“What is it about the maintenance of the institutions of American Christianity that makes risk-taking, prophetic witness against warmongering increasingly rare? (Why don’t more mainline pastors lose their jobs for speaking the truth?)”
That’s a fair question from Debra Dean Murphy. And I suspect that the answer is, mainline pastors like to eat and feed their families. It’s a lot easier, and safer, to let your mainline denomination take a stand against needless and endless American wars with statements issued from on high somewhere other than from your own pulpit. We all have our interests (i.e., family’s welfare) to protect, and we preacher types, like everybody else in America who finds it safer to go along to get along, tend to tread the path of least resistance.
I think all the so-called “mainline’ denominations, including denominational bodies of my beloved United Methodist*, came out very solidly against the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq. But I remember a lot of my own United Methodist colleagues in ministry saying and writing things like, ‘What do the war opponents [like yours truly the Jitterbug preacher] think we should do, drop love bombs on them?’
Hey, put me on record in favor of love bombing any day, OK? It’s a lot cheaper than war and spares a lot of needless blood spilling and maiming.
But I digress.
A lot of other preachers who opposed the invasion of Iraq either remained silent on it or took very nuanced positions outside of preacher circles. And I have to say, it’s a lot easier for someone like Debra Dean Murphy to raise the ten questions she raises below, from her perch in academia, than it is for preachers to raise hard questions about war that Americans don’t want raised.
As for me, I’m worried that the usual, “neo-conservative,” warmongering suspects–the same ones who fanned the flames for invading Iraq–will win the day and catapult us into war with Iran, where the vast majority of the population is under age 30 and wanting the latest from Lady Ga Ga and nothing to do with more oppression and certainly not wanting war. In fact, a lot of them are in the streets putting their lives on the line for peace, which is how peace there will ultimately prevail The actual people of Iran want peace as much as anybody else. Dealing with the loud clowns they have for some, but not even all, of what passes for their leadership is another matter.
Anyway, the question at the top of this posting is one of 10 questions raised by Debra Dean Murphy in her fabulous blog. See below for the rest of her Top Ten List of good questions. And as an aside, I’m throwing in a blurb from a biography of the genuinely conservative Republican President Eisenhower.)
1. What is it about America that makes most Americans unable to contemplate our defeat in war? (Is it hubris? ignorance? delusion? something else?).
2. What are the social and cultural touchstones that have shaped our collective sensibilities about American invincibility? (Are we history-wise enough as a population to be able to narrate a truthful answer?).
3. How does the mythology that emerged after 9.11 (comprised, in part, by a false sense of the uniqueness of the terrorist attacks) contribute to our nation’s unwillingness to engage in deep self-scrutiny? (What are we afraid we’ll find?).
4. Why does invoking the phrase “support the troops” (in any number of contexts and conversations) almost always close off honest debate about war and its evils? (Why can’t the moral agency of soldiers ever be part of the discussion?).
5. How have Hollywood filmmakers, beginning roughly with Steven Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan, invented a kind of warrior code that embraces every war as just? (Why aren’t we outraged at what sentimentality about war has cost us?).
6. Why does the “substitution of rhetoric for thought” (Wendell Berry) always win the day? (Why is it the default mode for presidents, politicians, pundits, and many preachers?).
7. Why is the Church in America — except for pockets of radicals who are mostly dismissed or ignored — so bereft of resources, will, imagination, and courage when it comes to refusing to send its sons and daughters abroad to kill fellow human beings? (Thank God for the radicals).
8. Why do most Christians misunderstand the nature of “freedom” and fall in lockstep with the war machine’s thin, silly notion of freedom as license to pursue “the American dream”? (Why can’t we see capitalism’s direct relationship to state-sponsored violence?)
9. What is it about the maintenance of the institutions of American Christianity that makes risk-taking, prophetic witness against warmongering increasingly rare? (Why don’t more mainline pastors lose their jobs for speaking the truth?)
10. How can the Church in America recover (or establish for the first time) a thick account of the sacraments as political acts? (How have Baptism and Eucharist become domesticated rituals emptied of their power to challenge the status quo?).
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From Michael Korda’s biography of Eisenhower Ike: An American Hero:
“Ike was our last president to have been born in the nineteenth century, but his outlook was that of a twentieth-century American, who took industrial miracles for granted but still understood that the country’s industrial might, above any other single factor, had won World War II and would in the end win the cold war. He remained calm when confronted by the showy successes of the Russians in space, confident that while the Soviet Union had to choose, to borrow Bismarck’s phrase, ‘between guns or butter,’ the United States could have both.“Thus, when Ike rather surprisingly capped his farewell speech with a warning to ‘guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial-complex, he was talking not about a conviction of long standing, but about fears that were as new to him as to his listeners, many of whom did not at first know what to make of it. Ike himself had been part of the ‘military industrial-complex’ for over thirty years; indeed, he was one of its creators, and he knew how great a role it had played in his own victories. Yet as early as 1945, when he had argued against using the atomic bomb on the Japanese, he was beginning to have doubts about the immense influence of defense contracting and new weapons systems over American politics and policies. He did not want to see American transformed into ‘a garrison state.’ The day after the speech he complained about the proliferation of advertisements in the pages of American magazines showing Atlas and Titan rockets, as if they were the only things Americans knew how to make. . . .
“Ike had his failings, but among this strength was the ability to use and apply simple common sense to large and complicated problems.”*No one speaks for the United Methodist Church except General Conference but bishops and certain church agencies and boards issue all kinds of stands and positions. It’s complicated.
* Hillary Clinton, who like President George W. Bush is a United Methodist, let herself get bluffed by Saddam Hussein too.
