“I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in
the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that
that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life.
But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding
the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of
these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but
there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these
issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey.
Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my
conduct and my values and my ideals.”—Barack Obama in a January 23, 2008
interview with Christianity Today
Barack Obama
came into the office of the presidency proclaiming hope and change and a
personal adherence to the teachings of Jesus Christ, who preached a
message of peace, love and nonviolence. Yet any hope that Obama’s
professed religious beliefs might lead him to put an end to the endless
wars was short-lived. Indeed, rather than dismantling the military
empire that became a hallmark of George W. Bush’s presidency, Obama has
continued to spread American troops around the globe.
Boasting
the biggest war budget since World War II (the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq have now passed the $1 trillion mark, with Congress recently
approving an additional $37 billion in war funding), Obama’s war machine
is wreaking havoc far and wide on communities and families devastated
by mounting military and civilian casualties, on the already faltering
economy, and on America’s once-noble standing in the world. Even the
recent disclosure of more than 90,000 secret military files documenting a
failing Afghanistan war riddled by undocumented civilian casualties has
not managed to slow Obama’s steadfast march to war.
Halfway
through his four-year term in office, it is increasingly clear that
Obama’s presidential priorities are being dictated by war hawks rather
than the principles of Jesus. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Seymour Hersh observed in an April 2010 speech, “At this point,
[Obama’s] in real trouble. Because the military are dominating him on
the important issues of the world: Iraq, Iran, Afghan and Pakistan. And
he’s following the policies of Bush and Cheney almost to a
fare-thee-well.”
Unfortunately, by adhering to these flawed
policies, Obama has chosen to expand America’s military empire rather
than investing in the all-too-real needs of the American people—what
Martin Luther King Jr. likened to choosing guns over butter. King warned
that a nation that chose guns over butter would starve its people and
kill itself, but Obama has clearly failed to heed that warning, as did
his predecessor, who also professed to follow Christ’s teachings. Just
imagine how much could have been done to help the homeless and poor in
America (which includes women and children)—or in the words of the
president, feed the hungry and heal the sick—using only a fraction of
the more than $1 trillion spent so far on these futile wars.
For
example, according to the National Priorities Project, for the price of
America’s two wars, the U.S. could have paid the entire healthcare bill
for 294 million people or 440 million children for one year;
underwritten the cost of 7,779,092 affordable housing units; provided
1,035,282,468 homes with renewable electricity for a year; or provided
the maximum Pell Grant award ($5,500) to all 19 million U.S. college and
university students for the next 9 years.
Ultimately, there is
no way to square Obama’s role as a war maker with the teachings of Jesus
who preached against the use of violence—war, of course, being
organized, systematic violence. One can only imagine that Jesus would be
horrified. After all, many who strive to follow Jesus’ teachings find
it impossible to participate in war. In fact, leaders in the early
church adopted Jesus’ attitude of nonviolence. Tertullian (born about AD
160), one of the giants of the early church, stated very clearly that
confessing “Jesus as Lord” means taking the teachings of Jesus
seriously. Just as Caesar commanded men to kill their enemies, Jesus
commanded them to love their enemies. Caesar made use of killing,
maiming and torture, in much the same way as modern governments do
today. Jesus, on the other hand, taught the need to forgive and to
sacrifice power for servanthood.
In fact, Tertullian had pithy
advice for soldiers who converted to Christianity: quit the army or be
martyred for refusing to fight. Tertullian was not alone in his
thinking. “For three centuries,” writes biblical scholar Walter Wink in The Powers That Be,
“no Christian author to our knowledge approved of Christian
participation in battle.” This, of course, changed in the third century
when the church was institutionalized and became an integral part of the
warring Roman Empire.
Jesus’ apostles never advocated violence.
Rather, they urged their followers to suffer, forgive and trust God for
the outcome rather than take matters into their own hands. And while
they may have talked about warfare and fighting, it was not through the
use of conventional weapons. For example, the Apostle Paul wrote: “For
though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The
weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.”
Christ’s
crucifixion was a radical repudiation of the use of violent force. And
the cross, which was the Roman tool of execution, was reserved
especially for leaders of rebellions. “Anyone proclaiming a rival
kingdom to the kingdom of Caesar would be a prime candidate for
crucifixion,” writes Brian McLaren in The Secret Message of Jesus.
“This is exactly what Jesus proclaimed, and this is exactly what he
offered.” But Jesus’ kingdom was one of peace. Among other things, he
proclaimed, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless
those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him
who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.” Consequently,
Jesus ordered Peter not to use the sword, even to protect him.
The so-called Roman peace (Pax Romana)
was made possible by the cross. That is, people so feared crucifixion
that many opted not to challenge the emperor rather than face the
possibility of death on the cross. Why then would early Christians
choose the cross—an instrument of torture, domination, fear,
intimidation and death—as their primary symbol? What could this possibly
mean?
For early Christians, “it apparently meant that the
kingdom of God would triumph not by inflicting violence but by enduring
it,” notes McLaren, “not by making others suffer but by willingly
enduring suffering for the sake of justice—not by coercing or
humiliating others but by enduring their humiliation with gentle
dignity.” Jesus, they believed, had taken the empire’s instrument of
torture and transformed it into God’s symbol of the repudiation of
violence. The message? Love, not violence, is the most powerful force in
the universe.
Not surprisingly, the early Christians were not
crusaders or warriors but martyrs—men and women with the faith and
courage to face the lions. Like Jesus, they chose to suffer rather than
inflict violence.
When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers,”
exhorting his followers to turn the other cheek and give freely, he was
telling us that active peacemaking is the way to end war. Can you
imagine what the world would be like if every church adopted that
attitude and focused its energies on active peacemaking?
The Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who vocally opposed the Vietnam War, took to
heart Jesus’ teachings about peacemaking. In his acceptance speech for
the Nobel Peace Prize, King proclaimed:
Peace is not merely a
distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is
not enough to say “we must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace
and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative
expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.
This
is not to say that Jesus was a pacifist. The opposite is true. He spoke
truth to power and engaged in active resistance to injustice. In my
opinion, Jesus would have intervened to defend someone being violently
mistreated, and I believe we must do the same. But he would never have
engaged in violence as the means to an end.
One has to wonder what Jesus would say about war being waged in his name today. As Gary Wills writes in What Jesus Meant,
“If people want to do battle for God, they cannot claim Jesus has
called them to this task, since he told Pilate that his ministers would
not do that.” In fact, as Wills notes, Jesus “never accepted violence as
justified.”
