Fuller Seminary's Glen Stassen, has become a chief evangelical Left opponent of the U.S. war on terror. An advocate of "just peacemaking," and a board member of Jim Wallis's Sojourners, the ethics professor has suggested that 9/11 might have been avoided if only President Bush an offered an olive branch to al-Qaeda.
"Do you think they would have gone ahead with 9/11 or do you think they would have at least waited" if President Bush had publicly announced his commitment to "just peacemaking?" Stassen asked during a debate last fall at the American Academy of Religion.
"Just peacemaking" is Stassen's theory on how to harness people power for "direct action" towards reconciliation and the overthrow of injustice. Unfortunately, from Stassen's perspective, President Bush evidently had not read Stassen's books in time before 9/11.
Stassen similarly wondered if Israel should not have surrendered some of its settlements in response to Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers last summer, rather than invading Lebanon. According to my assistant John Lomperis' report about the debate, Stassen surmised that Israel's commitment to "just peacemaking" might have been persuasive with Palestinians.
"Empirical realism" shows war to be ineffective against terrorism, Stassen insisted. U.S. military actions only arouse more anger and terrorism, he claimed, pointing to a U.S. State Department report chronicling more terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq War. "This administration declared three wars in one term!" Stassen lamented.
No doubt, Stassen would also have claimed, correctly, that Japanese attacks on Americans also increased after the December 1941 U.S. declaration of war on Japan. Stassen is the son of the once-chronic U.S. presidential candidate Harold Stassen. But his father, however numerous his electoral defeats, was usually not naive about the threats to America's safety, whether from fascists or communists. The son, with his commitment to abstract seminary theories, lacks that political realism.
Stassen is hardly a typical evangelical. He is on the boards of Peace Action Network (formerly SANE/FREEZE) and of Clergy and Laity Concerned, both old leftist groups that fought for decades to disarm the U.S. during the Cold War. Evangelical Left figures like Stassen are influential among evangelical school faculties, who are ever anxious to defy popular stereotypes about conservative evangelicals. Stassen's brand of pseudo-pacifism and hosility to U.S. national security strikes some evangelical academics as sophisticated.
Like Jim Wallis and other evangelical Left figures who are eager for political viability, Stassen prefers not to talk openly about pacifism. Instead, his vision of "just peacemaking" is supposedly aimed at unifying pacifists and Christian just war proponents in common action to avoid conflict. It emphasizes "non-violent direct action" as embodied by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the revolt against Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos. Stassen has also cited the peaceful 1989 revolutions against East European communist regimes as an example. More oddly, he likewise has pointed to the 1979 Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah and enthroned the Ayatollah Khomeini. Is the Iraninan theocracy an admirable fruit of "just peace-making?" Incredibly, Stassen mentions the "peaceful" parts of the Palestinian intifada against Israel as an illustration of his theory.
In most cases of successful "direction action" that Stassen cites, the targetted regimes, whether the British Empire or southern U.S. segregationists, were not maniacally genocidal and were unwilling to kill large numbers to sustain their power. Even the Shah and Marcos, though dictatorial, lacked the ideology to sustain mass murder. The East European communists had lost faith in their murderous ideology and, even more importantly, had lost the Soviet troops necessary to sustain it.
Stassen's "direct action" would not seem to have much application with Islamist fanatics, Baathist thugs, Iranian theocrats, or still believing communists, all of whom are more than willing to slay thousands in their defense of absolute power. But Stassen, like many on the evangelical Left, confuses the mandates of the church with the vocation of the state.
"Jesus didn’t just say no to anger and revengeful resistance, but commanded transforming initiatives," Stassen has written. "Go make peace with your brother or sister; go the second mile with the Roman soldier (Matt 5:21-25, 38-42). Christians need something more than an ethic of 'just say no'; we need an ethic of constructive peacemaking."
Historically, the Christian faith has drawn a distinction between the moral responsibilities of Christian believers, individually or collectively, and the governments under which they live. Where Christian individuals may be called to turn the other cheek, governments are called to avenge aggression in defense of the defenseless. But modern Christian pacifists, ignoring even the moral heritage of traditional Christain pacifism, are too often unable to recall these distinctions. In their minds, governments, especially Western ones, must perpetually turn their cheeks, no matter the provocation or the consequence.
To his credit, Stassen advocates that the "spreading of democracy and respect for human rights, including religious liberty," are conducive to peace. He notes that democracies rarely, if ever, war against each other, and military adventurism is lthe favored tool of dictators.
More predictably, like his cohort Jim Wallis, Stassen faults the U.S. as the foe of democracy, citing the U.S.-supported role of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Salvador Allende's fall from power in Chile in 1973, and the "terrorist" Contra forces that opposed the "democratically-elected" Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Pseudo-pacifists like Stassen, with others on the evangelical Left, fail at both theology and history. They reject much of Christianity's 2,000 years of moral developments on statecraft. Instead, they favor very thin re-interpretations of Quaker/Mennonite pacifism, varnished over with the slogans and assumptions of the post-1960's academic Left.
Historic Christianity, in its ethical teachings, has nearly always tried to respond to the world as it really is. But the "just peacemaking" of Stassen and the evangelical Left prefers a religous ethic that is relevant only on insulated seminary campuses.