It’s Veterans Day here in the United States of America. Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal this year that it usually is. Maybe that’s because it falls on a Friday this year, thereby creating an uncommon three day weekend for some. Or maybe it’s because today is 11/11/11, a once a century date that some think has some sort of mystic or magic significance. (Earlier today I saw the time of 11:11 on a digital clock, making it 11:11 on 11/11/11, yet nothing mystic or magic happened. Go figure.) Maybe those things explain why Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal than usual today, but I suspect that there is a less benign reason why we now make such a big deal out of Veterans Day. I suspect that we make such a big deal out of Veterans Day because the demonic myth is growing and spreading among us that everyone who serves or who has ever served in the American military is a “hero.” For example, as I write this I have on the television the “Carrier Classic,” a college basketball game being played on the USS Carl Vinson, a huge American aircraft carrier. The ESPN crew sits behind a desk with a big banner in front that reads “America’s Heroes.” QED. I have written on American militarism before. See in particular the post on this blog titled “Christianity and American Militarism: Comments Prompted By President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech,” posted on January 26, 2011. I will not repeat here what I said there, but I reaffirm here everything that I said there. Here I want to reflect more on the way that we call everyone in the American military a hero and to ask: As it relates to the question of the military, who are the real heroes in American life? Who should we, as Christians, really be celebrating?
The way in which we call everyone in the American military today a hero is tremendously destructive. It is destructive first of all because it isn't factually true. It’s not that some, perhaps many, American military men and women don’t commit acts of heroism. They do. They commit acts of bravery and self-sacrifice under the horrific conditions of war. They engage in acts of service to people at home and around the world in times of natural disaster. It is not my intent here to deny those facts or to minimize them. Yet it is also undeniably true that most people in the military lead ordinary, routine lives, going to work each day, raising families, living lives no more heroic than the lives the rest of us live. It simply is not factually true that everyone in the American military is, in any meaningful sense, a hero.
That, however, is not my main point here. Rather, what I most want to say is that calling everyone in the military a hero is profoundly destructive in a more fundamental way. Calling everyone in the American military a hero is destructive because it makes it more difficult than ever to criticize American militarism and to oppose the way in which we use the armed forces to project aggressive American imperial power around the world. After all, if the American military is made up entirely of heroes, then whatever they do must, by definition, be heroic. It must be honorable. It must be something we all should, indeed we all must, support. Criticizing any use of the military becomes an attack on heroes, and what decent person would attack heroes? The myth of the American military as made up entirely of heroes is one of the primary tools that the powers use today to perpetuate empire, to perpetuate a culture of violence and the lie of American superiority over other people in the world.
Let me suggest that there is another group of Americans, much less well-known and totally uncelebrated in our public life, who are indeed heroes whom we should be honoring today. They are the men (mostly) who, in a time when service in the military was mandatory for those who were drafted (i.e., forced involuntarily into service in the imperial war machine), refused to serve in the military out of convictions of faith and conviction of conscience. Some of these men were Christians from the historic peace churches—Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and some others. These men could sometimes get conscientious objector status. Others were Christians or not Christians at all who for whatever reason were not able to obtain that status. Some went to jail. Some fled the country. All of them are heroes. They are heroes because they took great personal risk in order to be true to the teachings of their faith or true to the dictates of their conscience. They took a risk, and many of them suffered, to be true to the ethic of nonviolence. Christian or not they all were witnessing to the truth of the way of nonviolence.. They took a stand for the way that truly makes for peace, for nonviolence, which Jesus taught was the way of God.
What is a hero? A hero is someone who risks much to save others. A hero is one who risks much to take a stand for conscience, to stand for what is right when doing so isn’t popular, won’t be understood, and can have significant negative consequences for the person taking the stand. Americans who have said no to the war machine have risked much to save the world from violence. They have taken a stand for conscience, stood for what is right, when what they have done has not been popular, has been misunderstood, and has often had significant negative consequences for them. They are heroes. The world may not see them as heroes, but Jesus said “my kingdom is not from this world.” John 18:36 They may not be heroes by the standards of the kingdoms of the world, grounded in violence, but they are heroes by the standards of the Kingdom of God, grounded in nonviolence.
So today I celebrate the heroes. I celebrate the heroes of the Kingdom of God, the heroes not of the world’s way of violence but of God’s way of nonviolence. Those who have refused to fight and all who have devoted their lives to ending war, to working toward a world in which no one would ever fight again. They are not “veterans.” No one plays basketball games on aircraft carriers, or anywhere else, to honor them. The world does not celebrate them. The world mostly condemns them, but then the world condemned Jesus too. Our call as Christians is to be true to the Kingdom of God, not to the empires of the world. So today let us celebrate some real heroes, heroes of the Kingdom, heroes of faith, heroes of conscience.
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