A few weeks ago I saw on public TV a documentary about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I was especially struck by the interviews with those who had been involved in the civil rights marches of the late sixties. Young Catholics had been inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. and by the struggle for the equal rights of black Americans. They recognized their own society as segregated and unjust, and began marching for equal rights in housing and voting for Northern Ireland's Catholics. Although the demonstrations had begun peacefully, those interviewed admitted that they and others had never made any serious commitment to the principals of nonviolence. When police attacked them, they attacked back, and the violence escalated from there. Neither side turns the other cheek.
Four out of five people in Northern Ireland attend either a Protestant or a Catholic church. Most of the people are peaceful, but extremists on both sides have failed to put loving their neighbor, much less loving their enemy, ahead of concerns about political and economic power. Because the two sides in the dispute are called the Catholics and the Protestants, it is easy to be misled into thinking that the dispute is a religious one. But it doesn't even begin to be. Nobody is arguing over ideas about God. Nobody is disputing differing interpretations of the New Testament. Nobody is even arguing about church polity, or the relative importance of church tradition and authority versus the priesthood of all believers. It is quite simply not about that. It is about power. Economic power and political power. Who has it and who doesn't, and how to get it.
Even if you are an atheist in Northern Ireland, you are either a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist. Because being a Catholic or a Protestant in that culture has nothing to do with your religious convictions. It's about what team you're on. There is a true story about a man who went to the hospital after being bitten by a dog. The first question the emergency room doctor asked him was not how big was the dog or did it appear to be rabid. Rather he was asked, was it a Catholic dog or a Protestant dog? The dog doesn't know the religious distinctions, but everybody has to be on one team or the other. It's not about religion.
Interestingly, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, agrees with Northern Irish Protestants that the Irish Republic to the south of them is too specifically Catholic in its policies. The laws of the Irish Republic have followed Catholic teachings about divorce and abortion, and the IRA disapproves of those laws. The IRA fights on behalf of Catholics, but it is not a religious organization. Its stated goal is a united, socialist, secular Ireland. It's not about religion.
I point this out because I think we are sometimes in danger of looking at violent conflicts around the world and thinking that religion is at the root of them. Sometimes we are tempted to avoid or disparage religion in order to avoid the conflicts. But I think the conflicts erupt in part because people ignore the central precepts of their own religions. If the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland had taken seriously the notion that other human beings have inherent worth because they are made in the image of God, or the notion that their first responsibility is to love their neighbor as themselves, they would have been much better off. They and all of us need to take our religious principles more seriously, not less.
There is at last some hope for peace in Northern Ireland. Last year's Good Friday accord aims at the development of a new Protestant-Catholic government. It was in the news this week that the deadline for the formation of the new government has been pushed back due to a dispute over the turning in of paramilitary weapons. Nevertheless, there is overall confidence that the difficulties will eventually be resolved and that the peace process will move ahead. This Wednesday, St. Patrick's Day, the leaders of eight different Northern Irish parties will come to Washington to meet with President Clinton. Also on Wednesday, Clinton plans to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our government's highest civilian honor, to Senator George Mitchell for his role in brokering the peace accord. It has been a long haul, and it is not over yet, but the different teams are finally listening to each other.
Another hot spot where violence has erupted along religious as well as cultural lines, is the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs are generally Eastern Orthodox Christians, the Croats are generally Roman Catholic Christians, the Bosnian Moslems are not a separate ethnic group, rather half are Serbs and half are Croats who were converted to Islam, sometimes by force, under the Ottoman Empire. The most recent fighting has been in Kosovo, where Serbs are fighting with Albanian Moslems, who unlike Serbs and Croats are not ethnically Slavic. The Albanians were promised by Mussolini and Hitler that Kosovo, a part of Serbia with a significant Albanian population, could become a part of Greater Albania. This has yet to be resolved.
This whole geographic region has been historically caught in the power struggles of major empires and regimes. For a long time it was caught between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, from whom Serbia fought for and won its independence. After World War I, the Croats and Slovenes, newly liberated from Austria-Hungary, joined the Serbians to form a new South Slav nation: Yugoslavia. While they were still struggling to form a viable nation together, along came World War II, which pitted the Croats and Serbs against each other in bloody massacres.
After that war, the whole nation was essentially handed to the communists.
The role of religion in all this has been complex. There is some evidence that extremist Croat Catholic priests have at times played a role in fanning the flames of hatred of the Orthodox Serbs. For the most part, however, the South Slavic peoples have been set against each other by power-hungry empires and regimes in whose best interest it was to keep the people from uniting with each other against the empires and regimes. It was in 1971, in Tito's communist Yugoslavia, that the Moslems in Bosnia began being counted as a separate ethnic group, rather than by their ethnic designations of Serb and Croat. The communists thought nothing of with one hand limiting the power of religious groups, whenever they became dangerously critical of the government, while with the other hand emphasizing religion and religious differences, whenever that helped the government to divide and conquer.
Religion can indeed play both positive and negative roles. In general, it adds to the trouble whenever it becomes the pawn of power interests, and neglects to focus on its own religious and ethical principals, and the imperative of critique that those principals require.
The Quakers are a people who have often in their history used the imperatives of their religion to critique the warring tendencies of nations. Last year I had a conversation with my youngest brother, who lives in London. He told me that after spending some time attending English Quaker meetings and some time in an English Unitarian Church, he finally decided to sign the membership book of the Unitarian Church. When I asked him why, he said, "The Quakers are wonderful people, but I just don't think they have an answer to the question, What do you do when Hitler's tanks roll into town?" That admittedly is a very hard question. But I have to admit that I was horrified to discover that he thought of us as the church he could join and still be violent. I told him that for me, our first principle, affirming the inherent worth of every person, was similar to the Quaker idea of an inner spark of the divine in every person, and that I couldn't kill a person with that spark or that inherent worth.
Speaking of Quaker pacifism, I recently heard that at Earlham College, a Quaker school, the athletic teams used to be named, somewhat ironically, the "Fighting Quakers." Some objected that this was not in keeping the mission of the school or the faith, so the name was changed to the "Hustling Quakers." Protesting the lack of a sense of humor in the name change, students began composing new fight songs, with which to cheer on their athletes. A colleague in the UU ministry recently heard a fight song at an Earlham College soccer game that went like this: Fight, fight, inner light, Kill, Quakers, kill! Kick 'em, stomp 'em, Knock 'em senseless, Do we have consensus?
It's important to have a healthy sense of irony about yourself.
John Howard Yoder, a theological scholar and a Mennonite pacifist, wrote a book called Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious Pacifism, in which he describes at least twenty distinct religious arguments that different individuals and groups have made that have led them to a pacifist position. He describes the strengths and weaknesses of each position.
In the appendix of the book, he also describes four distinct nonpacifist positions. They are Holy War, Rambo, National Self-Interest, and the Just War Tradition. Each of these can be examined with respect to its relationship to religion.
Holy War is the view that a war is justified because an army has been divinely called to destroy God's enemies. Of the four positions, this is the one in which the war is actually caused by religion. As I hope my examples have shown, I think it is rare that religion is actually the root cause of a war. Unfortunately, however, it is not rare at all for religion to be invoked in support of a war that has been started for other reasons, usually having to do with power. Any war can become a holy war once it is underway. Religious people and institutions must guard against using religion to demonize others.
Rambo used to be called John Wayne, but the name has been updated. Rambo is the view that war is an imperative for a particular man because thereby he acts out or achieves his manhood. By this view, people on the other side of the conflict have no status except as fodder for proving his own dignity to himself. A healthy religious response to this view is not only to defend the personhood of one's enemies, but also to define one's own manhood or personhood by other means. The inherent worth of your soul is not dependent on your machismo.
National Self-Interest is perhaps the most important position to critique because it is in this context that our own nation most often goes to war. American wars usually contain some elements of both holy war and Rambo, but it is in the name of National Self-Interest that the formal decision to go to war is made. National Self-Interest is the view that it is not possible to apply moral criteria to government, since by definition governments are accountable to no authority and no values except the preservation of themselves. This view is also called realism. It was expounded in ancient Greece by the Cynics and in Renaissance Italy by Machiavelli. Yoder points out that it has a couple of logical difficulties. One is that it dismisses morality, while at the same time assuming that the preservation of the state is an inherent moral good. Another difficulty is that it assumes that national interest is clearly defined. But whose interest is it? The ruling class? The people? Which people? And does this self-interest include self-respect and promise-keeping?
The fourth nonpacifist position is the Just War Tradition. Interestingly, Yoder lists the Just War Tradition as both a pacifist position and a nonpacifist position. It is historically a religious tradition, having been first expounded by St. Augustine in the 5th century, to help Christians decide whether or not and in what circumstances it would be justified for them to go to war. Secular social theorists are now beginning to pay attention to this tradition as well. The phrase "Just War" was all over the media during the Gulf War. The Just War Tradition is essentially a set of criteria for determining two things. First, whether or not it is morally justified to enter a particular war, and second, what behavior is morally justified during a war. Briefly, according to the Just War Tradition, the seven criteria for a justified war are these: just cause, competent authority, comparative justice, right intention, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality.
The reason Yoder includes this tradition under pacifist positions is that an honest application of these criteria to real conflictual situations would frequently result in the conclusion that no, the particular war being contemplated cannot meet all these criteria and therefore should not be waged. Unfortunately, the tradition is sometimes misused. Because it is a religious tradition, which contains the words "just war," people sometimes invoke it to show that war is, in general, morally and religiously justifiable. The tradition itself, however, states that this is so only under very stringently limited conditions. The criterion of proportionality, for example, is a key limit. The proportionality rule states that the damage to be inflicted and the costs incurred by a war must be proportionate to the good expected by taking up arms. Some contemporary thinkers argue that by this rule, while some wars at earlier times in history may have been justifiable, in our modern world, with its massive increases in the destructive powers of our weaponry, no wars are justifiable any longer. The tendency of wars to escalate and the real risk of annihilating all of humanity, means no cause is proportionally worth that risk. Even if one rejects the proposition that no war of any kind is any longer justifiable, it has to be admitted that fewer and fewer wars could reasonably pass the moral criteria, given the increased risks.
The criterion of last resort is another especially important piece of the Just War Tradition. We have not fully explored the nonviolent possibilities for dealing with conflictual situations. Whenever we go to war, it becomes heroic to be willing to risk death for one's country. But we seldom take seriously the notion that one might risk one's own death while being unwilling to cause the deaths of others. This is the lesson of Gandhi and of Martin Luther King, and it is harder than anything we typically try. Recently, UN forces with explicitly nonagressive intent are being increasingly used to quell potentially volatile situations. I applaud this as a healthy step in the right direction.
I am a fan of the Just War Tradition because it is morally leaps and bounds ahead of the theory of National Self-Interest upon which our foreign policy is ostensibly based. In reality our government uses a jumbled mixture of National Self-Interest and Just War criteria. Although the Just War Tradition offers no easy solutions (people will disagree about what constitutes a just cause, or a reasonable proportion of damage and risk), it at least affirms that moral behavior is, in fact, required of governments. Framing things in a context of Self-Interest loses sight of this. Religious people and institutions can and should raise our voices to encourage the use of moral criteria over and above self-interest.
Although religion can play a dangerous role in conflicts if it is allowed to become caught up in demonizing the enemy, overall, we need our religious principles and our religious traditions to guide us in dealing constructively with one another. It is a proper task of religion to critique the secular society, or, as the Quakers would say, to speak truth to power.
I will close with more words from a deeply religious man, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King wrote: "We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." Amen.
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