Defending Pacifism

I've written this article before. Bear with me.

The story of the "Christian Peacemaking Teams" rescue has shown modern "christian" "pacifism" for what it is - an ideologically and morally bankrupt philosophy.

Pacifism is a fine thing - as long as the pacifist has integrity. Modern "christian" "pacifism" has largely none.

I attend the Presbyterian Church, for purely theological reasons (an alignment that has been and remains sorely tested at times). While the people in the pews at most Presbyterian churches are all over the place, and frequently as conservative as the church's reputation would have you think they were, the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly - the elected body that takes care of the church's temporal governance - is, frankly, insane. And you can see from whence they come if you walk into nearly any Presbyterian (or Lutheran, or Catholic, or Methodist...) church; people who, as P.J. O'Rourke said, have self-righteousness like some people have halitosis; people prone to making grandiloquent pronouncements about world events that are inevitably in line with the model set by the World Council of Churches 30 years ago when it cast its lot with Liberation Theology (to the point of funding religious mission supplies like rockets and explosives for leftist guerilla groups in Latin America).

There's one of those in my congregation; a crotchety septuagenarian who, during open prayers on Sunday morning, inevitably sermonizes: "Pray for the people of North Korea, who are being starved because the US Government won't send food", or for "the people of Darfur, who we are too racist to rescue" (along with prayers for "the people of New Orleans, who are being killed by Administration indifference" and an end to "the genocide of tax cuts"), that sort of thing. No mention, of course, of the stalinist government in Pyongyang or Khartoum that is making it so easy for us to achieve our nefarious ends. Naturally. The woman - like the "Christian" "Peace"making teams - is completely silent about the horrors under the Hussein regime, and was when Hussein was in power (although she prayed fervently for us to drop our sanctions...)

Moral stances are fine; to be moral, they must have integrity. "Pacifists" who only protest against perceived American abuses, and remain silent on those of totalitarian regimes around the world (at least, those of them at odds with the US) have no integrity; they are, indeed, perfect hypocrites.