As Harvey Yoder and many others have noted, Christianity has largely jettisoned the non-violent core message of its founding figure. From the time of its enthusiastic alliance with the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Christianity became an imperial and warrior religion. Only a relative handful of Christians today hold to Jesus’ central values of unconditional love and radical pacifism. Are they impossible idealists? Yes and no.

Their pacifism, representing a minority view, is not going to bring about world peace in the near future. But their vision is essential: that peaceful means can triumph in conflict zones, as in India with Gandhi, in Poland with Solidarity, in Czechoslovakia with Havel, in South Africa with Mandela.

Peaceful means would not have stopped Hitler but it seems possible, in retrospect, that the Nazis might have been prevented from their worst evils if German Catholics—undermined in the 1930s by the Papacy—and Protestants had strongly opposed Nazi anti-semitism, militarism, and imperialism. Prevention, for Christian pacifists, becomes the key to stopping wars before they break out.

So there is hope. Surprising changes in societal ways of thinking and values are possible. Witness the rise and seemingly impossible victories of the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, restorative justice as an alternative to punitive justice. Most of these seemed far-fetched as global movements just decades ago. So Christian pacifists, and Jewish, Muslim and Hindu ones, need to stand up and make themselves heard. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Bob Bersson

Bridgewater