There's a commercial that has been running on American television lately. It is an ad for a HTC cell phone. As a young man walks through a city scene listening to music through headphones plugged into this cell phone all kind of things blow up behind him. Several cars, including a police car, are flipped onto their roofs, which then collapse, presumably killing everyone inside. It is a scene of violent mayhem breaking out in an American city; and the young man plugged into the cell phone walks through it completely oblivious to what is happening behind him. Also running on American television are ads for several different video games, all of them depicting some kind of combat. Sometimes the combat looks contemporary. Sometimes it looks medieval, but it is always violent with lots of death and destruction. Many, albeit not quite all, of our popular movies are immensely violent too. The supposed sport of boxing, which is simply violence for the sake of entertainment, is making a comeback; and the even more violent extreme cage fighting is becoming mainstream.
The conclusion is inescapable: Violence is now the norm of our popular culture. The acceptability of violence is taken for granted. We don't just accept it, we expect it. We don't just tolerate it, we find it entertaining. Our advertising agencies use it to sell even products that in themselves have nothing to do with violence, and advertising agencies succeed when they have their finger securely on the pulse of popular culture. Violence is now our cultural norm.
Violence is our norm in more ways than in our popular culture. It is our norm in foreign affairs as well. When something happens that we don't like we find someone to invade, Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent examples. More recently we have taken to targeting for death specific individuals whom we have identified as terrorists, never mind that they have never been convicted of anything through any kind of legal process. I have written elsewhere in this blog about the evil of the glorification of the military and our calling everyone in uniform a hero. Those dynamics too are part of the way in which violence is now our norm.
Of course violence has always been a big part of American culture. Like every empire before us our country was founded in violence, expanded through violence, and preserved through violence. Violence has always been part of our entertainment. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived on movie and TV westerns in which the good guys always defeated the bad guys (and the Indians, who were mostly identified as bad guys) through violence and on World War II movies in which the horror of war was sanitized and violence was heroic when it was our side that applied it. Still, it seems to be getting worse. The violence of our popular entertainment is more graphic and, I think, more pervasive than it has ever been before.
Jesus Christ's teaching of nonviolence has always been counter-cultural. It was counter-cultural when Jesus preached and lived it in Roman-occupied Galilee. It was counter-cultural when Gandhi taught and lived it in British-occupied India. It was counter-cultural when Martin Luther King taught and lived it against American racism and unjust economic and foreign policies. It is counter-cultural today. Convincing Americans that violence is always immoral and that there are nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems we face is a very tough sell. Trust me on that one. I try to do it all the time.
The response from the defenders of violence is predictable. They say: Nonviolence doesn't work. Violence is necessary to protect people. Violence is necessary to defeat the bad guys. Even those of us who advocate nonviolence might, in the right situation, resort to violence to protect loved ones. Most of those objections simply are not factually true, and even when they may have some truth in them that modicum of truth doesn't make the use of violence moral. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler because he thought assassinating Hitler was the only way to end the war, but he never maintained that his doing so was moral. He always said that it was something for which he had to ask God's forgiveness.
For all the arguments in favor of the use of violence, there are two undeniable truths for us Christians. One, which applies to everyone not just to Christians, is that if humanity will not learn the ethic of nonviolence we almost surely will destroy ourselves and most of life on earth. We have the means to do it. We have have created nuclear weapons that are able to destroy the earth many times over, and humanity has never developed a weapons system that it hasn't used.
The other undeniable truth for Christians in that Jesus taught and lived an ethic of nonviolence. Nonviolence wasn't incidental to Jesus' teaching. It isn't something that we can say applied only to particular social conditions of his time and place. For Jesus nonviolence was nothing less than the way of God. We must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent. Nonviolence was the way of God that Jesus taught with his words and lived with his life. To follow Jesus is to follow the way of nonviolence. Christians can and do reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence all the time, but no Christian can reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence and truly claim to be following Jesus in that rejection. To resort to violence is to turn one's back on Jesus. I simply can see no way to avoid that truth.
Violence is now our norm here in the United States of America, but it can never be the norm for a Christian. The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to the way of nonviolence. The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to an ethic and to a life that is counter-cultural. The faith of Jesus Christ puts us at odds with our culture in many ways, but one of the most fundamental of those ways is how it puts us at odds with our culture of violence. Being at odds with one's culture isn't easy. I often think that it would be a whole lot easier, and life might be a lot more fun, if I could just go along with the ways of my culture, the ways of violence, the ways of consumerism, the ways of economic injustice. The problem is, I'm a Christian. Violence is the American cultural norm, but it is not and will not be mine. Am I sure that I can live according to the ethic of nonviolence in every hypothetical situation I or some proponent of violence can dream up? No. I am not Jesus Christ, and I know that I am his fallible follower. Still, nonviolence is the ethic of Jesus, and I will be true to it to the best of my limited human ability. As a Christian I can do no other.
The conclusion is inescapable: Violence is now the norm of our popular culture. The acceptability of violence is taken for granted. We don't just accept it, we expect it. We don't just tolerate it, we find it entertaining. Our advertising agencies use it to sell even products that in themselves have nothing to do with violence, and advertising agencies succeed when they have their finger securely on the pulse of popular culture. Violence is now our cultural norm.
Violence is our norm in more ways than in our popular culture. It is our norm in foreign affairs as well. When something happens that we don't like we find someone to invade, Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent examples. More recently we have taken to targeting for death specific individuals whom we have identified as terrorists, never mind that they have never been convicted of anything through any kind of legal process. I have written elsewhere in this blog about the evil of the glorification of the military and our calling everyone in uniform a hero. Those dynamics too are part of the way in which violence is now our norm.
Of course violence has always been a big part of American culture. Like every empire before us our country was founded in violence, expanded through violence, and preserved through violence. Violence has always been part of our entertainment. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived on movie and TV westerns in which the good guys always defeated the bad guys (and the Indians, who were mostly identified as bad guys) through violence and on World War II movies in which the horror of war was sanitized and violence was heroic when it was our side that applied it. Still, it seems to be getting worse. The violence of our popular entertainment is more graphic and, I think, more pervasive than it has ever been before.
Jesus Christ's teaching of nonviolence has always been counter-cultural. It was counter-cultural when Jesus preached and lived it in Roman-occupied Galilee. It was counter-cultural when Gandhi taught and lived it in British-occupied India. It was counter-cultural when Martin Luther King taught and lived it against American racism and unjust economic and foreign policies. It is counter-cultural today. Convincing Americans that violence is always immoral and that there are nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems we face is a very tough sell. Trust me on that one. I try to do it all the time.
The response from the defenders of violence is predictable. They say: Nonviolence doesn't work. Violence is necessary to protect people. Violence is necessary to defeat the bad guys. Even those of us who advocate nonviolence might, in the right situation, resort to violence to protect loved ones. Most of those objections simply are not factually true, and even when they may have some truth in them that modicum of truth doesn't make the use of violence moral. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler because he thought assassinating Hitler was the only way to end the war, but he never maintained that his doing so was moral. He always said that it was something for which he had to ask God's forgiveness.
For all the arguments in favor of the use of violence, there are two undeniable truths for us Christians. One, which applies to everyone not just to Christians, is that if humanity will not learn the ethic of nonviolence we almost surely will destroy ourselves and most of life on earth. We have the means to do it. We have have created nuclear weapons that are able to destroy the earth many times over, and humanity has never developed a weapons system that it hasn't used.
The other undeniable truth for Christians in that Jesus taught and lived an ethic of nonviolence. Nonviolence wasn't incidental to Jesus' teaching. It isn't something that we can say applied only to particular social conditions of his time and place. For Jesus nonviolence was nothing less than the way of God. We must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent. Nonviolence was the way of God that Jesus taught with his words and lived with his life. To follow Jesus is to follow the way of nonviolence. Christians can and do reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence all the time, but no Christian can reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence and truly claim to be following Jesus in that rejection. To resort to violence is to turn one's back on Jesus. I simply can see no way to avoid that truth.
Violence is now our norm here in the United States of America, but it can never be the norm for a Christian. The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to the way of nonviolence. The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to an ethic and to a life that is counter-cultural. The faith of Jesus Christ puts us at odds with our culture in many ways, but one of the most fundamental of those ways is how it puts us at odds with our culture of violence. Being at odds with one's culture isn't easy. I often think that it would be a whole lot easier, and life might be a lot more fun, if I could just go along with the ways of my culture, the ways of violence, the ways of consumerism, the ways of economic injustice. The problem is, I'm a Christian. Violence is the American cultural norm, but it is not and will not be mine. Am I sure that I can live according to the ethic of nonviolence in every hypothetical situation I or some proponent of violence can dream up? No. I am not Jesus Christ, and I know that I am his fallible follower. Still, nonviolence is the ethic of Jesus, and I will be true to it to the best of my limited human ability. As a Christian I can do no other.
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