SojoNet: Faith, Politics, and Culture

I want to be very clear. I don’t think the Taliban or bin Laden are nice people. I know this would be very difficult, but what are your alternatives? When you ask those kind of questions, it makes it sound like I need to have a foreign policy as a pacifist. What that is asking me to do is accept the world up to this point and then try to make it work out. I say to just war people: How in the world are you going to have a just war when you have a Pentagon and a State Department built on national self interest? Just war isn’t built on national self interest, but the Pentagon and our State Department’s foreign policy are built upon political realism informed by national self interest. To ask me now, “Okay, what would you pacifists do?” means I’ve got to accept those presuppositions. I’m not going to do that.
We need to turn around to the churches and say, “Where have we been that we don’t represent the kind of patience that political leaders in America can count on to say “We’re going to be in this for the long haul — and we’re going to have to pursue a policy that will ask you to be very patient in the face of evil.” We Christians have been schooled for that! And if our leaders don’t know that there’s a significant body of people that are committed to that… How could you have had the Civil Rights movement without the patience of the black church? You’ve got to have people schooled in the gospel to say, “We would rather lose than fight wrongly.”