Why Won't Progressive Christians Claim Nonviolence as a Core Value?

There simply is no doubt that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence.  Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence in the Gospels is so well documented that it truly is not necessary for me to rehearse the evidence here.  Jesus believed in nonviolence.  Jesus taught nonviolence.  Jesus lived nonviolence.  Jesus showed us that nonviolence must be humanity’s way because it is God’s way.  Beginning in the fourth century CE the Christian church largely turned its back on Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence, but that betrayal of Jesus does nothing to disprove the undeniable truth that nonviolence was a core value for Jesus and must be a core value for Christians.

So why won’t two of the leading expressions of progressive Christianity today expressly claim nonviolence as a core value?  I refer to the 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org (previously known as The Center for Progressive Christianity) and the Phoenix Affirmations.  The 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org and the Phoenix Affirmations are two of the most widely known and adopted statements of the core values of progressive Christianity, and neither of them expressly claims nonviolence as a core value.

I’ll start with progressivechristianity.org.  The closest that organization comes in its 8 Points to claiming nonviolence as a core value comes in Point 6.  That point states:  “By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who strive for peace and justice among all people.”  The web site tcpc.org shows a link to a study guide for this Point, but there is in fact no study guide.  The site says the study guide will be updated soon.  So we are left only with the few words of Point 6 itself.  It says progressive Christians strive for peace and justice among all people.  Fair enough.  So did Jesus.  Point 6, however, says nothing about how Jesus did that or how Jesus calls us to do that.  Most importantly, it simply contains no commitment to nonviolence, no recognition that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence, no statement that nonviolence must be the way of the Christian, and no call for nonviolence as a means of combating injustice in the world.  Nonviolence is so central to Jesus that I can’t help but wonder why.

The Phoenix Affirmations are a set of twelve “affirmations” put together by a group of progressive clergy in the Phoenix, Arizona, area.  They have been widely propagated by Rev. Eric Elnes through his book The Phoenix Affirmations:  A New Vision for the Future of Christianity.  The twelve Phoenix Affirmations don’t come even as close to a statement of the value of nonviolence as do the 8 Points of progressivechristianity.org.  The closest they come even to naming peace and justice as core values as progressivechristianity.org does is a statement that “Christian love of neighbors includes being advocates for the oppressed.”  That’s a long, long way from stating a commitment to nonviolence.  Again, nonviolence is so central to Jesus that I can’t help but wonder why.

I of course do not know why progressivechristianity.org and the Phoenix Affirmations do not claim nonviolence as a core value.  I have never met Eric Elnes, so have never asked him that question.  I did once ask Fred Plummer, the main figure in what at the time was The Center for Progressive Christianity, why the 8 Points do not mention nonviolence, but I got no meaningful reply.  I got the sense that the question had never occurred to him before.  So I cannot answer my question of why these organizations do not claim nonviolence as a core value of progressive Christianity in their Points or Affirmations.  I can only speculate.  I can only examine some of the dynamics of American and Christian history and culture than may explain why these two otherwise praiseworthy statements of the basics of progressive Christianity shy away from an explicit commitment to nonviolence.  That is what I now propose to do.

The primary dynamic that causes even otherwise progressive Christians to stay away from the nonviolence of Jesus as a core value is, I think, how far Christianity has strayed from Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.  Shortly after establishment Christianity developed the doctrine of the “just war,” which was a way to justify Christians fighting to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  That initial abandonment of the teachings of Jesus, that initial capitulation to the interests and values of empire, opened the door to Christian justification of violence.  It wasn’t long before Christians had abandoned Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence altogether.  Before long we had Christians fighting Christians in the political strife of Europe.  We had Christians using massive violence (by the standards of the time at least) against Muslims in the Crusades and against Jews in the pogroms of both western and eastern Europe.  All pretense  was gone, and in our own time (or shortly before it) we had European Christians slaughtering each other (not to mention the Jews and others) with reckless abandon, all of them convinced that God was on their side.  Here in the United States Christianity became the lapdog of American empire, blessing genocide against Americans Indians, the brutalizing of Africans, and engaging in religious imperialism in Hawaii and elsewhere that went hand in hand with cultural, economic, and political imperialism.  We simply forgot that Christians are supposed to be nonviolent.  Most of us still haven’t remembered.

Violence is so engrained in American culture, and Christianity has so participated in and blessed that violence, that opposing violence in the name of Jesus Christ carries great political risk in the United States today.  Raising nonviolence as an issue produces great tension and dissention even in our churches.  Most Christians see nothing un-Christian about violence as long as it is employed in a cause of which they approve.  Including an express commitment to nonviolence in statements like the 8 Points and the Phoenix Affirmations would produce significant opposition to those statements even in Christian churches where many people might agree with the other things contained in those statements.  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were disagreement over nonviolence even among the progressive Christians who drafted the 8 Points and the Phoenix Affirmations.  Perhaps those statements don’t include nonviolence because there was no consensus about it among their authors.

Progressive Christianity, as expressed in the 8 Points, the Phoenix Affirmations and elsewhere, goes a long way toward recapturing authentic Christianity, toward recapturing the actual teachings of Jesus on issues like justice and peace.  Yet the reluctance of many otherwise progressive Christians to embrace nonviolence the way Jesus embraced nonviolence weakens their witness and renders their commitment to authentic Christian values incomplete.  The absence of nonviolence from the 8 Points is the primary reason I have not urged my church to affiliate with The Center for Progressive Christianity, now progressivechristianity.org.  I plan soon to ask my adult education group to study the Phoenix Affirmations, but if we do I will certainly point out to them the absence of a commitment to Christian nonviolence in those affirmations.  Nonviolence is the way of Christ, it is the way of God, and it must be the way of the Christian.  I am profoundly disappointed when my progressive Christian sisters and brothers hold back from committing themselves to Christian nonviolence.