A somber day to remember the tragedy of 9/11 is punctuated by the outbreak of more political violence in the US. What was Charlie Kirk’s assassin hoping to achieve? What did the shooter of a Minnesota state lawmaker assassinated in her home think was going to happen? What did the white-nationalist, anti-immigrant shooter Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 and injured 22 others in El-Paso in 2019 actually think he was solving? What was Trump’s would-be killer hoping for? What did attacker David DePape think when he wielded a hammer and assaulted Paul Pelosi in his home in 2022? I have wondered what the terrorists thought they’d actually achieve by flying planes into buildings and killing people. Did they not see the War on Terror coming and the (according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project), the approximately 4.5 million to 4.6 million deaths through 2023 as a result of post-9/11 wars? Do these acts of political and terrorist violence actually accomplish the aims of their perpetrators?
Do you see the trend? The list above is just what comes to mind from the last few years. There are thousands of more wars, assassinations, killings, and violent attacks the world over. Even around us, do you feel the tension in the streets, a growing hostility from bumper stickers to short tempers, angry outbursts to fist fights and open calls for violence?
A growing percentage of even Christians are advocating for political violence, and retaliation in the US. Church leaders mime political leadership and Christian non-profits also amplify political leaders’ threats. In fact the largest percentage of domestic terrorism today is perpetrated by far-right groups, often with Christian religious leanings.
I find myself shocked by the lack of clarity on the means of influence ‘on the table’ for Christians.
I am also not surprised when violence erupts in the context of hostile and defamatory rhetoric that fuels fear, harassment and discrimination. In a recent study Christian nationalist rhetoric among politicians is a statistically significant predictor of physical violence against religious minorities in the U.S. One Christian, inflamed about the the Gaza war, insisted to me that some ideologies and people are so bad that “they just need to be wiped out.” We should not be surprised when violence is then is perpetrated in return because violence begets more violence. Escalation invites mutually radicalized responses. It is a dangerous game of brinkmanship and self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in real harm to real people. Violence is “metaphysically incapable” of producing peace.
So, let’s review a bit of history, then some theology and finally some pragmatics.
Some History
How did we evolve from Jesus’ entreaty to Peter to “Put away your sword” and 400 years of pacifism in the early church to Bernard of Clairvaux’s call on Christians to “utterly annihilate or surely convert” Muslims in 1147 as a way to further the Kingdom of God11. Some, even Christian, leaders today continue in this tradition in their political battles calling for or justifying violence against cultural enemies in the US and abroad.
If return to the first centuries, the church fathers’ condemnation of war and violence is without exception and the first four centuries of Christian writings are unanimous in their pacifist teaching. Small theological and pragmatic shifts in thinking about violence, the state, the role of conversion and the role of the church took place that saw an overwhelmingly peace-oriented minority church in the 1-4th centuries that grew in grassroots movements, evolve towards violence-justified conquering armies in the 11-16th centuries.
The link between violence and Christianity finds its genesis in a desire for political power. Constantine was arguably the first Christian with command of armies and needed to justify/reconcile the power of the sword with his religion. The teachings of Ambrose and Augustine in the 4th and early 5th century (and later Thomas Aquinas) sought to nuance this. They first elucidated ‘just war’ ethics, whereby hostility could be carefully measured within bounds and forced baptism could be used as a tool of war, spiritualizing violence.
The ethics of loving one’s neighbor and enemy through coerced conversion and violence were carefully teased out, the spiritualized motives layered on top of the machinations of empire. This new church teaching stood in stark contrast to the early centuries and innovations escalated over the next five hundred years as Islam came on the scene.
Christian thought on violence and warfare developed as subsequent rulers from Constantine onward sought justification for their territorial advancement. In the preaching of the Crusades, popes, monks, and abbots associated the process of conversion with conquest and devised spiritually manipulative ways to underwrite and motivate it, such as indulgences. By the time of the Baltic Crusades, “warfare was not just a ‘necessary evil’ but a major, if not the major, instrument of conversion” and territorial expansion: there was no smoothing over or spiritualization of these Crusades, just “brutal blood spilling for God.” Violent extremism in the Christian camp became an eventuality with well-developed ideological roots.
When Christian Nationalists (in Lebanon, the US, or elsewhere) justify violence and domination as a sort of God-given mandate, whereby the only options for their enemies are conversion or death, this is direct echo of a history of Christian justification for hostility-as-ministry. Some Christians throughout history have sought to bring about the end-of-days and the conversion of the nations through the sword.
Some Theology
Let’s be crystal clear: Jesus rejected violence as an option for his followers and he is the model for Christians (i.e. who are called little Christs). He is not just a ‘model’ or admirable moral person, but the King of the Universe who inaugurated a new Kingdom of which his followers are citizens. Jesus constantly pointed his disciples to think, talk and act different. “My Kingdom is not of this world… You have heard it said, but I say to you… Give to Cesar what is Caesars and to God what is God’s.” Jesus emphasized there is a higher reality, one that requires primary allegiance for his followers: his Kingdom. And, this kingdom, we are told, is where “they will learn the ways of war no more” and “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares” and “lions will lay with lambs” (Micah 4, Is 2:4)
Violence, hostility, and everything in between hostile rhetoric and assassinations and war are the work of fearful right-handed men which contrast with God’s kingdom and his ways of “left-handed power.” Robert Farrar Capon offers this This helpful analogy of handedness. He contrasts the persuasive ways of God paradoxically working through weakness, failure and even death to redeem the world and man’s preference for right-handed ‘power over’ that seeks control, domination and hostility. Capon uses “left-handed power” to describe the paradoxical, non-obvious way God’s power works, as seen in the cross of Christ.
Jesse P. Nickel says:
Jesus’ rejection of violence… teaching and example make it clear that any work that is oriented toward God’s eschatological mission must reflect the character of the kingdom it seeks to establish, which itself derives from the God who is its king. In other words, the means matter: work for God’s kingdom must itself embody the reality it hopes to enact. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of shalom (peace). shalom cannot be established by violence, which is a weapon in the arsenal of death and all its friends. No matter how holy, noble, just, or ethical the cause may be, violence not only must not be embraced as a means to such ends, according to the witness of the NT, violence is metaphysically incapable of contributing to the work of God on earth22.
Martin Luther King Jr. said:
Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Through the vistas of time a voices still cries to eery potential Peter, “Put up your sword”!” The shores of history are white with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command. If the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for justice, unborn generations will live in a desolate night of bitterness and their chief legacy will be an endless reign of chaos.”
King called on “all who suffer oppression in this world” to “reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice33.
Jesse Nikel again:
Jesus calls his followers to be people who live according to the reality of the kingdom of God, and Jesus himself is the one whose words describe what that kingdom is like, and whose life demonstrates what it looks like to live within it… “Jesus’ life is the way the world is meant to be.” (quoting Hauerwas).
The refusal to seek retribution, the enactment of self-giving love in return for hostility… only makes sense if one is living according to a different set of rules: “If we live in obedience to Jesus’s command to renounce violence, the church will become the sphere where the future of God’s righteousness intersects – and challenges – the present tense of human existence.” (quoting Hays, The Moral Vision, 344)
And Stanley Hauerwas:
The centrality of nonviolence as the hallmark of the Christian moral life is not just an option for the few, but incumbent upon all Christians who seek to live faithfully in the kingdom made possible by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Nonviolence is not one among other behavioral implications that can be drawn from the gospel but is integral to the shape of our Christian convictions44.
Violence, hostility, harassing and threatening rhetoric, advocating anyone’s elimination, even terrorists, is out of line with the gospel, and with the mission and Kingdom of Jesus. That is the language of the state, of empire. Look at the things Jesus did himself. He preached peace, fed and healed people, he preached the gospel and he made disciples. So if we’re not doing those same things then there’s something off about our mission because it’s not our mission, it’s God’s mission. We join God and Jesus demonstrated what that was supposed to look like.
Lastly, Some Pragmatics
Swiftly put, violence, for the Christian is not only off the table, but neither does it pragmatically work to achieve stated aims. I’ve written previously on extensive research around retributive responses, escalation, etc. A short review:
Audrey Cronin, in her two-century survey of how terrorist groups end, found that negotiation, normalization, and political engagement are far more effective than military force alone. She notes that once groups enter negotiations there is less than a 10 percent chance of failure. A 1994 study by Bryan Brophy-Baermann and John A.C. Conybeare found that Israeli military retaliation had no significant long-term deterrent effect on terrorism. Martha Crenshaw and Gary LaFree found that retaliatory attacks, harsher punishments for captured terrorists, and even UN resolutions have little impact on reducing terrorism and may even lead to a net increase in attacks. And Louise Richardson similarly critiques military methods, arguing that the use of overwhelming force often exacerbates extremism rather than curtailing it. (link)
Erica Chenoweth’s extensive research shows that nonviolent movements are significantly more effective at achieving political change than violent ones, being twice as likely to succeed and 10 times more likely to result in democratic transition.
To bring it to the interpersonal level… when’s the last time you experienced peace in a relationship or settled an argument through hostility or violence? When is the last time using your tongue like a sword, thrusting hostilities at your opponent accomplished a net positive?
Some ask should we bomb extremists, is it justified and is force the only ‘language’ terrorists speak? Others ask isn’t violence sometimes the only option for those seeking to address injustice? Still others, while condemining physical violence ask haven’t things gone too far?… turn the other cheek isn’t working… thus isn’t a serrated edge of derogatory and satirical, caustic, angry “take no prisoners” obscene and vulgar speech permissible?
No.
No, assassinations don’t work. Violence is incredible adept at replicating itself and reproducing itself in the object of scorn. Neither do war, retaliation, retribution or hostile and escalatory rhetoric accomplish the aims they seek. War, violence and assassinations often start with words that come out of a sick heart. “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” (Matt 15:18-19).
“The peace of man is found in the keeping of his tongue” says an Arab proverb.
“He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword” said Jesus (Matt 26:52)