Monday, March 13, 2006
(5:20 PM) | Anonymous:
Christian Peacemaking and the Religious Left
On Friday, March 10th, the body of Tom Fox, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams from Clear Brook, VA, was found in Iraq. He was one of four Christian Peacemakers kidnapped last year. As I write this, the fate of the other three is unknown. The fact of this man’s death convicts me, in a way. After all, I happily point out that most of the people who decided to get the U.S. involved in an illegal war in Iraq never served in the military. On the other hand, for all I say about the need for peace, I’ve never put my life on the line for it. I haven’t been to Iraq or Palestine. I haven’t been in Columbia’s Magdalena Medio region. I haven’t been to Rwanda or Burundi. I haven’t placed my safety on the line as I tried to give the same strength and commitment to the Prince of Peace that our governments give to the god of war.Yet I know that I’m in a long line of those who have stood up for justice: John Brown, Henry Ward Beecher, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary Elizabeth Clark, Catherine Doherty, Mother Teresa, Walter Rauschenbusch, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanne Zweip, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and on, and on, and on. Christians have stood against slavery, discrimination, war, poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, regressive taxation, and on, and on, and on, often well before the secular world cared about the issues. In spite of the church’s shining record of progressive issues, however, the Christian left’s contribution to mercy and justice has often been forgotten, perhaps because the right so often yells louder and pounds its fists harder.
For those of us who are both Christian and on the political left, this can be a frustrating fact. It does often seem that, to the majority of liberals and progressives, “Christian” and “left” are mutually exclusive terms. Certainly, we’re useful to the left at times, when certain constituencies are being called to action, but it’s just as often, if not more often, assumed that if a person is religious (particularly Christian) then he or she must also be politically, socially, and fiscally conservative. What this means for Christians is that we are left out of the debate on the left unless we are willing to somehow bracket off our religious values. What it means for the left is that they lose out on a voice that has, in the case of Christianity, 2000 years of experience speaking up for progressive values.
Partly, this is the fault of the religious left for not shouting louder, for letting people like George W. Bush talk about their faith without calling into question what they do in the name of that faith. However, part of the blame must also go to the non-religious left, who seem happy to cede any discussion of religious values to the right, even if that means relegating the religious portion of the left to their own small sphere, ignored by the secular left and reviled by the religious right. After the 2004 elections, for example, when it was discovered that ‘moral values’ hadn’t played such a large role in determining the outcome of the election, much of the left seemed more than happy not to discuss moral values again. That being the case, the moral discussions of poverty, for example, as opposed to the economic discussions of job creation and GDP, have all but vanished from the political landscape. Poverty is certainly a moral concern, and Christians certainly have experience in both speaking out against it and using institutions to fight it.
Which brings me back to Tom Fox. I don’t know what his exact theology was. I don’t know where he stood on the many issues that affect the church today. I don’t know what his thoughts were on poverty, hunger, abortion, gay marriage, or any number of other things. I do know, though, that he went to a dangerous place to embody a philosophy of non-violence and live out a call to peace. I was asked to write a piece on what the Christian left has been up to recently, and my answer is that we’ve been doing recently what we’ve been doing for two thousand years: living out the progressive values that we’ve been called to preach.
[Editor's note: Chris Warfield is a fellow student with me at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he will receive his M.Div. degree this coming May. --AK]
