‘We prepare for war, and we get it’ – Stanley Hauerwas
Over a month has passed since the Kabul bombing that took place as American forces withdrew from Afghanistan. 169 Afghani’s died in the attack, as well as 13 American service members. It was an emblematic, if horrific, exclamation point to a mostly neglected twenty-year war. President Biden responded as national leaders often do in such circumstances, promising swift and decisive retaliation.[1] While many cheered, my immediate thought was: ‘have we learned anything?’
Retaliation is what got us into the mess in Afghanistan in the first place. If you were alive at the time, you certainly remember 9/11. It was a day that is impossible to forget. I remember it well, as I do the rush to retaliation that took place in its wake. In Congress, only one member of the House of Representatives counseled forbearance, and was viciously attacked for doing so. Even in the Church, the desire to strike back, to get even, ran high. ‘An eye for an eye’ was the typical response of Americans, including American Christians, in those days. It seemed so right to so many.
Twenty years later, some at least are reconsidering. America has pulled out of Afghanistan. The war is lost, the Taliban back in control, and the Afghani people once again face a bleak and oppressive future. The futility of the ‘war on terror’ is more apparent than ever. The world isn’t any safer now than it was on September 11, 2001. Indeed, one could make a convincing argument that America, and the global community, is less safe. One could even argue that the desire for retaliation and revenge has fueled movements of hate right here at home; movements that threaten the very existence of the American experiment. Our lust for retaliation didn’t, after all, help us in the wake of 9/11; and folks, it isn’t going to help us now.
It certainly didn’t help in the aftermath of the airport bombing. America delivered on Biden’s promise with a drone strike aimed at what was believed to be a car bomb. It was not. It was the car of an aide worker, Zemarey Ahmadi, who was trying to get his family out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took control. The strike killed 10 civilians, including Zemarey and seven children (four boys and three girls) aged 2-10 years old. Their names, if anyone cares to know, were Faisel, Farzad, Binyamin, Armin, Haya, Sumaya, and Malika. Retaliation, in both the case of 9/11 and in the case of the Kabul airport bombing, didn’t exactly deliver what it promised, did it?
There simply has to be a better way.
Two Sundays ago, I preached on Jesus words in Matthew 5:38-42. It’s a passage about nonretaliation. Instead of striking back at your enemies, Jesus teaches, his followers are to, ‘turn the other cheek,’ ‘hand over their cloaks,’ and ‘go the extra mile.’ I won’t spend time fully exegeting those examples here (you can listen to the sermon on the Facebook page of the First Baptist Church of Collingswood; it includes an exploration of how we might have responded nonviolently to 9/11), but essentially, Jesus was telling his disciples and would-be disciples that when wronged, even egregiously so, they should respond, not by retaliating in kind, but by employing nonviolent strategies that assert one’s dignity, surprise and disarm evil, witness to the way of the kingdom, and extend the possibility of friendship. Rejecting the notion of an eye for an eye, Jesus called his followers to seek more creative solutions to the problem of evil. Jesus understood what Gandhi would say many centuries later as he himself creatively employed Jesus’ strategy, that ‘an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’
Alas, most of the world scoffs at such advice.
I recently read an article about the National Peace Museum in Washington D.C. Never heard of it? Well, that’s because it doesn’t exist. Originally chartered in 1984 as an extension of the U.S. Institute of Peace, it was to have borne witness to the possibility of creative peacemaking and peacebuilding. It would have championed the efforts of those who had, whether they realized it or not, heeded the advice of Jesus; those who sought, and often found, creative and nonviolent solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Sadly, to this day, the museum remains but a dream. It has never received the needed funding or support from the United States government.
Big surprise.
Wendell Berry, in his essay, The Failure of War, offers words that help explain why such a museum has never come to be. Berry writes:
‘Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great – and successful – advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices. But so far as our government is concerned, these men and their great and authenticating accomplishments might as well never have existed. To achieve peace by peaceable means is not yet our goal. We cling to the hopeless paradox of making peace by making war.’
Tragically, Berry is right. Our government clings to such a hopeless paradox. I suppose we can’t expect them to change overnight, but certainly among the followers of Jesus, it should be different. Jesus’ disciples should respond to evil with creativity and generosity, and in so doing, provide witness to another way. We should advocate for creative, nonviolent responses that encourage even the government in the direction of peace. Perhaps we will never fully persuade those whose default response is to wield the sword, but we might get them to at take a few positive steps in the direction of peacemaking, and exchange at least some of their swords for plowshares.
I hope America eventually builds that peace museum. I hope that more people come to understand the power of creative nonviolence. I hope that more people discover the creative way of Jesus.
And I hope that the next time a terrible attack happens, at home or abroad, Christians might, whatever else the government may do, consider spreading love instead of bombs. That instead of rushing to support a policy of retaliation in kind, as many did in the wake of 9/11, we might, as the old song goes, give peace a chance.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent
[1] In the aftermath of the attack, the President further invoked the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘Here am I, send me,’ and applied them to the soldiers of the United States military. While one can admire the bravery of those who put their lives on the line for others, the comparison is extremely dangerous, as it advances an insidious Christian Nationalist theology that equates military action with the work of the Kingdom of God. But that’s for another post.