Peace of God

ETA: This is probably as open about my faith, maybe, as I’ll ever be, at least for now.

When I was an adolescent, I was around a lot of debate between liberals and leftists and the notion of peace and pacifism. That got crowded out in my young adulthood as most people around me, whatever their political leaning, seemed to reject pacifism as naive and foolish, blinkered to realpolitik.

The pacifist debates of my adolescence were secular in nature. Liberals and leftists, all people who did not subscribe to a religion. Many of these arguments I heard were in good faith and came from deep aspirations to justice.

Nevertheless, these arguments didn’t ring true with me, and in the last few years, starting with the early BLM days when secular mainstream media was tut-tutting about “peaceful protest” and invoking MLK etc etc, and then particularly lately with current events, I’ve been reflecting on why both the peacenik hippies of my adolescence and the fiery radicals of my young adulthood have felt disconnected from reality, whenever the subject is raised.

Because: The unconditional pacifism espoused by traditional Mennonitism, by my people, that’s also seemed unworkable to me from the get-go, as admirable as it too was. I saw And When They Shall Ask at a very young age. My great-grandfather is in it, Jake Sawatzky. One of the other old men in the documentary, he says, “I would kill all of them if I could,” about the Makhnovists who sowed horror and violence on the Mennonites back in Ukraine, back when it was South Russia. “No man is a pacifist when a soldier is at his mother’s bed.” I’m paraphrasing, maybe I don’t remember these quotes exactly. He definitely said this grinning, smiling, with the clear face of someone who is sure he knows something his interlocutor does not. My great-grandfather wrote about how his family refused guns during the Makhnov days, and his father said well if this means we’ll die, then we’ll die. I thought there was something admirable about that. I suppose there is. But it’s the other old man in the documentary, whose mother had soldiers at her bed, who was right, in the end.

And that, I think, is where I think about my Mennonitism here. Whatever wisdom lies in pacifism is not of a secular nature. The wisdom is not to ignore the old man in the documentary, because he is right. What’s there, though, is that debating the necessity of violence for self-defense makes sense to me, sure (though what counts as “self-defense” is of course an unending koan and is not unrelated to the fact that tens of thousands of people are dead right now that weren’t a few months ago) but alongside this fact that deathly violence is always, always spiritually uncleansing, and there is no glory or righteousness in it, ever—and that is unconditional, that I’ve never heard a convincing argument for that scans in my soul. I think that is what I believe, though it also causes me no smaller despair for our world. The older I get, the more I realize that ignoring or rationalizing certain violences as righteous is eventually practiced by all humans in nearly every corner of my life, across all spectrums, something we’re all guilty of, and a fact that so many people don’t seem to mind at all. Often when confronted with it, they will respond with the violence that troubles them more, as if tragedy deserved one-upping. Magdi Jacobs said, “The ultimate result of whataboutism is essentially nihilism. No one can express concern about any topic-including dead children-without being accused of not caring enough about another topic–including other dead children. We all end up caring a little bit less about everything.” I have a bad feeling about it all.