Stanley Hauerwas and the Politics of Christian Pacifism
By Colman McCarthy
As a theological ethicist, Duke University Divinity School professor, and writer cruising through his 40s and 50s with few bumps and no detours, Stanley Hauerwas enjoyed the twin blessings of personal achievement and professional obscurity. Then in 2001 the assessors of talent at Time magazine declared him “America’s best theologian.” Oprah Winfrey gave him air time. Invitations to talk, exhort and entertain poured in. Now he was Stan the Man.
Hauerwas, a Texan who speaks in the twangy cadences of Jim Hightower and is as adept with the barbs and jibes, guffaws when recalling the praise from Time: “Best is not a theological category! Faithful or unfaithful are the right categories. The last thing in the world I’d want to be is the best.”
By the measure of fidelity to his Christ-centered beliefs, Hauerwas, whether as an intellectual trading in the nuanced language of theology, or as a member of his local Durham Christian parish that comes together for the succor of liturgy, community and prayer, is steadfast. “I am a Christian pacifist,” he says. “ Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist.”
That puts Hauerwas in a distinct minority. When countless Christian leaders—from popes, cardinals and Jesuits to assorted divines from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson--say that wars can be just, if not just dandy, and when pacifists are denounced as cowards misfits on the nation’s airwaves and op-eds, the wilderness from which a voice like Hauerwas’s is sounded becomes larger and larger.
It doesn’t bother him, as it never bothered Dorothy Day, A. J Muste, Emily Balch, the Berrigans, David Dellinger, Arthur Laffin and a long list of others for whom pacifism—active pacifism, which has nothing to do with passivity nor appeasement—was both a spiritual creed and a political philosophy.
For more than three decades, and shortly after studying at Yale Divinity School and earning a doctorate from the same university, Hauerwas, the son of a Texas bricklayer, has articulated the case for Christian pacifism in books, classrooms—at Notre Dame from 1970 to 1984 and Duke since—and public forums ranging from the Air Force Academy to a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Silk Hope, N.C.
As a pacifist, Hauerwas, who is 62, a hand under 6’ and owner of a pair of knees half blown out from too many years of running, is part of the minority Christian community operating under the consistent life ethic that calls for alternatives to the violence of war and militarism, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These, and other issues involving public morality and personal ethics, have been at the core of Hauerwas’s writing and teaching. Much of his prose has been in low-circulation theological journals and books from university presses. In 2001, Duke University Press published “The Hauerwas Reader,” a 729 page volume of literate and often feisty argument drawn from such books as “The Peaceable Kingdom,” “Truthfulness and Tragedy,” “Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics” and “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony.”
In mid-February Hauerwas spent the day in dialogue with an audience of 200 at the Servant Leadership School in Washington, a group that has ties to the Church of the Savior. It is a longstanding ecumenical congregation located about a mile from the White House and which practices the works of mercy and rescue in programs ranging from low-income housing to literacy tutoring. Few parishes in Washington take the Christian gospel as seriously.
An hour before his morning talk, I had some time with Hauerwas. He began with a wisecrack, a benign one about George W. Bush being a Methodist “who was raised an Episcopalian which is that form of Christianity that the upper middle class uses in America not to take Jesus seriously. I say that as someone who is now going to an Episcopal church!” On Bush’s frequent references to religion and faith, Hauerwas said that the president’s “personal relationship with Jesus doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jesus’s teaching.”
And what of his own personal relationship with Christ, the Christ of nonviolence, of sharing wealth, of healing? “When you say you’re a pacifist you don’t really know what you’re saying. I say I’m a pacifist because I’m obviously a violent son of a bitch. I’m a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I’ve got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it’s too passive. But by avowing it I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all. That’s part of what nonviolence is—the attempt to make our lives vulnerable to others in a way that we need one another. To be against war—which is clearly violent—is a good place to start. But you never know where the violence is in your own life. To say you’re nonviolent is not some position of self-righteousness—you kill and I don’t. It’s rather to make your life available to others in a way that they can help you discover ways you’re implicated in violence that you hadn’t even noticed. When I say I’m a pacifist it’s not meant to be some claim to righteousness.”
Hauerwas echoes the thought of Jim Douglass of the Catholic Worker community in Birmingham, Ala.: “The first things to be disrupted by our commitment to nonviolence will not be the system but our own lives”
In his talk to the Servant Leadership audience, Hauerwas ranged from dismissals of the just war theory to prayer—“it is often a form of silence”—to 9/11. He recalled that Bush, after urging Americans to go shopping, immediately proclaimed “’we are at war.’ Magic words necessary to reclaim the everyday. War is such a normalizing discourse. Americans know war. This is our Pearl Harbor. Life can return to normal. We are frightened, and ironically war makes us feel safe. The way to go on in the face of 9/11 is to find someone to kill. Americans are, moreover, good at killing. We often fail to acknowledge how accomplished we are in the art of killing. We now conduct war in a manner that only the enemy has to die.”
As with many who are committed to nonviolence, Hauerwas has found himself asked what are his alternatives to bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. “Such questions,” he replies, “assume that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. My only response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better—a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.”
Except it’s a small church, one that it is well apart from the large denominations—Catholicism, Methodism, the Baptists, Lutherans—and their frequent complicity with Caesar and the Pharaohs. In “The Peaceable Kingdom,” Hauerwas wrote: “The functional character of contemporary religious convictions is perhaps nowhere better revealed than in the upsurge of religious conservatism. While appearing to be a resurgence of ‘traditional’ religious conviction, some of these movements in fact give evidence of the loss of religious substance in our culture and in ourselves. Christianity is defended not so much because it is true, but because it reinforces the ‘American way of life.’ Such movements are thus unable to contemplate that there might be irresolvable tensions between being Christian and being “’a good American.’”
To understand Hauerwas the theologian and his emphasis on the church as a community—a people with a common unity—a knowledge of the early pre-Augustine pre-Constantine church is helpful. It was a band of mostly dissidents who organized around a troublemaking rabbi. If read as sociology, and not religion, the Acts of the Apostles portrays the early Christians as people who pooled what little wealth they had, risked their lives to the point of martyrdom, resisted violence and realized that on this earth they would never really be home. Phillips Brooks, the Protestant pastor in the late 19th century and for whom a residence house for service-minded students at Harvard is named, wrote: “In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical…His religion has so long been identified with conservatism…that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.”
Days before Hauerwas visited Washington, politicians, lobbyists, generals and assorted court reverends convened for the annual national prayer breakfast in the ballroom of a local hotel. Head-bowing presidents and vice-presidents rarely miss showing up. Unsurprisingly, Hauerwas had an opinion on these events, one that put him in the company of Amos, the Hebrew prophet who thought little of the rich Israelites who were publicly pious while privately greedy: “The God that’s prayed to [at the breakfasts] is such a vague God that it’s very hard for me see to how it avoids idolatry. It’s dangerous for Christians to think that the state is sponsoring their faith. Is it really about prayer? Or a display of piety? Prayer breakfasts are just parading the piety to ensure a kind of righteousness that isn’t commensurate with confessional sin. You’d never catch me at one.”
Hauerwas believes that Christianity, to be authentic, is an adventure. In a 1991 interview, he said: “If you ask one of the crucial theological questions—why was Jesus killed?—the answer isn’t ‘because God wants us to love one another.’ Why in the hell would anyone kill Jesus for that? That’s stupid. It’s not even interesting. Why did he get killed? Because he challenged the powers that be. The church is a political institution calling people to be an alternative to the world. That’s what the cross is about. The first social task of the church not make the world more just. It’s to identify the world as the world. George Bush, for example, doesn’t know he’s the world. He thinks he’s a Christian. He needs to be told he’s the world.”
In one part of his pacifist religious life, Hauerwas appears to be still developing. Occasionally, he eats the flesh of animals. Intellectually he is a vegetarian but not yet actually: “The arguments for vegetarianism, theologically, are more powerful than any arguments I could give against it. I just haven’t gotten into the habit yet. Any account of nonviolence that doesn’t seriously consider our relationship with the rest of God’s creation is deficient.”
Hauerwas is married and is the father of a son. Asked once how to raise children who are moral, he answered: “Start with baseball and also teach them to read. Don’t teach kids a bunch of rules. Help them submit their lives to something that they find to be a wonderful activity that transforms them. Activities such as baseball and reading are where the virtues are inculcated with a seriousness that is hard to match in other areas of our lives.”
It isn’t clear which ideas of Hauerwas appealed to the editors of Time when they hailed him as “the best.” Judging from the tenacity of his beliefs, and the candor by which he expresses them, the word faithful does seem to apply.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”