Christianity and American Militarism: Comments Prompted by President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech

Christianity and American Militarism:

Comments on President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech

Last night President Obama gave his State of the Union Speech.  At least some of my friends are enthusiastic about that speech.  I’m not, for a variety of reasons.  One is Obama’s totally uncritical and completely wholehearted endorsement of American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is somehow radically different from other nations, that we embody principles of liberty and equality in a way that no other country does.  That simply isn’t true.  We are not a shining light on a hill as Obama and American exceptionalism insist that we are.  We are simply the latest in history's succession of world empires, better (sometimes much better) in some ways than some others, no worse than most, typical of empire in most respects.  America is not the light to the nations; for us Christians at least Jesus is.  Obama’s speech last night was nothing but the latest in a long line of imperialist speeches from the head of an imperialist government.  It was better than some, although the ways in which it was better don’t rise much above the level of vague policy outlines with no specifics.  Some of its proposals were simply appalling.  Before the massive shift of the American political spectrum to the right that began with the disastrous presidency of Ronald Reagan in the nineteen eighties we never thought we’d hear a Democratic president call for a five year freeze on spending for government programs that actually benefit people while giving only a meaningless nod in the direction of reducing military spending and restoring a semblance of fairness to our tax structure by making sure the wealthy pay their fair share.   On the whole there was little to like about the speech other than Obama's polished and appealing way of speaking.  There was however much that causes concern.

Here’s the thing that happened last night that causes me the most concern and that says the most about the nature of America today.  Only one thing in Obama’s speech produced unanimous, loud, and protracted applause.  That thing came late in the speech when Obama said "we must always remember that the Americans who have borne the greatest burden in this struggle are the men and women who serve our country."  He meant those who are in the armed forces.  The House chamber erupted in enthusiastic applause that went on seemingly forever.  I nearly cried.  I nearly cried first of all because our country has decided that only those people who join the military “serve America.”  Obama didn't have to say those in the armed forces.  He eventually did, but the applause erupted before he made that clarification.  The President had only to say those who serve the country, and everyone in that chamber and every American hearing his speech immediately knew he was talking about the military.  And I thought:  That means that teachers, nurses and other medical professionals, fire fighters, police officers, sanitation workers, hard working public employees at every level of government, workers building public infrastructure, indeed anyone else doing essential and constructive work in our country isn't serving the country.  Only those in the military serve our country.  Service equals military service.  That’s where we've come in this land of ours.  I feel like weeping for my country.

I feel like weeping because service has come to mean solely participating in a massive war machine whose raison d’être is death and destruction.  Service means enlisting in a military apparatus the primary purpose of which is to kill and to die.  Even those in the military who themselves are unlikely to kill or to die in combat support the institutional structure whose purpose is killing and dying.  They work to make the killing and the dying possible.  Our culture has become so militaristic, so addicted to violence as a solution to problems, that all the President has to say is “the men and women who serve our country,” and we immediately understand those who serve in the war machine; and we immediately jump to our feet with cheers and ovations.    

I want to weep too because I know that my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ taught nonviolence not violence.  About that there simply is no doubt.  Jesus taught and lived an alternative way of life to the always violent way of empire.  About that there is simply no doubt either.  America is the current world empire, and our way is violence, our way is militarism.  All empires are of course militaristic.  Empires are created through military conquest, and they are maintained through the application of military force as needed.  Our empire was created through wars against Mexico, Spain, England, and virtually every nation of the American Indians.  The United States of America is today's Roman Empire.  John Dominic Crossan , one of today’s leading prophets of nonviolence, points out that Rome’s innovation in the way of empire was to station its armies on the periphery of the empire, thereby protecting the homeland from foreign invaders.  That, of course, is why the Roman legions were in Judea in Jesus’ time.  The United States today mimics Rome in this regard.  We station our military forces around the world.  We apply military force as we think necessary to protect the homeland and to protect our imperial economic as well as political interests, never mind that our wars are always immoral and, as in the case of Iraq, are often illegal even under the very worldly standards of international law.  Today we have military forces on the periphery of our empire from western Europe to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan.  Rome is our teacher, and we have learned well. 

Rome glorified its legions.  It held victory parades in the capital and built monuments to victorious emperors and commanders.  Victorious commanders on occasion became emperors.  Today perhaps more than ever we follow Rome’s example here as well.  Glorification of the American military has saturated our popular culture today.  We hold Memorial Day parades cheering the troops.  We build war monuments, and sometimes our military heroes become President, Eisenhower being the most recent example.  (How many of us remember his warning against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, a term he coined? Yet in Eisenhower's day that part of the war machine was far smaller than it is today.)  Virtually everyone with a public voice today must—and does—laud the service of everyone in the American armed forces, which service of course is always said to be given in defense of freedom.  President Obama last night was just the most recent and visible example.  We have begun referring to every single person who serves in any branch of our military as a hero, regardless of whether or not the person has done anything heroic even by the standards of the world.

We have, in short, done nothing less than create a myth of the American military.  Much of what we say about our military is not factually true, but that isn’t what makes what we say a myth.  What we say is a myth because it is a story that is told to connect the people with an ultimate concern.  It is a story that is told to justify the military and to procure public support for the military.  It is told to procure public approval of the use of the military for the purposes of empire by those in power.  American militarism is an idolatrous myth.  The American military and the empire it serves function as an ultimate concern, but that concern is of course not truly ultimate.  The myth of the American military, however, cannot be questioned.  Anyone who raises questions about it is immediately accused of being un-American, un-patriotic, always with the clear implication that being un-American, un-patriotic, is a mortal sin that no decent person would ever commit.  I am quite confident that this essay will produce the same accusations against me, at least it will if it is read at all widely.  Rejecting the American enthusiasm for the military is a sin within our national mythic system because that stance toward the military serves to separate people from the military, and a good definition of sin is anything that works to separate a person from the ultimate concern of any mythic system, whether that concern is truly ultimate or not. 

The myth of the American military is utterly incompatible with the Christian myth, with the Christian story that serves to connect us with the truly ultimate, with God.  It is nothing less than a competing mythic system, a faith that serves a different god than does the Christian faith.  In the mythic system of Christianity the  ultimate concern is God as we know God in and through Jesus Christ; and God is of course the truly ultimate.  Christianity which truly makes God its ultimate concern, and not some idolatrous concern such as belief in the Bible or in the church, is true non-idolatrous faith.  In our country it co-exists with other non-idolatrous faiths, other religions that make the truly ultimate their ultimate concern; but it also competes with numerous idolatrous faiths that make something conditional and preliminary their ultimate concern, including the myth of the American military.  True Christianity is entirely incompatible with those idolatrous faiths, including the one we are concerned with here.

True Christianity is incompatible with any idolatrous faith because Christianity’s ultimate concern is the truly ultimate while idolatrous faith’s ultimate concern is something that is not ultimate; but Christianity is entirely incompatible with the myth of the American military for another reason, one that is less fundamental but one that may be easier to grasp.  This consideration brings us back to a point we began with.  Christianity is inconsistent and incompatible with the myth of the American military precisely because Jesus Christ taught nonviolence.  The job of the military is, however, precisely violence.  We try to pretty up the military.  We show film of the Navy bringing relief supplies to Indonesia after the tsunami as a recruiting tool, but a soldier I once heard interviewed on television spoke the truth when he said “My job is to kill people and blow up their stuff.”  The job of the military is violence.  The military’s raison d’être is violence.  A nonviolent military is an oxymoron.  The military is there to be violent, and Jesus Christ taught nonviolence.  For a Christian the matter really should be no more complicated than that. 

God of course cares for every soldier of every nation, for God cares for every person of every nation; but God judges our violence and grieves over the death and destruction that it causes.  God calls us back to the true ways of peace, to the ways of nonviolence.  The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.  He isn’t Christian, but he gets the truth about God and violence far better than most Christians.  He teaches and lives far better than most Christians the truth about violence that Jesus taught and lived.  Violence doesn’t lead to peace, violence leads to violence.  Peace leads to peace.  Justice leads to peace.  That is a core truth of true Christianity but one that actual Christianity mostly rejects.

So what must our attitude toward the current glorification of the military, which amounts to nothing less than a militarization of American culture, be?  It must not be that we judge or condemn those who choose to serve in the military.  God doesn’t judge or condemn them, and neither should we.  They are products of their culture, our culture; and their culture, our culture, tells them that serving in the military is honorable and heroic.  Many of them choose the military because they see no meaningful opportunities for themselves in civilian life, and we are in no position to judge their choice. 

We must not, however, buy into the glorification of the military, into the militarization of American culture that was so clearly displayed during Obama’s speech last night.  The myth of the American military permeates the air we breathe today, and it functions to legitimate war and perpetuate violence.  We must not let the mythology of the military, with its stirring symbols of flag and uniform, cloud our vision.  We must not let it obscure the truth.  Jesus is for us Christians the truth.  Jesus taught us Christians the truth, and the truth is that violence is not God’s way.  It is not God’s way because God is not violent.  God is a God of grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, and violence is the opposite of those divine characteristics.  God is a God of life.  Violence destroys life. 

So we must be people of peace.  We must be people who work for an end to violence.  Our ideal, our goal, must be a world without violence, a world without armies, a world without weapons, a world without war.  We must strive always to beat the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks.  We will never see that vision realized.  The powers of the world, fallen as they are to use Walter Wink’s imagery, are too powerful.  They aren’t going to go away any time soon, but that is no reason for us to capitulate to them, to give in to them.  Nonviolence is the way of the Christian.  Nonviolence is the call of the Christian.  With Christ as our guide we can see the myth of the American military for the idolatry that it is, analyze it with clarity, judge it with wisdom, and work to replace it with the way of God, the way of nonviolence.  If we would be truly Christian we can do no less.

The MLK We'd Rather Forget

It’s Martin Luther King Day, 2011.  A lot of people are talking about him today.  Some progressive voices are saying what I want to say about him, but most people aren’t.  I’ve haven’t before posted one of my sermons here, but I’m now posting the one I gave yesterday.  It’s about Martin Luther King, and it’s about the Martin Luther King we’d rather forget.  It’s an important message.  I hope that by posting it here I can in some tiny measure help to get the word out.

A Light to the Nations

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 16, 2011

Scripture:  Isaiah 49:1-7

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s Martin Luther King Day weekend.  This weekend we pause to remember and celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  If Protestantism had saints he’d probably be one.  He would at least be venerated as a martyr for the faith, as many people are in Orthodox Christianity.  We don’t do that exactly, but we do celebrate King’s life and work.  Yet as I considered Martin Luther King once more this past week I discerned that we need to ask ourselves just what it is about his life and work that we celebrate; and we need to ask whether there aren’t parts of his life and work that we don’t celebrate, that we’d rather forget.  I am convinced that there are such aspects of his life and work, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning.

We celebrate Martin Luther King the civil rights leader.  We celebrate his courage and the powerful way he articulated, in the great preaching tradition of the Black churches, the cause of equality in our country.  We celebrate his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech.  All of that is worthy of celebration, and we do celebrate it.  But here’s the thing.  Martin Luther King was about a lot more than that, and it’s that a lot more that we maybe would rather forget, that, in fact, a lot of Americans do forget or ignore.

We know that King insisted on nonviolence in the civil rights movement.  It was, I think, that insistence on nonviolence that made him white people’s favorite civil rights leader.  We wanted the civil rights movement to be nonviolent.  That was a good thing, although maybe we only thought it was a good thing because we were afraid of Black America’s righteous anger at centuries of white racism resulting in violence against us.  What we pay less attention to is the fact that King did not limit his call for nonviolence to the civil rights movement.  He saw the connection between violence at home and the violence we were perpetrating at the time in Vietnam.  So he spoke up.  He spoke out against the Vietnam War, and when he did he became a lot less popular with white America.  People told him to stick to his proper sphere of activity, the civil rights movement.  That was of course a racist response to King’s opposition to the war because it said that a Black man’s only legitimate concern was the civil rights of his own people, but just as importantly it greatly misunderstood King’s—and Jesus’—message of nonviolence.  It limited nonviolence as a value to one aspect of life, one set of issues.  It failed to see that King’s—and Jesus’—call to nonviolence is universal, that it applies to all aspects of life.  That was, and is, a part of King’s—and Jesus’—message that a great many of us did not and do not want to hear; but Jesus proclaimed it and King preached it just the same.

And King insisted on more than nonviolence; and he insisted on more than legal equality, equality of legal rights, for Black Americans, as important as that was and is.  He insisted on economic justice for poor people, Black and white and every other color as well.  When he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, he was there to support the demands of sanitation workers for a fair wage and safe working conditions.  That was an issue of economic justice not of race.  King also saw the connection between poverty and violence.  He saw that it was disproportionately Black Americans and other poor Americans whom we sent to fight and die in our imperialist war in Vietnam.  A great many white Americans reacted to King’s calls for economic justice the same way they did to his call for an end to the Vietnam War.  Civil rights are fine, we said, as long as you’re only talking about legal rights.  But don’t go supporting the economic rights of the poor.  That’s not your concern, we said, perhaps out of fear that true economic justice for the poor might mean that those of us with economic privilege might have to live a little less high on the hog.

We celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader, but he was much more than a civil rights leader.  He was an advocate of nonviolence in all aspects of life, and he demanded economic justice for the poor.  Where did all of that emphasis on nonviolence and justice come from?  It came from Jesus, that’s where.  Why did King insist on preaching those things as well as civil rights?  Because he was a Christian, that’s why.  Jesus preached economic justice, what Crossan calls distributive justice, economic justice that assures that all have enough.  Jesus called us to be advocates of such distributive justice as well.  Jesus preached and lived nonviolence, and he calls us to preach and to live nonviolence too.  Martin Luther King got all of that.  A great many Christians do not.  Those things are hallmarks of King’s life that many of us would rather forget.

Our passage from Isaiah this morning may not seem to have much to do with the message of Martin Luther King, but I think it does.  That passage is one of the so-called servant songs from the part of Isaiah scholars call second Isaiah.  In it God calls God’s servant, whose identity historically is unknown, to be a light not only to his own people Israel but to the whole world.  God says to the servant “I will give you as a light to the nations.”  By that light, God says, the nations of the world will see and come to the ways of God.

For us Christians the primary light to the nations is Jesus Christ.  He is a shining beacon in a world of darkness.  He lights the way to God and reveals the ways of God.  What is the way to God that he lights?  What are the ways of God that he reveals?  They are more than anything else the ways of economic justice for the poor and of nonviolence in all aspects of human life.  Martin Luther King understood that truth.  He proclaimed that truth, a truth he learned from his Lord and Savior, and ours, Jesus Christ, our primary light to the nations.  Everyone who reflects the light of Christ is also a light to the nations.  God, you see, calls us to be a light too.

Friends, the world today desperately needs that light.  It desperately needs the light of economic justice.  We are starting to see the effects of the world’s unjust distribution of resources, an unjust distribution from which we all benefit, revealed more and more starkly.  In recent days we’ve seen stories of soaring food prices causing hardship in places like India and Indonesia.  In our own state services on which many people depend just to stay alive are being reduced or eliminated because the rest of us won’t pay for them.  Economic injustice today threatens to destabilize the whole world.  If it doesn’t do it today, it most certainly will do it tomorrow.

Violence today threatens to destroy the whole world.  Prophets of nonviolence like Crossan and Wink say, rightly, that unless we humans can overcome our addiction to violence, can transcend our belief in what Wink calls the myth of redemptive violence, the belief that violence can save us, we will eventually and inevitably destroy ourselves and our part of God’s creation.  We have the means to do it.  More nations are seeking the means to do it.  I and many others are convinced that Jesus’ way—God’s way—of nonviolence is our only hope of escape, the only path of salvation for the world.

Martin Luther King knew these truths.  He knew them because he knew Jesus Christ.  He was a light to the nations because he reflected the light of Christ.  He did that not only by working for civil rights but by working for economic justice and by preaching universal nonviolence as well.  In all of that he was a light to the nations.  Are we?  Amen. 

The Defining Issue

In Liberating Christianity I identified homosexuality as the defining issue in Christianity today.  I called it the defining issue because the issue of homosexuality leads immediately to the more fundamental question of the nature of the Bible and of biblical authority, an issue that largely defines the difference between progressive Christianity and conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity.  I continue to believe that homosexuality is a defining issue in American Christianity today.  Christianity’s attitude toward God’s gay and lesbian people is first of all a justice issue, one in which most of Christianity is still on the wrong side.  Beyond that, the traditional Christian understanding that homosexuality is per se sinful can be maintained today only by clinging uncritically to a Biblicism that makes an ancient cultural understanding the ethical norm, indeed, by making an ancient anthropology the word and will of God.  In what I am about to say I do not intend to diminish the importance of homosexuality as a defining issue for Christianity today.  A Christian’s, or a Christian church’s, understanding of the Bible and their willingness to let God speak a new word on an issue that appears in the Bible can easily be gauged by their attitude toward homosexuality.

That being said, in recent times I have begun to think that perhaps homosexuality is not the defining issue in American Christianity today.  I want here to consider the possibility that another issue is in some ways more decisive for our contemporary faith.  That issue is our relationship to the Kingdom of God, and it has two major components:  What is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of poverty, and what is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of violence.  These questions more than any others go to the heart of what it means be a disciple of Jesus Christ. 

Despite the Christian tradition’s long insistence that the Christian faith is about how we are saved from sin, about how our souls are saved from damnation and granted a blissful eternity in heaven, it is beyond serious doubt that what Jesus preached was not the eternal salvation of our souls but the Kingdom of God; and it is beyond serious doubt that the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it was primarily about two things:  distributive justice for the poor and nonviolence.  The historical Christian focus on the afterlife and the eternal fate of human souls is at best a distortion of Jesus’ message.  It is a distortion of that message because it diverts our attention from the things Jesus taught us and leads us to focus on something about which he had little or nothing to say.  (I am of course aware that the Gospel of John can be read as being about the eternal salvation of our souls, although I don’t think that’s really what John is about.  I take it as given, however, that John reflects theological thinking from the end of the first century CE and that it tells us little or nothing about what Jesus of Nazareth actually said or did.  The Synoptic Gospels are also theological tracts from the last third of the first century, but they come significantly closer to preserving what Jesus actually said and did than does John.)  The church's distortion of Christ’s message by focusing on the afterlife is part of a larger refocusing of the faith that occurred when Christianity accommodated itself to the interests of empire after it became the official faith of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.  I am becoming convinced that what distinguishes true followers of Christ from others who claim the name Christian is our attitude toward the Kingdom of God, that is, toward the distributive justice for the poor and the nonviolence that Jesus actually taught.

Jesus proclaimed God's dream of universal distributive justice for the poor, and I am convinced that one cannot be authentically Christian and at the same time support social, political, economic, and environmental policies and systems that create and perpetuate poverty, that depend on the existence of a large number of poor people as our current economic system does.  Christians can be very good about giving to charity to help the poor.  That is a good thing as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Dom Helder Camara, the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, famously said “When I feed the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry they call me a Communist.”  It is precisely other Christians who called him a Communist when he raised the question about structures and systems that create and perpetuate poverty; but the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached isn’t just about giving alms, although giving alms is a good thing.  It is about a transformed world, a world freed from the ways of empire, a world in which hunger and poverty do not exist because resources are shared and not hoarded, because none insist on having so much that others must necessarily not have enough. 

The way of empire, the way of extreme inequality in the distribution of resources in which the extravagant wealth of a few is supported by the poverty of many, is the way of the United States today.  It is our way domestically, where more and more wealth is being accumulated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population and social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable are being shredded so that the wealthy don’t have to pay more taxes and we can continue to spend obscene and unjustifiable amounts on the military.  It is our way internationally, where we as a nation, being something like two percent of the world’s population, consume fully one quarter of the world’s resources.  That reality is intolerable for authentic Christians, people who follow Jesus’ way of inclusion and justice for the poor and the marginalized.  Yet we Christians tolerate it.  More than that, we support and perpetuate it.  Many of us vote for politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.  Many of us vote to repeal taxes every chance we get.  We buy into the falsehood perpetuated by those who advocate the interests of the wealthy that government is necessarily and always a bad thing and that income redistribution through progressive tax policy is an inherent evil.  Then we go to church on Sunday and convince ourselves that we are faithful followers of Jesus Christ, a delusion that the church only too eagerly reinforces lest anyone be offended or, worse, withhold their pledge dollars. 

The situation is no better when it comes to that other pillar of the Kingdom of God, nonviolence.  John Dominic Crossan is absolutely right when he says that the way of empire is

religion (or ideology)→war→victory→peace

while the way of Jesus is

religion→nonviolence→justice→peace.

Peace through violence and victory is the way of empire.  Peace through nonviolence and justice is the way of Jesus.  It is the way of God.  It must be the way of the Christian, yet ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have capitulated to the way of empire and engaged in warfare.  The capitulation began with the formulation of just war theory, which justified the Christian use of violence in rather narrowly defined circumstances.  Over the centuries Christians abandoned even the fig leaf of just war theory and put the Christian faith at the uncritical service of empires and nations.  The Roman Emperor Constantine claimed to have a vision before a battle of the cross and the words “In this sign conquer,” and the church never told him how un-Christian that vision was.  During the Crusades in the early centuries of the second Christian millennium European armies marched into battle at the behest of the church with crosses lifted high and emblazoned on their shields.  With the rise of nation states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the church had no qualms about blessing the military adventures of those states.  The church sent clerics and missionaries with the armies of the European colonial powers to bless their violence and convert the supposed heathens against whom that violence was directed.  In the first half of the seventeenth century wars between Christians devastated western Europe.  In the modern era soldiers on all sides of the wars that ravaged Europe from the Napoleonic wars to the World Wars of the twentieth century were sure that God was on their side and blessed their killing and maiming of other people, most of whom were also Christians.  There were from time to time isolated voices that reminded the church of the teachings of Jesus.  The churches we know as the historic peace churches—Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers, etc.—are especially important in this regard.  Yet on the whole Christianity turned its back on the teaching about violence of the one it continued to proclaim as Lord and Savior, the one Christians convinced themselves they were really following. 

Today it never occurs to most Christians that their support of the military activities of their nation is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, but of course it is.  We come up with all kinds of justifications for Christians participating in violence.  Just war theory was the beginning, but today we usually resort to more supposedly pragmatic considerations to justify violence.  Violence is necessary, we say.  War will bring peace we say, never mind that it never really has.  We have a right to use violence to defend ourselves, we say, never mind that Jesus specifically forbade his disciples to use violence to defend him.  Violence works and nonviolence doesn’t, we say, never mind that as Walter Wink points out we don’t know that nonviolence doesn’t work because we’ve never really tried it universally and consistently and there is good evidence to suggest that in fact it does work in the few situations where it has been tried.  Ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire Christians have been immensely creative in formulating justifications for rejecting the teaching of Jesus on nonviolence. 

None of which changes the fact that violence is un-Christian.  Always.  That’s what Jesus taught, or rather he taught that violence was un-God-like.  Violence is not God’s way.  Ever.  Yet we want both to be violent and to convince ourselves that we are faithful disciples of Christ and that God is on our side.  So we fabricate justifications and reject Christ’s teaching.  We go to church, pray, feel righteous, and then march off to battle or cheer those who do.  The eighth century BCE prophets said again and again that God despises our worship when it is not combined with justice for the poor and vulnerable.  They would say that today as well, but we must add that God despises our worship also when we follow it with war or support for war. 

If we would be true to our Lord and Savior we Christians must be people of peace.  We must work for an end to war and to all manifestations of violence in the world, violence between nations, violence between people, violence against God’s creation.  Our ideal, our goal, must be a world without violence, a world without armies, a world without weapons, a world without war.  We must strive always to beat the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks.  We will never see that vision realized.  The powers of the world, fallen as they are to use Walter Wink’s imagery, are too powerful.  They aren’t going to go away or be redeemed any time soon, but that is no reason for us to capitulate to them, to give in to them.  Nonviolence is the way of the Christian.  Nonviolence is the call of the Christian. 

So what is the decisive issue in Christianity today?  It is the issue of how we relate to the Kingdom of God that Jesus taught and lived.  It is therefore the issue of how we relate to the issues of poverty and violence.  Are we committed to using nonviolent means to bring an end to violence and an end to distributive injustice?  If we would claim the name of Christ we must answer that question yes.