Was American Revolution Just?

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American Revolution, anti-American, Eric Patterson, just war, pacifist, Regents University

(credit: FineArtAmerica.com)

By Mark Tooley @markdtooley

Eric Patterson wrote an excellent piece for The Washington Post last week, in time for July 4, making the case that America’s revolutionary founders were following traditional Christian Just War thinking to justify their reluctant revolt. The author of a recent book on Just War teaching (Ending Wars Well – Yale University Press, 2012), Patterson is Dean of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and Senior Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. I’m also honored to know him as a friend.

The Post article by Patterson is very helpful and timely because a growing number of Christian, especially evangelical, elites commonly deride justification for the American Revolution. Some of these elites are themselves pacifists or pseudo-pacifists who don’t believe in Just War teaching at all but simply deploy it as a supposed argument against any viable force. Others are anti-American and anxious to discredit the United States and its founding narrative and principles. Sometimes they hail King George III as the legitimate authority, although it’s very likely that if they were themselves British they would apologize for British imperialism. Some of this crowd seems to relish contempt for their own nation as a virtue.

Anyway, Patterson counters with a succinct recollection of the moral justifications behind the American Revolution. He cites the Continental Congress’ “Declaration on the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms” of 1775, which was written mostly by the Quaker inspired John Dickinson of Pennsylvania with help from Thomas Jefferson. This lesser known Declaration asked whether God granted to government “unbounded authority…never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive” or is the state “instituted to promote the welfare of mankind”?

The Declaration of 1775 cited, as Patterson recounts, “seizure of property, martial law, a blockade, and now bloodshed,” persuading the Founders that their self-defense was “proportionate, last resort alternative to ‘submission to tyranny’ and ‘voluntary slavery.’” Further echoing Just War principles, they noted their chance of success thanks to likely foreign aid against the British.

Anyway, read Patterson’s excellent column for yourself. Also check out an exchange in American Spectator I had several years ago on the justness of the American Revolution with distinguished Catholic ethicist John Keown of Georgetown University, who’s also a friend.

Christian Witness and American Global Power

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Council on Foreign Relations, David Gushee, empire, just war, Richard Haass, Syria

By Mark Tooley @markdtooley

Recently liberal Baptist ethicist David Gushee of Mercer University, a prominent thinker on the Evangelical Left, tweeted about a “brutalized Syria: 70,000 dead, 1.4 million refugees, UN powerless, US and UK unwilling to intervene, and the killing goes on.” Later he tweeted: “I am not opposed to all US engagements to address global security and humanitarian problems. More could be done here.”

Gushee strongly implies that he favors some level of U.S. military intervention in Syria’s brutal civil war. What else could he mean by “intervene?” Yet he is a longtime critic of U.S. interventionist policies. He in the past has lamented how “our regular military interventions around the world create a steady supply of new enemies.” In 2009 he asked President Obama:

Do you agree that America has been living on myths and needs to get back in touch with reality when it comes to our role in the world and the efficacy of war? Do you agree that our military is overstretched and exhausted and needs a more limited and manageable role? Do you agree that we need to get back to genuine national defense and away from trying to project an imperial role in the world in the name of freedom and democracy? Do you agree that the national-security bureaucracy, besides being ineffective, has grown too big and unwieldy and needs to be pruned dramatically? President Obama, you seek to be a transformational leader. Are you willing to be transformational enough to return us to a more modest foreign policy and a more restrained exercise of military power? Will you end this militarized American imperialism before it destroys us?

More recently Gushee has complained that U.S. foreign and military policy has been “potentially lethal to the planet, as well as bankrupting, unwise, and neo-imperialistic.” His concerns about U.S. imperial over stretch seem somewhat at odds with his implied suggestion of intervention into the murkiness of Syria’s conflict. But at least Gushee grudgingly accepts the Just War tradition, despite pacifism’s supposed appeal, as the price of admission to realistic geopolitical conversation. Others on the Evangelical Left denounce all force, at least by the U.S,, as idolatry. And they routinely condemn U.S. “empire” without offering plausible alternatives. “American Exceptionalism” for this crowd is quite wicked, maybe even blasphemous.

In counterpoint, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations in yesterday’s Washington Post describes how this century, like the last, likely will be dominated by American power, which he suggests is not regrettable: “The alternative to a U.S.-led 21st century is not an era dominated by China or anyone else, but rather a chaotic time in which regional and global problems overwhelm the world’s collective will and ability to meet them.” He concludes: “Americans would not be safe or prosperous in such a world. One Dark Ages was one too many; the last thing we need is another.”

It should be added that it’s not just Americans who would be imperiled by a new Dark Ages but most of the world. The Religious Left often wants the benefits of American power, soft and sometimes hard, for its humanitarian ambitions while still bemoaning that power. Current world order, including aspirations for some measure of greater justice and peace, rests on American leadership and power, economic, political and military. A Christian political witness that pretends otherwise is ineffective and foolish.

Wheaton Theology Conference Showcases Appeal, Limits of Hauerwasianism

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Institute on Religion and Democracy, John Lomperis, just war, Karl Barth, pacifism, Reinhold Neibuhr, Stanley Hauerwas, Wheaton College, Wheaton Theology Conference 2013: Christian Political Witness

Dr. Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. (Photo Credit: Mennonite Mission Network)

By John Lomperis (@JohnLomperis)

Duke Divinity School theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas promoted his somewhat distinctive, Anabaptistic worldview at Wheaton’s annual theology conference earlier this month. This year’s conference theme was “Christian Political Witness.”

The passionate pacifist stressed that Christians must live radically different lives from those around them, in a way that would be “unintelligible if the God we say we believe in does not exist.”  In the face of the reality that people never get the children they want and always “marry the wrong person,” Christians are to follow ethics of welcoming children and of maintaining lifelong, monogamous marriage. This contrasts sharply with American culture’s solutions of abortion along with divorce and remarriage. (On the latter point, the United-Methodist-turned-Episcopalian self-deprecatingly made fun of his own divorce and remarriage.) The church “must resist the domestication of our faith” which is promoted “in the interest of social peace.” He traced social pressures to tame Christianity to Rousseau, “who realized the modern state could not risk having religion that challenges its authority.”

But unfortunately, “[w]e have failed to develop a church culture for developing people as Christians.” Hauerwas mocked liberal Protestantism for its efforts to construct “bland theological statements” seeking “to show how what Christians believe is not that different than what non-Christians believe.” For the sake of our identity as citizens of our nation who are civil to our neighbors, “we have lost the ability to articulate what we believe.” “The politics of modernity has been so successful in defining Christianity as just another one of many lifestyle options” in the cafeteria of secular culture, “rather than the Truth,” that it has become difficult to understand why first-century Christians thought the faith was worth dying for or why the militant “new atheists” are threatened by it. Hauerwas noted that today much more care and moral concern is invested in medical education than in divinity school, because “[n]o one believes an inadequately trained priest can hurt their salvation.”

For Hauerwas, Christians are people who “believe in history,” recognizing that “[t]ime has a narrative logic.” And it appears that at this point in history, “Christendom is coming to an end,” setting the church free “to embrace its body politic.” Once Christians realize that they are no longer in charge of their surrounding society, Hauerwas advised that they can enjoy the same social freedom to talk about Jesus that Jews have to talk about the Torah and Muslims have to talk about the Koran.

In admitted departure from most of evangelicalism, Hauerwas said that he “avoid[s] using language of belief to define what makes Christians Christians.” For the Duke professor, the “greatest challenge to Christianity is not in belief, but in politics.” Particularly, he framed Christians’ loyalty to God as being in opposition to embracing the identity of loyal citizens of a modern nation-state. He extensively cited Karl Barth, under whom Hauerwas’s own mentor, John Howard Yoder, studied. Hauerwas shared that he “often enjoy[s] making liberal friends, especially American liberal friends, nervous by saying that I am a theocrat.”

After declaring the fact, not mere “personal opinion,” that Jesus is Lord, Hauerwas was quick to add that “the way this works is not through any sort of coercion or violence” as in the 1600 years of “Constantinian dominance of world.” Rather, “[i]t is a politics of persuasion all the way down” in which “God gives us all the time we need.”

For Hauerwas, this means not only absolutist opposition to war (especially the U.S. military), but also rather broad denunciation of violence and coercion. He argued that “Christians are not called to non-violence because we think that that will rid the world of war, but it means that in a world of war, we cannot imagine ourselves being anything else.” In an apparent attempt to be provocative, he asserted that Reinhold Niebuhr was “the secret theologian for evangelicals” (of whom he repeatedly spoke in the third person), since “when it comes to foreign affairs, they just can’t wait to kill someone!” (He glossed over the major departures of Niebuhr’s theology from evangelicalism and of his ethics of Christian Realism from the Just War tradition.) According to Hauerwas, “[w]ar is the great liturgical alternative to the Eucharist,” and soldiers’ main sacrifice “is not their sacrifice of life, but of their normal unwillingness to kill.” On the world wars, he asked why they were not called “World Slaughter I” and “World Slaughter II.”

In light of the great evil forcefully advanced by the Axis powers, a questioner asked “[w]hat should we have done in World War II” and if just passively “watch[ing] that happen” would have been the best response.

After challenging his questioner by asking, “Who is the ‘we’?” Hauerwas replied, “I want to be as responsive as I can.” But he admitted that Christian non-violence “may mean we will have to watch the innocents suffer for our convictions.” He then immediately claimed that this was “no less true for Just War,” but did not offer any argument for this strong assertion beyond, somewhat bizarrely, referring to the atomic bombings of Japan (whose satisfaction of Just-War criteria is hardly uncontested).

Also during the question-and-answer time, I questioned his absolutist repudiation of “coercion,” asking about such cases as parents coercively preventing children from running across the street or the sort of church discipline seen in 1 Corinthians 5.

Hauerwas agreed that Christians are to be “people who live out Matthew 18,” which “feels like a very coercive interaction,” but serves “to save us from the violence that’s in us.”  He continued that “of course you are going to use methods that seem coercive at the time, but they are always under negotiation.”

Stanley Hauerwas is certainly right to stress the urgent need for culturally accommodated Christians to re-awaken to their divine calling to live radically different lives than what the surrounding culture expects of us. And it is worth noting that, in principle, his call for the church to challenge “imperial ambitions of the state” could be applied not only to foreign military actions, but also to government’s playing an increasingly important role in a growing number of aspects of citizens’ lives.

But agreeing that Christians need to be different than non-Christians hardly necessitates accepting the whole package of Hauerwasianism. Any social ethic falls short of the basic Christian test of neighbor-love if it makes a choice to abandon millions to suffer such unchecked evils as naked aggression or genocide. And the apparent idolization of opposing coercion easily leads to a lack of full intellectual honesty (about good actions that actually are coercive, rather than just seemingly coercive) and also, potentially, a rather distorted, unbiblical view of God that leaves little room for what the Old and New Testaments teach us about His wrath, judgment, and, yes, coercion in His relationship with us subservient creatures.

Hauerwas’s Wheaton address, along with the question-and-answer session, thus highlighted much of why many Christians find his ethics appealing, as well as some of its biggest shortcomings.

Is God against Drones?

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Chicago Theological Seminary, David Gushee, Drones, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Jonathan Merritt, just war, Mark Tooley, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

(Photo credit: WordPress)

By Mark Tooley (@MarkDTooley)

The Religious Left does not like drones and even under the current administration has sounded their alarm.  Give them some credit for consistency in that they are reliably opposed to whatever tools are currently deployed in defending America. Some Religious Left critics have tried to exploit Just War teaching against drones, though they are themselves at best skeptical of Just War and are typically pacifists, explicitly or functionally.

David Gushee, a liberal Baptist ethicist at Mercer University, recently opined against drones as exemplifying a “disturbing combination of American arrogance and self-righteousness.” In a recent “Washington Post” online op-ed, he faults them on America’s false notion of itself as the “exceptional nation, the beacon of freedom and justice, [which] can be trusted with the power to kill our own and others around the world in the name of national self-defense (and global security).”

The Religious Left never likes thinking of America as “exceptional,” though their own demands and unique expectations of America showcase their own vivid but unconfessed form of American exceptionalism. Call it what you will, the United States is the most powerful nation. And with this power flows responsibility not just for the security of our own people but also a wider duty for upholding a global peace, to the extent possible. Absent a global police force, the United States is the final arbiter of an approximate global stability. That stability requires America to deter, contain and sometimes deploy lethal force against renegade states and terror groups.

Gushee complains that America would never accept China or Russia launching drone attacks inside the U.S. Indeed not, but is Gushee unaware of the significant distinctions between the U.S. and Afghanistan or even Pakistan, which are unable to police their own nations, and whose governments privately if not publicly consent to U.S. drone strikes? And in the rush to reject American exceptionalism, Gushee and the Religious Left typically refuse to distinguish U.S. and Western strategic actions from pariah states. Germany invaded France in 1940, and the U.S. and Britain invaded in France in 1944. Were American and Britain therefore morally indistinguishable from Nazi Germany?

Typically in Just War thinking, intent is key. U.S. drone strikes on homicidal terrorists operating freely in a failed nation state is quite different from communist China theoretically launching drones against Chinese dissidents residing in the U.S. Could the Religious Left ever comprehend this distinction, or does their seething anti-Americanism blind them to discerning moral judgment?

Gushee complains of the U.S. “self-perception of being in an endless war on terror” is an excuse to overlook moral restraints. Does he dispute that the U.S. is locked in an ongoing conflict with terror groups dedicated to killing Americans and many others? In some sense, the world is always at war and always has been. Fortunately, the current open wars, although vicious, are largely contained in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan. American power, among other forces, helps to keep them contained, and to deter the explosion of other conflicts that could become more widespread and threatening. This American power provides an approximate peace for most of the world, although there have always been and will always be forces of disorder working against peace and stability.  Such is the bent of human nature, which Gushee and the Religious Left are loath to admit.

Similar to Gushee is another Religious Leftist, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, and now a fellow at the Center for American Progress.  In her recent online op-ed in The Washington Post against drones, she complained that some drone targets do not actually present an “imminent” threat. She likens drone strikes against terrorists for whom there is not necessarily explicit evidence of an immediate planned attack to the U.S. preemptive war on Iraq.  And she cites civilian deaths in some drone attacks, without pondering alternatives that would inevitably entail far more civilian deaths. Thistlethwaite is “grieved” that President Obama is not living up to the lofty promises of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech to wage “just peace.”  Doubtless she will be “grieved” by all U.S. chief executives sworn to defend the American people, with lethal force inevitably at times.

Echoing Thistlethwaite, and praising Gushee, liberal Baptist columnist Jonathan Merritt really liked Gushee’s comparison of U.S. drone attacks to China or Russia launching strikes in the U.S, exclaiming: “Hard to disagree with that!” Why don’t these Religious Left critics just go ahead and liken U.S. drones to Nazi Germany’s v rocket attacks on London? Merritt is really upset that U.S. drones are launched against targets in Yemen, a “sovereign nation,” opining: “Last time I checked, America is not at war with Yemen.” Maybe Merritt should check on Yemen’s latest political situation, which is less than rosy, with a very weak “sovereign” government that is not routinely able to act effectively against terrorists. U.S. drone strikes typically occur in nations whose regimes cannot fully police their own territory; otherwise terrorists would not have encamped there. Those regimes usually back U.S. drone strikes privately, even while sometimes denouncing them publicly, unable to admit their own impotence.  But Merritt and the Religious Left seem to prefer the pretense that weak or non-existent governments are “sovereign” if it facilitates arguments against decisive U.S. action.

Pretense is the utopian Religious Left’s often favored pose. They prefer to imagine the world as though a family board game, with each player patiently waiting for his or her cards to be dealt. Anybody caught cheating gets a quick slap on the wrist and the friendly game moves forward amicably. In the Religious Left imagination, it’s America that typically cheats, and the Religious Left’s prophetic role is to be the wrist slapper.

The real world is quite different from the imagined board game, and thoughtful Christians are called to develop policies that acknowledge the world for what it is, and to seek an imperfect, approximate justice by the flawed available means.  Even in the best circumstances, wars still happen, and the innocent horribly suffer. The goal is to limit the suffering wherever possible, which often demands that legitimate governments must act forcefully and lethally.

People of faith trust that God, in His own time, will fully redeem the world and defeat evil forever. But the utopian Religious Left sometimes wants to pretend their policies can preempt God. Fortunately, their counsel is mostly ignored, on drones, and virtually on every other issue.

The following article originally appeared on the FrontPage Magazine.

United Methodist Bishops as Echo Chambers of Secular Culture

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abortion, Bishop Sally Dyck, just war, same sex marriage

United Methodist Bishop Sally Dyck of Chicago has generated a brouhaha by announcing to her Northern Illinois Conference her support for legalizing same sex marriage, which is currently before the Illinois legislature. She admits that United Methodist clergy may not conduct same sex unions, which their church law prohibits. And she admits her church officially disapproves of homosexual practice. Then she asserts The United Methodist Church also “holds the teaching and a long tradition (albeit a struggle every inch of the way) of civil rights.” And she claims: “Marriage equality is a civil rights issue; it provides for all what is afforded to some.”

Here’s what Bishop Dyck omitted. The United Methodist Church has an official position on marriage in civil law, not just within the church. And that position, which the 2004 General Conference ratified by 77 percent, declares: “We support laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

If Bishop Dyck is publicly speaking about marriage in civil society, shouldn’t she, as a bishop charged with faithfully transmitting her church’s teachings, at least acknowledge what the official stance is, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist? Of course, she is not alone among the bishops in pretending United Methodism has no position on same sex marriage in law. Bishop Grant Hagiya of Seattle actively campaigned for legalizing same sex marriage in Washington state without reference to his church’s teaching. Recently he blogged:

Personally, I celebrate the signing into law of the legalization of same-sex marriage for our state. It is an historic moment for the people of this geographic region, and it marks a secular turning point in the liberation of those who have too long been oppressed in our current times. I celebrate with those who will be free to enjoy equal health and security benefits through the state institution of marriage.

Bishop Hagiya did write: “I also personally grieve over our United Methodist Church polity that will not recognize same-sex marriage.” So like Dyck, he grudgingly admits his church won’t celebrate same sex unions. But he never references what United Methodism says to society about marriage in law. Last year Bishops Larry Goodpaster and Al Guinn publicly opposed North Carolina’s marriage amendment defining the union as man and woman.

The whole Council of Bishops has maintained radio silence over their church’s stance on marriage in civil law. I cannot recollect a single bishop who has publicly acknowledged it. It’s the stance that dares not speak its name. The bishops pretend that Christianity and United Methodism have consensus views about U.S. foreign and military policies, or immigration law, but has nothing to say decisively about marriage.

United Methodism’s marriage stance is not the only ignored official church stance. The 2000 General Conference declared that most Christians believe war is preferable to tyranny, aggression or genocide. But the bishops collectively refused to cite this stance in their response a year later to 9-11, despite good faith efforts by Bishop Joe Pennel. (Bishop Tim Whitaker did cite it in an essay or two.) The bishops, with the General Board of Church and Society (GBCS), continue to pretend that United Methodism is pacifist.

The same is true on abortion. In 2000 the General Conference opposed partial birth abortion and has subsequently urged other limits. Excepting Bishop Whitaker and one or two others, the bishops are serenely silent, as is GBCS. Occasionally over the years General Conference has spoken about global religious liberty and persecution of Christians. But the bishops have on that topic been quiet as church mice.

United Methodist bishops in the U.S. collectively, and with few exceptions individually, when speaking to public issues, merely and banally echo secular conventional wisdom as found in liberal newspapers, liberal academia, or among liberal advocacy groups. There is no drawing upon the rich resources of our Christian moral tradition. This sad habit for our bishops dates back for most of 50 years or more. As United Methodism becomes more global, I’m hopeful for a day when more bishops will sound like bishops rather than echo chambers of secular American culture.

Meanwhile, for an intellectual defense of marriage that official United Methodism is currently unable or unwilling to offer, check out the new book “What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense,” by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T Anderson, and IRD emeritus board member Robert P George. It is endorsed by Pastor Rick Warren and Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Let’s pray for a time when a United Methodist bishop also will defend marriage.