Healthy Liberal Christianity Looks at War and Peace

Perhaps the most ignored passages in the Bible are those that deal with questions of war and peace. (Well, those that deal with poverty and wealth are right up there, too. Is it possible that they are related?)

I am particularly disturbed by those elements of Christianity that imply or state right out that God wants the “good” people to go to war against the “bad” people. As I see it, so much of scripture makes it clear that creation (yes, all of creation) is an expression of the Divine and therefore entitled to care. Sadly, too much violent language has found its way into Christian worship and liturgy, so if people don’t think clearly about it, they might get the idea that Christianity sanctions war. So much for loving your enemy!

Here is my opinion: In order to justify war (any war), “our side” must believe that the other side is evil, or perhaps just inhuman. It is only by removing the humanity from the enemy that any of us can justify the terrible things that people do to each other in a war. And once we vilify the other side, it is much more difficult for us to take a humble look at our own shortcomings. From any rational perspective, the amount of suffering and destruction in any war is unthinkable. At least it would be if we were not able to make the enemy into the embodiment of evil.

I think war should always be the absolute last resort, and should only be utilized when every other possible approach to solving the conflict has been exhausted. In short, war should always be seen as a failure! We should never glory in it, even when we come to the point where we see no other possible response. Furthermore, we should never engage in a war at all unless we are willing to include in the cost of the war the restoration of the people on the other side as well as the restoration of our own soldiers and their families. And the restoration is not only material. To subject anyone, soldier or civilian, friend or enemy, to the horrors of war without helping them through the inevitable Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is nothing short of cruel.

At the end of the war, whether one side can make a political claim to victory or not, there are never any real winners. Let me correct myself. Actually, one group always does benefit – at least financially – and that is the industry that makes and sells war equipment. But it galls me to think that these people profit from the industry of death and destruction.

Howard Zinn offers another way for us to see our role as a world super power. What if, instead of promoting the United States as a military super power, we became a humanitarian super power instead? What if, instead of committing massive resources to training people in the art of war, we trained people in the art of diplomacy and reconciliation? When I think of the massive cost of waging war, I wonder what the world would look like if we dedicated our resources to improving living conditions in all countries. It seems to me that the humanitarian approach could increase our influence in the world. But the political realities make that approach nearly impossible. Imagine how great the outcry in this country would have been if the President had committed 300 billion dollars to humanitarian causes in the Middle East rather than going to war. While there was considerable protest against the war, I fear that there would have been a much greater protest against this level of expenditure to improve people’s lives.

This is a huge issue, but I want to remain within the scope of this blog. So, I ask you at the very least to consider taking Jesus’ words seriously – as a potential practical approach to foreign relations: Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.”

This is not a naïve sentiment. It has the potential to transform the planet. Still, the industrial world has a long history of exploitation of the poor and disenfranchised throughout the world, so some of those people may be understandably angry at us and might resort to acts of violence towards us. It takes great courage and political will to interrupt the cycle of violence. But it is not impossible.

The central question, however, is whether we will let violence set the tone for our actions or whether we will develop a more mature and less reactive ethic of peace and reconciliation.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson

“No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
The United Church___of Christ

Individual vs. Relationship

I have noticed an interesting (though not particularly original) correlation between political and religious socio/economic perspectives.

I will begin with the political realm. As I look at the respective platforms of the Democratic and Republican Parties, I notice that the Republicans seem to lean toward the rights of the individual to prosper – usually with a spurious promise that the prosperity of the few at the top will somehow find its way to benefit those at the bottom. The Democratic leaning is more toward the well being of the community and that to have a healthy community requires resources and opportunities not only to be available, but to be encouraged across the board. The Republican platform leans more towards the value of competition among individuals while the Democratic one leans more towards mutuality and care for the whole group.

Having made these broad statements, I am well aware that actual behavior does not necessarily match stated principles, and that the actuality may turn out to be better or worse than the stated objective.

At the same time, I see a similar pattern in much of religion. In America, many if not most traditions have emphasized the eternal status of the individual soul as the most important religious issue. The farther right a particular tradition is, the more individual piety seems to matter. What’s interesting here is that religious traditions seldom come into being by promoting the rights of the individual to achieve.

To give a couple of examples: much of Judaism is based in the Exodus story where the product of their wilderness experience is to become “a people” (rather than a collection of competing individuals). Centuries later, Jesus lifted up the integrity of the Realm of God as offering benefit to all, rather than the individualistic piety that had become so common in his time. Jesus witnessed to a God who cared for all people, the good and bad, neighbors and enemies, not just the socially and religiously acceptable ones.

American Christianity is to some degree a product of the extreme individualism that has always been associated with a pioneering spirit, so we have come about our problematic leanings honestly. It seems to me that the connection between right wing politics and right wing religion is no coincidence. They share the same radical individuality. This is not the kind of individuality that values uniqueness and diversity. It’s a kind of hierarchical individuality – sort of like “king of the mountain.” Everyone has an opportunity to become powerful in this system, but then the powerful inherit the right to tell everyone else how they should believe and behave in order to be acceptable.

While the political shift toward the Democrats, and particularly toward Barack Obama, may be largely a product of present economic woes, there is also an undercurrent of awareness that our system has let individuality become so extreme that corruption in the service of greed has been the result.

I would not say that individuality and community are completely antithetical perspectives. Any healthy system must hold them in proper creative tension with one another. Family System Theory says that a healthy family supports the differentiation and development of healthy individuals, and that healthy individuals tend to contribute to healthy families. This is true for groups of all sizes, even at the cultural dimension.

I hope that if the election goes according to what the polls are reporting, an improvement in both the integrity of the system and in the availability of opportunities for diverse individuals will be the result. In the final analysis, we are all connected and our cultural health is in the balance.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson


“No matter who you are, or where you are in life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
The United Church___of Christ

Leadership

I don’t know about you, but I am more than tired of the election season. It feels like it’s been going on forever! By this time, all the political pundits have given their myriad perspectives and the pollsters have counted and recounted, trying to figure out how the final count will go. We’ve heard about economic plans and foreign policy, the value of experience, and the danger of past relationships that might have involved controversial people. But behind the noise of the election process, perhaps we need to consider how we understand the nature of leadership itself. What are we looking for in a leader, after all?

For hundreds of years before Christ, prophesies swarmed around Israel that someone would be sent from God to save the people and restore them to their former glory. They referred to this divine hope as “The Messiah”, to use the Hebrew term that means “the anointed one.” It is from the Greek language that we get our Christian term, “The Christ”. Both the Greek and the Hebrew words mean substantially the same thing. By the way, anointing, or pouring olive oil on the head, was part of the ritual by which the priest indicated God’s choice of the next leader.

From a psychological perspective, troubled human individuals and groups tend to project their hopes and dreams onto the person who is supposed to come and save them. The Jews in the time of Jesus used the ancient story of King David to determine the model for their expected savior: the mighty warrior and great king. It is interesting to note that while the times of King David were thought of as “the good old days”, much archeological evidence indicates that Jerusalem in David’s time was not, in fact, a great kingdom, but it was rather simply the center point of a loose collection of rural communities. But of course, nobody in Jesus’ time knew that. They had visions of the past greatness of Jerusalem and they expected that God would send another a new “Messiah” who would resemble their image of King David: one who would be anointed by God to be the leader they needed. If God would only send this leader then all would be well. Sound familiar?

Probably we can relate to the feelings of those first century Israelites. Every time we go through the process of electing a President, lots of legitimate and fantastic projections are heaped onto the candidates. As the actual election draws close, our feelings tell us that if our chosen candidate is elected, all will be well, but if the other candidate is elected, we might as well leave the country, because disaster must be right around the corner.

Bad leaders believe that those projections are really about them, personally. Good leaders realize that many of the expectations placed upon them to be “the next King David” are not about them at all. What is projected onto them does not only come out of the neediness of the people, but in fact, points to the latent strength in the people that is obscured by their fear. Good leaders empower their people to make use of their own power rather than hoarding and misusing the power that has been projected upon them.

Too often, voters succeed in selecting powerful leaders, but then go back to sleep, expecting the leader to fix everything. They are likely to feel betrayed when the results are not acceptable. The best leaders do not fix, they lead. The best leaders always reflect the projected power back onto the people. This is true for kings, presidents, prophets, basketball players, and interim ministers, to name just a few.

This dynamic of psychological projection takes place in religious institutions only too often. One of my concerns about so much of current American religion involves the power that is projected onto the clergy and even onto the “correct” doctrines held by the group. That model makes leaders look powerful, and it suggests that the people should remain childish and needy. All the people can do, then, is wait for someone in authority to tell them how to believe and how to act. Bad leadership keeps the people powerless and dependent. Good leadership engenders growth, learning, and development with the goal of supporting people in their journey toward maturity.

So do you want a president or a minister who will do the job for you, or do you want a president or a minister who will help you find the best in yourselves and will empower you to take collective responsibility for your spiritual transformation (and, yes, for your salvation, too)?

Sometimes people misunderstand statements about taking responsibility for your own spiritual transformation, thinking that they are intended to cut God out of the process. Actually the opposite is true. It takes great faith to risk one’s personal and congregational identity to the process of transformation. We need leaders who will help engender such faith in us so we can more fully trust the Divine Process.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
Interim Minster

"Never place a period where God has placed a comma"
The United Church___of Christ

Sustainability in the Realm of God

Sustainability is a very popular word these days – and for good reason. Traditionally, businesses and other organizations have tried to evaluate themselves by isolating themselves from their larger context and by arguing that whatever happens outside of their perimeters doesn’t concern them. The classic example is the business that points to a healthy “bottom line” of profits. Every related cost that can be “externalized” improves the look of their profit statement. That approach can work only if the external environment has a virtually infinite capacity to absorb those “externalized” costs. An example might help here: Let’s say an oil company secures (or assumes) the right to drill in the jungles of South America. The company makes huge amounts of money until the wells run dry and then they leave. The resulting disruption to the local culture, the toxic sludge left behind, the environmental impact of building roads and pipelines, and the increased pollution generated by burning the oil are costs that must be borne by someone, but that never show up on the oil company’s balance sheet.

Eventually, the externalized costs begin to overwhelm the larger system, because it turns out that the larger system does not, in fact, have an infinite capacity to absorb them. We now have a system that is not sustainable. It cannot sustain its current behavior without undermining its own health and the health of the wider system.

I have given an economic example, but there are readily available examples in the realm of religion, too. For a long time, the separation of church and state meant that churches were only supposed to be concerned with the eternal soul of the individual, and that all other consequences of human behavior were out of bounds. So what happens to the externalized costs of the company CEO who makes generous contributions to the church, and makes a religious confession to insure an eternal address in the heavenly high rent district, but who continues the policies that are harmful to the world, especially to the poor and disenfranchised? In this case, the religious institution that promotes private salvation is an indirect contributor to the unsustainability of the wider system.

Those who promote concerns for sustainability in the design of all systems and organizations want us to realize that we are all connected, and “whatever we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves.” (attributed to Chief Seattle)

This is not a new idea. It is another version of “The Golden Rule”. It is certainly possible to think of the Golden Rule as an economic principle as well as an ethical one. “Externalized costs” must be paid by someone, and when they get massive enough, as they have in our present world, we, our children, and our children’s children (“to the seventh generation”) are required to pay up.

Jesus’ central teachings focused on healthy relationships and on the quality of community. The early church was remarkable because people within that community derived their sense of security from the quality of their caring for one another. “The powers that be” tend to resist and undermine the creation of sustainable systems because the values of sustainability limit their ability to feed their greed. In a truly sustainable system, people put into the system at least as much as they take out. In our present system, we are taught to take out as much as we can and to externalize whatever costs we can. Ultimately this approach can only result in the kind of environmental and social bankruptcy that are rampant today.

Bringing the argument down to the local level, many churches and other religious institutions today are trying to figure out how to survive in the present socio-economic system. Sometimes they look at themselves only in terms of how they can persuade people to join so the institution can survive. This makes congregants little more than consumers. I believe that spiritual communities can survive only if they learn to apply the principles of sustainability to themselves. A sustainable spiritual community is one that has found and developed a relationship of mutuality with the surrounding community. To that end, we at Park Church are trying to discover what the surrounding environment needs us to be. I’m not talking about chasing social and religious fads here. I am saying that in the sustainable Realm of God, we learn to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The love we make available in relationship is the love that makes the system sustainable for all. Any system whose central value is expressed in loving relationship will be a manifestation of the Realm of God.

I believe that is the task that Jesus has given us.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson
Interim Minister, The Park Church

“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking isn’t.”
The United Church___of Christ