Some Christian pacifists have worked to make the police “less violent” by advocating for less lethal weapons than firearms, such as tasers. In a recent editorial in The Mennonite, for example, Everett Thomas who is also a city council person in Goshen Indiana, claims that he raised money to buy tasers for the Goshen city police department because he felt they were trained to use their guns too quickly. Tasers, he claims, add another option on the “continuum of force” than simply reaching for a gun. This makes the police less violent, and that is the kind of thing a pacifist Mennonite should do.

Beyond the fact that as of 2008 over 400 people have been killed by police tasers in the U.S. and Canada, and beyond the fact that police have used tasers to simply torture people, the logic of the kind of argument that allows a pacifist to put more weapons in the hands of the police is radically flawed in its lack of race, class and gender analysis.

While in the Birmingham Alabama city jail, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed sadness that the white church supported the police. He also acknowledged that the police had “been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been rather publicly nonviolent.” Yet “nonviolence,” King said, is not enough to justify a Christian’s support of or participation in such a force. King said that the police had acted nonviolently, “to preserve the evil system of segregation.” Although King had always advocated that the means used must be commensurate with the ends sought after, so that violent means will not achieve a lasting peace, in this case he lamented that the police had used a moral means to preserve an evil end and denounced the police being “publicly nonviolent”: “there is no greater treason than to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

What Thomas and other Christian pacifists have missed, is the way that police are part of a system that maintains race, class and gender stratification. When pacifists argue that nonviolence is a more effective means of social control than violence, and then raise money and advocate for more effective weapons, that is, nonlethal weapons, they are in effect arguing that nonviolence can be a more effective means for controlling race, gender and class inequalities. Nonviolence, these pacifists are implicitly saying, can be a more effective tool for oppression than violence.

And they are not wrong. Nonviolence may indeed be a more effective tool for maintaining the social hierarchy than violence. Even the Roman Empire recognized that administrative justice was far more effective at maintaining Rome’s dominance than brute force. This has been the abiding legacy of the Romans for centuries. Indeed, Michel Foucault argues that governmentality in the modern age does not so much repress and prohibits actions, but disciplines, rehabilitates and normalizes which results in a population of disciplined and passive people who have internalized the power they want to be liberated from. While many people think that they can be liberated from repression by giving free reign to their desires, in reality, Foucault argues, they are only further ensconced into the system that created those desires in the first place. For the capitalist system is primarily a system that creates desires. It is a nonviolent system that creates consumers, not a violent system that brutalizes its subjects (there is that too, but that is not its primary purpose).

We are living in a Brave New World, where social control is moving not toward the most violent, ugly repression imaginable, but toward sanitized, depoliticized clean methods of control. The system wants what is effective and what is effective is nonviolent methods. That is why the video in the side to this post is just another example of capitalist, techno power: police now have weapons where they can blind people with a laser, hit people with sound waves that cause them extreme nausea. But even these weapons are not the most effective yet. The most effective weapons the technological system has are those that train us up to be tame, passive recipients who accept our place in society willingly, happy to take whatever crumbs fall from the master’s table.

Pacifism, which I hold to, should not be put into the service of the technological system. Shame on the pacifists who do this without any recognition of how their actions will play out to keep this dirty rotten system in place.

–Andy Alexis-Baker

For more information see www.peace2010.net

For those who have read much in Yoder, these lectures present little that is new or surprising. Much of the material here, plus much more, can be found in Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution or The Politics of Jesus, not to mention other books. Yet there is an element to these lectures that brings out more clearly than ever Stanley Hauerwas’s claim that Yoder provides us with resources to think of “natural theology” in a new way. “The gain of the cosmos” bends towards Jesus and nonviolence (46).

Thus Yoder narrates the “cosmological conversions” that Tolstoy, Gandhi and King underwent that pushed them to see reality anew. Speaking of Tolstoy’s insight that influenced Gandhi and King Yoder states:

The key to the good news is that we are freed from prolonging the chain of evil cause engendering evil effects by action and reaction in kind. By refusing to extend the chain of vengeance, we break into the world with good news. This one key opened the door to a restructuring of the entire universe of Christian life and thought. There developed from it a critique of economic exploitation, of military and imperial domination, and of westernization. (22)

Yoder invites the reader to have their own “cosmological conversion” as he explains the New Testament’s cosmology (thus overcoming some weaknesses in Tolstoy’s viewpoint). The “powers and principalities,” which help create order but also dominate and oppress people in forms such as the state, have been disarmed and defeated in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They were put on public display and shown for what they truly are: emperors with no clothes. Jesus now wages a cosmological war against these defeated powers, and invites us to be part of the march toward history’s christological telos. Christians are a sign of Jesus victory and the eschatological kingdom. As such we take part in an alternate politics that sees that the “grain of the universe” is not with the powerful, but the oppressed and downtrodden, not with violence but with suffering as Christ suffered. As such, Jesus’ church will inevitably run headlong into the empire’s of this world as they resist Jesus, and the church will have to witness publicly, and sometimes at great cost.

This cosmological conversion to which we are invited is to a new way of living in and viewing the world, not merely to feelings and beliefs. It is to see that Jesus is more determinative of history than anybody in the White House, the Kremlin or some country’s Parliament. He goes on to show how in the past few decades the Holy Spirit has moved within the Catholic Church to help many people to this conversion, most importantly people in the Catholic Worker movement, but there have also been stirrings in the bishops themselves. Jesus is lord and has altered the course of humanity’s sinful, violent rebellion. The question for us is whether we care to take the medicine that will make us well enough to see again, to see not merely shadows, but the reality that casts them.

This is a kind of natural theology. It is also a realist epistemological and metaphysical outlook. Not realist in the Machiavellian sense of political self-interest, but realist in the sense that the actual material world is the place where history lies and in which Jesus operates and moves. Without a real, live Christian community—such as the Catholic Workers—that embodies this cosmological worldview, without these living examples, there is little hope that others can come to see how radically Jesus altered reality.

So although there is not a lot of new material here, the way it is presented may help a new reading of Yoder and more importantly a recovery of the more precise political sense in which Christians are called to operate in this world.

Finally, I should make a note about the good introduction to the text. Martens and the other editors tell us the general historical situation of Poland in 1983, as well as give a very helpful overview of the content of the lectures. I was hoping to know who Yoder’s exact audience was and what questions he was asked to address (which Yoder would have taken very seriously), but that information is not there. I read these lectures in their unpublished form in 2005, but even then lacked the context in which to place them. Other than that missing element of context the editor’s introduction is good. Moreover, they helpfully tell us what they did and did not do to the text (unlike Stassen’s introduction to the recent Yoder book, War of the Lamb, in which he fails to mention that they added, subtracted and moved things around in the text). In sum, I’d recommend this book as supplementary material to Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution and other writings. At 145 pages, it might also make a decent introductory text to Yoder and nonviolent history as well.

–Andy Alexis-Baker

The primary intent of the lyrics is not for calling people to arms; the lyrics, primarily, are meant to illustrate a scene in which the flag waved proudly after weathering an attack from a foreign power and to use this as a sign of hope for the survival of our nation and its ideals. The battle imagery in the lyrics is in the context of the United States defending an attack from British bombs bursting in air.
–Joseph Penner

In their book, Blood, Sacrifice and Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle argue that American patriotism is a civil religion of blood sacrifice in which the flag is a sacred object akin to totems and idols. Violence is key to this religion. The Star-Spangled Banner is a hymn to the American flag. It essentially is about how the sign of the flag was a beacon of hope that the American patriots would not be defeated by the British military. As Marvin and Ingle state:

The patriotic statement that Americans are an unconquerable people, common at times of totem peril, is a deadly serious statement of totem faith. The totem wards off evil and protects from harm.
-Marvin and Ingle, Blood, Sacrifice and Nation, 37.

The “totem,” in this case the American flag, has to deliver protection to be effective. If an army overruns and defeats it, the totem will cease to exist. Thus its group members have to be willing to exchange themselves for the totem, to sacrifice themselves to renew the flag’s power. It is a bloody ritual, enshrined in the Star-Spangled Banner. Marvin and Ingle write:

During the British bombardment of 1814, Francis Scott Key was moved to model in poetry the flag’s endurance under fire. The battle for the death defying Star-Spangled Banner was ritualized as a creation-sacrifice guaranteeing the nation for eternity and illuminated by the regenerative dawn.
-Marvin and Ingle, Blood, Sacrifice and Nation, 245.

The battle for regenerative power of the flag is replayed at every sporting event as people, stand, turn their bodies toward the flag (or the music), and place their hand over their hearts in a pious act of reverence that re-enacts a creation myth of bloody proportions. This deeply idolatrous ritual, is also enshrined in federal law that mandates body posture whenever the national anthem is played:

§171. Conduct during playing
During rendition of the national anthem when the flag is displayed, all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. Men not in uniform should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Persons in uniform should render the military salute at the first note of the anthem and retain this position until the last note. When the flag is not displayed, those present should face toward the music and act in the same manner they would if the flag were displayed there.

This law states not only that people should stand but directs people’s body posture. This is the type of thing that civil religion ceremonies are made of. In the sporting events the flag and its hymn—the Star-Spangled Banner—remind us that we are Americans, and that what we share is a submission to a violent authority, whose totem power is to protect us from harm. It is godlike.

Thus, this ritual is far from harmless from a Christian perspective. But there are simple ways to resist it. The simple act of staying seated communicates a powerful message that Christians are for Christ rather than this totem blood ritual. This is not unique to the United States. All nations have these totem rituals. Christians should find ways to witness to Christ in the face of these idols.

–Andy Alexis-Baker

This morning, I read one of the latest entries into the discussion on Goshen College’s decision to break with 114 years of Mennonite tradition and play the national anthem instrumentally at select sporting events. Written by John D. Roth, history professor at Goshen College, director of the Mennonite Historical Library and editor of the Mennonite Quarterly Review, “A Modest Proposal for Peace” calls its audience to “shift our attention to the second half of the equation—the prayer that is to follow the anthem.” He then offers a concrete suggestion on how to accomplish this, stating:

At the beginning of each event a recorded message would say something like the following: “Please rise for the playing of the national anthem and remain standing for the words of Jesus taken from the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5.” Then, immediately following the national anthem, a recorded voice would read the beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-10) without commentary, followed by a pause, and finally: “Welcome to Goshen College. Enjoy the game!”

Before I delve into my own reflections on this proposal, I want to say that I respect Roth and believe that his reputation for being a thoughtful theologian and scholar is well-deserved. Furthermore, I want to say that I admire the courage he showed as one of the few Goshen College faculty who has publicly voiced his disappointment with the school’s decision. That said, there are a few flaws in his proposal that I feel compelled to address. I hope to do so as diplomatically as possible below.

As I see it, Roth’s proposal is pointing at the wrong target. The problem with Goshen’s decision is not the longstanding Christian discipline of prayer that demonstrates one’s faith in God to hear and respond to God’s people. The difficulty is with the anthem itself, which is little more than a worship song to the flag and the national hymn of American empire. For this reason, what is most needed are proposals for ways to work at repealing the decision before it becomes entrenched (at best) or truly subverting its privileged position at games (at least). In my view, focusing our attention on what to do after playing a nationalistic song with violent and idolatrous overtones does neither.

My second thought on this proposal has to do with substituting the prayer following the anthem with the beatitudes. Although I admire Roth’s creativity and agree that in the context of the national anthem, “public prayers could easily become coded messages of civil religion,” I also don’t think this suggestion adequately addresses the theological problems at hand. Many of the people I know that support honoring the nation through its holiest song are aware of Jesus’ teachings on the mount. Yet for many people, the words have also been theologically dismissed as lessons that serve only to remind us of our sinful, imperfect humanity, are seen as impractical for “real life” situations, and have been re-framed in decidedly unhelpful and un-Christian ways. Simply reading these verses without commentary as Roth suggests does little if anything to communicate that Goshen College, the Mennonite Church and the Anabaptist tradition understands these words as ones Christ’s-followers are called to live by to the best of our individual and collective abilities. In other words, it does nothing to either state our position in relationship to the war song that proceeds it or to shift the paradigms of those for whom, “Blessed are the peacemakers” may be little more than a prayer of support for the troops.

Finally, it is my understanding that there is widespread dissatisfaction from Goshen College students, alum and faculty that the anthem is being played at games. Yet, the sense I have gotten from people within that community is that most of those people are cynical and disillusioned about the possibility of change. While I concede that what I have heard has been primarily anecdotal, I wonder why Roth advocates a kind of accommodation that will likely reinforce that sentiment. I have always seen Goshen as a place that teaches its students to believe that transformation is possible. Indeed, its brand new slogan, “Healing the world peace by peace” paints Goshen as the best place to learn how to intervene in various conflicts and attain real peace. At the risk of sounding too critical, I am perplexed about how the next generation is supposed to be ready for these lofty tasks if they don’t even feel empowered to resist a war song on their own campus. If I was a student at Goshen who was upset with this decision, I would want to be supported and encouraged by teachers who shared my view to find creative, direct and even public ways to speak and act against it. Yet what this article seems to propose is for rightfully displeased people of conscience to settle into an uneasy truce in which they stop trying to achieve the change they’d really like to see and start focusing on ways to just live with it.

In light of these critiques, I would like to make a couple of less-modest proposals. As someone who came to love the Mennonite faith several years ago and who sees Goshen’s decision to play the national anthem as undercutting the Anabaptist witness that has touched the lives of Christians like me and those who have signed our petition, I submit that it is vital to keep resisting the national anthem’s place in the campus community. Indeed, I urge people who are opposed to the decision and the implications it has for the direction of the school and the church as a whole to make repealing this action a top priority. If the Berlin Wall can fall and the Cold War can end and legalized segregation can be overturned, then there is more than a little hope for getting the national anthem removed from select sporting events at an Anabaptist school.

Second, if the anthem begins playing in March as planned, I would like to suggest another less-modest proposal that people discern active and public ways to subvert the privileged position it holds in both Brenneman’s and Roth’s formulations. For example, instead of playing the anthem at the start of the game, play it after a prayer and/or a 5 minute history lesson on Anabaptism and/or a sermon about peacemaking and/or an introduction to one of Goshen’s core values and/or a well-loved hymn — and play it on kazoos. Or for the sake of fairness and true hospitality, play instrumental versions of all the anthems represented on the teams or at the colleges in general in alphabetical order with the anthem of the United States of America falling where it may — and play them after reading Scripture from 1 Samuel 8. Or better still, just play the national anthem after the game as people are leaving — on nose flutes. If the national anthem is “just a song” as people who are puzzled by the passionate response against it tend to argue, then it shouldn’t matter if the college assigns it to a place that better reflects our primary allegiance to Christ.

Attempting these and/or other not mentioned less-modest proposals, requires that we not just assume, as Roth seems to, that the anthem is here to stay before the first note is even played at the college’s first game. It also requires continuing to point to the theological and ethical problems that including the national anthem in the life of the institution and in the Christian faith more broadly. All of these things are even more crucial in light of Goshen’s new statement, which amounts to little more than a declaration that they will simply wait out our “emotional” reactions to this move by “revisiting” the issue in a year. May we be bold enough to rise to this challenge.

– Nekeisha Alexis-Baker

• Exiles and Citizens, (July 4th) – 7/4/10 – Jeremiah 29:4-7, Daniel 3 — Sermon by Joel Miller at Cincinnati Mennonite
• Reverse anthem decision — by Roger Farmer, The Mennonite 7/1/2010
• Web exclusive: John Howard Yoder’s ‘irresponsibility’? The Mennonite — by LeVon Smoker
• Letter to the Editor — Yorifumi Yaguchi, The Goshen College Record (Draws on the authors Japanese context and Christian refusal there to sing the Japanese anthem)
• Ready for rejection — by Eugene K. Souder, Mennonite Weekly Review
• Implications of flag, anthem — by John and Betty Drescher, Mennonite Weekly Review
• Because Words Matter, Schleitheim
• Letter to Editor, from GC Faculty, The Goshen College Record
• Letter to the Editor — David Hiebert, The Goshen College Record
• Letter to the Editor — Rueben Miller, The Goshen College Record
• Patriotism mit paxibum, ja? — By Glenn Lehman, Mennonite Weekly Review
• Goshen anthem decision debated — Celeste Kennel-Shank, Mennonite Weekly Review
• Is the Roman Emperor Still Your God? — John Goerzen
• To Whom Should Christians Pledge Allegiance? — Heber Brown, III, Faith in Action
• Goshen College caves – Peacemaking, Convictions and Heritage — Amish Phonebook
• No national anthem at Goshen, please — Halden, Inhabitatio Dei (contains a good comments discussion)
• The national anthem and Christ’s lordship — Celeste Kennel-Shank, Mennonite Weekly Review
• An Open Letter to Goshen College — Britt Kaufmann
• Christian College Reconsiders National Anthem: Has 114 year history of NOT singing it — Heber Brown, III, Faith in Action
• Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation — Tim Nafziger, The Mennonite
• I am making peace with the national anthem — Sheldon C. Good, The Mennonite
• Letter to the editor on GC’s anthem decision — East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church, in Lancaster, Penn., The Goshen College Record

After the flurry of public attention, Goshen College set up a committee to deal with the issue while Brenneman halfheartedly defended the college in a public letter, saying:

Our practice of not playing the national anthem at our sporting events has been a practice of the college since its inception 114 years ago rooted in the nearly 500-year-old confessions of faith of the Mennonite heritage and in the simple New Testament expressions, “Jesus is Lord” and “God so loved the world.” Such an expansive reign and love includes a deep love for our own country, to be sure, but also for the whole world.

Yet his strong words defending their abstention in one paragraph were quickly subverted as he assured readers that Mennonites are just as patriotic as anybody else.

I believe all of us who are citizens of the United States love and honor our country profoundly and are grateful for the blessings of U.S. citizenship. We fly the U.S. flag on campus, annually read the Constitution, honor the Fourth of July as a national holiday by not working, pray for our leaders, and, many of us vote. Some of us pledge allegiance to the flag, sing the national anthem and are veterans of war. Others choose to be conscientious objectors to war, stand silently when the flag is saluted and choose not to sing the national anthem. In honoring the differences, we honor the best of our country.

So it should come as no surprise that in February 2010, the college demonstrated its real feelings about the 500-year old Anabaptist tradition of nonconformity when they publicly announced that they will not only play an instrumental version of the national anthem at some sporting events, they will also muddy the theological waters further by praying afterward. To make matters worse, the statement frames the act of cowardice in terms of an exciting new adventure in peacemaking: “Playing the anthem offers a welcoming gesture to many visiting our athletic events, rather than an immediate barrier to further opportunities for getting to know one another.”

This is part of a larger vision for reshaping Goshen College that Brenneman brings as president. Citing J. Lawrence Burkholder, Brenneman gave a chapel message in which he hoped to move Goshen from “a culture of dissent” to “a culture of assent.” Blatantly misrepresenting the Anabaptist tradition from which he came, Brenneman stated that the early Anabaptists who died resisting such things as military service, church/state union and jingoistic songs like the national anthem were “perfectionists” who were on the side of dissent rather than the institutions who could put their beliefs into wider practice. They were part of “dissent standing outside the systems of the world” and for this Brenneman derisively called them “naysayers.”

Thus the “moral ambiguity” that Burkholder first brought up as reason for Mennonites to move into positions of power and fly U.S. flags, has also become a reason to reject Anabaptist history and tradition, even the “simple gospel statements” in favor of a supposedly more “realistic” and “wider” social ethic. Brenneman named his speech “Getting to Yes and Amen! The New GC ‘School of Thought’”——a fitting title for a manifesto that declares Goshen’s goal to train its students to be toadies and sycophants for the establishment. Every “yes” entails some “no” and the Anabaptist tradition’s no to these anthems has been a “yes” to peace. What is this “yes” a “no” to, other than a caricatured version of Anabaptism and Christianity?

Unfortunately, baptizing “yeses” and “amens” to empire is becoming another Mennonite tradition as our leaders sell-out their tradition to evade the necessary conflict that comes with being faithful disciples. As Tim Nafziger recently wrote:

…there seems to be a pattern of leaders of Mennonite institutions citing Burkholder’s work as they move their organizations towards the mainstream and away from distinctive Anabaptist ways of being. In a chapter in Building Communities of Compassion: Mennonite Mutual Aid in Theory and Practice, GC Professor Keith Graber Miller writes about how former Mennonite Mutual Aid president Howard Brenneman met regularly with Burkholder for breakfast as he gradually took MMA from being a mutual aid organization to being just another insurance and investment firm with Mennonites as a target market. For more on this see Peacewashing MMA.

Currently, the Mennonite church is being damaged by more and more leaders who “say yes!” to flags, war songs, government, capitalist greed, the cops, military in their congregations, and so much more. Yet they conveniently forget that meaningful change happens when people get together and start marching, start causing trouble, start revolting and start saying “enough is enough.” The peace department at Goshen College teaches about this history. Will their students find the courage to practice nonviolent civil disobedience at Goshen College itself? Will the wider Mennonite church and others who claim an Anabaptist identity boycott institutions like Goshen College? Or will we continue supporting those that spurn our rich tradition of faithful dissent and resistance in exchange for a crumb of the American pie?

-Andy Alexis-Baker

Update: Please consider signing the letter of resistance and/or contacting the college and Mennonite Church USA (the college’s institutional home) directly:
Goshen College’s phone number: 1 (800) 348-7422.
Jim Brenneman (President): president@goshen.edu .
Executive director of Mennonite Church USA: Ervin Stutzman: (574) 523-3092

Update II:
On the heels of Goshen College’s recent decision to play the national anthem, a local Mennonite high school is now revisiting its own policy on not playing the national anthem according to an article in yesterday’s Elkhart Truth. They are reconsidering with the help of Goshen College administrators. http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-anthem-sink-hole/

Two interviews with Dorothy Day, one on the Christopher Closeup Show and one with Hubert Jesse, have recently been added to YouTube. In the interviews, Dorothy discusses the origins of the Catholic Worker movement, shares her theology on war and nonviolence, and talks about the Christian call to the works of mercy, among several other topics.

Visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNMHud0fFUg to start viewing.

In a recent article for Conrad Grebel Review, I examined the idea that “community policing” is a less violent alternative to militarized models of policing and I believe I showed that this is not the case: community policing can actually be more violent. One of the arguments that community policing theorists make for increasing the number of police is that even though it is known that police do not actually reduce the crime rate, the presence of police make people feel safer. Therefore, to increase the public perception of crime reduction, cities should put more officers on the street. This is an explicit argument made by Wilson and Kelling in their famous “broken windows” theory and shows that despite popular conceptions that more police equals lower crime, the data does not support the myth.