Category: Church matters

In a comment to the previous post, Michael Westmoreland-White asks a fair question of Just War theory:

Has JWT EVER led to massive civil disobedience and refusal to fight on the part of a church’s members? Pacifists have often been arrested or executed for refusing to fight. When has this been true of JWTers? CAN the doctrine be given “teeth” or will it always just be a sop to the consciences of nationalistic warriors?

The reason this is an important question is that, if the only effect of JWT is to bless whatever wars the government undertakes, then it’s not functioning as a theory of the morality of warfare. And I think it’s fair to say that many American Christians have gone along with the state’s war plans while using the rhetoric of just war more as a fig leaf than as a critical tool. Both the mainline and evangelical churches have been guilty of buying into forms of nationalism that serve to blunt criticism of the government’s actions, especially during wartime. It’s also worth pointing out that the vast majority of Christians aren’t taking to the street to engage in civil disobedience in protest of any of the other great evils our society is complicit in, whether that be abortion, poverty, ecological degradation, or what have you.

Still, it has to be pointed out that many Christians, both clergy and laypeople, who have protested war have done so for broadly Just War reasons. Unless we’re going to assume, for instance, that everyone who protested the Vietnam war was a committed pacifist, there must’ve been at least some cases where opposition was motivated by people concluding that the war didn’t meet the standards of a just war. And I think it’s safe to say that this has been the case in more recent years as well. The mainline churches, none of which are officially pacifist, have been very critical of the Iraq war and many of their members took part in demonstrations protesting it. Granting all that, though, it’s safe to say, I think, that JWT doesn’t provide the controlling template for how most American Christians think about war.

Whether or not JWT can become more effective as a genuine restraint on Christians’ willingness to participate in unjust wars depends, I think, on whether it can be effectively taught. My evidence is strictly anecdotal, but my impression is that JWT is rarely taught or discussed in most congregations. No moral framework can be put into practice if it isn’t taught and received. And this is true of any morality. Sexual morality doesn’t require abstinence in all cases, but it does require the practice of restraint and discrimination, as well as the development of virtues necessary for that practice. Likewise, putting JWT into practice means not just learning a theory, but also learning the virtues of restraint, moderation, and justice as well as faith, hope, and charity. That it hasn’t been taught and internalized isn’t necessarily a knock against the theory, but a knock against us. If mainline chruches are serious about JWT, maybe a first step would be to learn from the peace churches how they reinforce and inculcate the practices of peacemaking in their members.

Eric directs our attention to this Godspy interview with Catholic theologian and “Radical Orthodoxy” fellow-traveler William T. Cavanaugh. He’s got some interesting stuff to say about globalization, the church, freedom, and just war theory among other things.

I don’t agree with everything Cavanaugh says, but here are a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy:

Globalization is an aesthetic which produces a way of looking at the world. It assumes that we’re a universal subject. We can go anywhere and do anything. But this has damaging effects. A few years ago my friends and I gathered for a dinner party and started discussing what should be done about Kosovo. I remember thinking how incredible it was that most of us had never even heard of Kosovo just a couple of weeks ago. But suddenly we’re all talking as if we know what’s right for this place on the other side of the world. It’s absurd.

[…]

America in particular has this tendency to think it’s the universal nation, the exceptional nation, which means that we know what the solution is to everyone’s problems.

I sometimes joke that if I were invited to give a commencement address—which I never will be—I’d never say the usual thing they tell the graduates: “Go out and change the world!” I’d tell them: “Go home! Go back to your little towns and please, dear God, don’t try to change the world!” The world has had enough of American college graduates who know what’s best for the world.

He also talks about how the churches might give just war theory some bite when it comes to Christian participation in war:

If we’re going to have a functioning just war theory, then we can’t abdicate this judgment to the leaders of the secular nation state, as if they can decide when a war meets Christian criteria and when it doesn’t. Historically the prince was traditionally responsible for making these kinds of judgments. But the prince in medieval Europe wasn’t outside the Church. This wasn’t a secular role, but a pastoral role within the Church.

Also, individuals were never absolved of responsibility for deciding when princes’ judgments were just and when they weren’t. It’s always up to the individual to decide and to apply these criteria. And bishops and popes often intervened in these matters, excommunicating looters, imposing truces, interdicting the Eucharist, and so on. The recovery of the Church’s sense that it needs to be the place where these decisions get discerned is absolutely crucial, otherwise we’ve lost any sense of what it means to be Church.

[…]

The first thing the Church needs to do is stop fighting unjust wars. Take the just war theory seriously. I’m not talking about pacifism. If there’s a war that the Church judges is unjust, then Catholics shouldn’t fight it. That’s the way the just war theory is supposed to work. It’s sometimes supposed to say ‘no’ to acts of violence. What the theory is usually used for, of course, is to justify whatever violence is going on. I can’t think of a single instance where it was used to stop violence. That is the most pressing issue.

Imagine what would have happened if Catholics in the previous war had said in significant numbers, “No, sorry, this is an unjust war; we’re just going to sit this one out.” The world would have turned upside down.

Of course, there may be a bit of wishful thinking in the idea that the church, even the Roman Catholic Church, will not only make definitive pronouncements on the justness of particular wars but get its members to go along with those judgments to the point of not participating in them. For instance, John Paul II and Benedict XVI may both have opposed the Iraq war, but neither one, to my knowledge, declared it unjust outright in any official capacity, much less forbade Catholics from participating in it.

In the case of Protestant churches (which I realize Cavanaugh isn’t speaking about) it gets even muddier. Without a magisterium it’s not at all clear how they would make and enforce this kind of judgment. Or, for that matter, whether they should. Cavanaugh is surely correct in rebutting the charge of theocracy in recommending that Christians put their allegiance to Christ ahead of the nation, but there is a danger of a kind of ecclesiastic authoritarianism if we decide that the church should legislate on such matters for its members.

But, in fairness, maybe this kind of top-down legislation isn’t what’s being recommended. Maybe a better way to think about it is that Christians who are formed, at the parish or congregational level, by worship, prayer, sacraments, study, mutual encouragement and consolation, fasting, almsgiving and other charitable works, and other traditional Christian disciplines will come to see the world differently and this will shape their response to decisions like this. But this also has to allow for the possibility of divergent responses among different Christians. Which is, perhaps, as it should be. In the course of a post on the present difficulties in the Anglican Communion, *Christopher linked to this piece by Fr. William Carroll on subsidiarity in the church. Carroll is writing about the strife over homosexuality, but the principles he outlines seem like they would have wider application:

True subsidiarity empowers local bodies to incarnate the Gospel in their local context. Much like modern organizational theory, it pushes power and authority as close to the action as possible. This enables the Church to become more flexible and mission-driven. It also brings us closer to Gospel models of authority. … A more adequate notion of subsidiarity, which characterizes historic Anglicanism at its best, emphasizes that decisions should always be made at the most local level possible

Shaped by the context of their local church, Christians may well come to different conclusions about questions of war and peace. But that’s to be expected; Christians come to different conclusions on virtually all matters of significance. Rather than diktats from above, congregational study of the principles of just war theory, for instance, might be one way in which a responsible deliberation about these matters could be incarnated at the local level.