’s post on protest activism (via Jennifer). He quotes Alasdair MacIntyre:

For the Western social pattern has a role all ready for the radical moral critic to play. It is accepted that there should be minorities of protest on particular issues. And it is even a reinforcement for the dominant picture of morality that the moral critic should exhibit himself choosing his values of protest. For they remain his values, his private values. There is no set of common, public standards to which he can appeal, no shared moral image for his society by means of which he can make his case. And if he chooses his values in the spirit of Hier sich ich, ich kann nicht anders, is it not equally open to his opponents to do the same? . . . the isolation of the moral from the factual, the emphasis on choice, the arbitrariness introduced into moral matters, all these play into the hands of the defenders of the established order. The moral critic . . . pays the penalties of both self-deception and ineffectiveness for imagining that moral knight errantry is compatible with being morally effective in our form of society.

I think he has a point that in America, leaders and protestors have a certain co-dependence. The existence of protest lends moral legitimacy to leaders, because it shows that they do allow dissent and yet most Americans have freely chosen to side with the leaders. At the same time, the continued misbehavior of leaders is always giving protestors something to get on the moral high ground about, without actually having to deal with the responsibilities of power.

I think he’s also correct about the lack of a larger moral foundation. Many Christian protestors seem to think of themselves as successors to the Old Testament prophets. But the prophets were sent by God to remind the Hebrews that their nation was founded on God’s law, and that they were supposed to stick to it. The founding principles of the United States of America, on the other hand, take the right course to be whatever the majority supports and the Constitution allows.

This brings me to something I was thinking about in the discussion on Ben Witherington’s post about the beliefs of the founding fathers. In response to his first question, I wrote that democracy is to some extent the logical outcome of the Judeo-Christian demystification of the state. Jews, and then Christians, rejected the claims of kings to be gods; Christian kings sidestepped this by claiming to rule by divine right, but eventually, under pressure from radical Protestants, this claim toppled also. However, we see in America that the last stronghold of mystical nationalism is the idea that the people rule by divine right. This concept is embedded in the Declaration of Independence, and was greatly expanded upon over the years.

From a Christian perspective, this belief has a few problems. One, the Bible doesn’t support the idea that anybody has a divine right to rule; God appoints leaders for the sake of public order, but they are constantly under judgment. But the more insidious effect that I see among Christians I know is the assumption, “I could do it better.” If only my preferred policies were implemented, instead of what those evil morons up there are doing, all these intractable problems would be solved.

Of course, many Christian activists would object that they are not promoting their personal opinions, but God’s opinions. Pastor John says that “the immorality of the invasion (of Iraq) is not my private moral judgment, but the truthful application of Christian just war principles.” The problem, though, is that the concept of the divine rule of the people (or of anybody) often blurs the two. I think what bothers me when I hear a lot of my churchmates talk about politics is the casual assumption that if they were in charge of America — a position that, I think it is safe to say, none of us has been in anything remotely like — they would implement Christian principles and nonviolently end terrorism, knit up Iraq, and get the Israelis and Palestinians holding hands and singing “Kumbayah.” OK, I’m exaggerating a little, but not a lot.

The fact is, for me to write a letter to President Bush telling him how to deal with the Middle East would really be “the blind leading the blind.” I carry in me the hope — often, I admit, a fragile hope — that the way of love and nonviolence will be the last word in the universe. Until then, however, I can make no guarantees. The first followers of Jesus were persecuted for centuries, to the point where they were willing to buy Constantine’s “vision” story even though it seemed awfully out of character for Jesus. I have not been subjected to that sort of temptation, nor have I been subjected to the temptations of being born into a powerful family and semi-inheriting leadership of the most powerful nation in the world. I can pray that I would do better in those circumstances, but it’s not something I can assume.

As an alternative to protest, Pastor John says Christians should be involved in more “direct works of love,” rather than trying to influence the government to perform them in their stead. Telford made the same point a few years ago when blogging about the same topic. I remember, though, the story my boyfriend told me about how Mennonites became more politically active than they traditionally were: they went out into the world to try to help the underprivileged, then discerned certain systemic conditions that caused them to be underprivileged, and so moved on to trying to change the conditions. In other words, such direct acts of love might lead you toward political activism rather than away from it.

This reminds me of AKMA’s post on the ambiguous legacy of St. MacGyver – that is, the burden that well-meaning people of privileged classes feel to fix things. AKMA points out that this urge has accomplished good things but also carries hazards, which he expanded upon in a follow-up post. There’s a great balancing act in this, as is shown in his conclusion:

So, on the terms I’m setting out, our response to injustices that we perceive is neither a determination to remedy them (tacitly: “at any cost”), nor passively to say, “well, the poor will be with us always,” but to endeavor to live in ways that (imperfectly) bespeak God’s equity and truth: within the ambit of our capacities (patiently), subject to criticism and correction (humbly). To the extent that we attain such a life, we do so not through the power of our own wills or intellects, not through the purity of our intentions, not through the guaranteed inerrancy of our authorities, but solely through a grace that does not originate with us, that refuses coercion, that invites correction and cooperation (even when these involve a departure from the corrective program we devised).

So simple to say, and so hard to do.