Martin Luther King Jr, arguably the most decorated civil rights activists in U.S. history, describes nonviolence, or pacifism, as “a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.” And yet Luther, much like the famous Indian peace icon Mahatma Gandhi, did not limit this belief to simply being objectively righteous. Rather, both men actively believed that peaceful demonstration was the greatest weapon at the disposal for men of good will to use against oppressors. It is “one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” Luther said. With history being their witness, both men seemed to be right.
No man more so than Luther contributed to the eradication of Jim Crow segregation and the national tilt towards acceptance and peaceful cooperation between white and African Americans. Likewise, the political advocacy of Gandhi, both doctrinally and publicly shrewd in nonviolence, contributed to the pressure that eventually pushed British forces out of India, helping to end the colonial age of Europe. Clearly, neither of these men were naive or cowards, and yet they managed to avoid the use of violent retaliatory force to achieve their goals, goals which changed the trajectories of both nations, and even the world. As brilliant as these tactics were, however, there was a much deeper motivation in pursuing nonviolence, especially in the case of Luther.
A devout Christian man himself, Luther became convinced as a young man that there is an inherent contradiction between the genuine love of the Christian faith and the application of violence in any way. Luther is a specifically important figure to focus on due to his Christian convictions, and the fact that he used the same Bible (well, more or less) and belongs to the same tradition (again, more or less) as a faith that has a long history with the question of moral use of violence in large conflicts.
His premise is a simple yet crucial one, which is that anyone who professes a genuine faith or love of God must be equally unwilling to use any wrath of violence against an enemy, as the very action would contradict said faith. Theologically, there are no shortages of biblical texts where Luther might choose to cite. “Do not resist an evil person,” Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew, where he also instructed his disciples to “turn the other cheek” upon being struck by an enemy. Similarly, Jesus calls upon his followers to pray for their prosecutors, and not to curse them.
The emphasis of treating every man in the context of a world created by and redeemed by God is a challenging thing to do, especially when reverting to forceful rage is so simple and accessible. Luther ought to be praised for his convictions of using the love of God as a shield that can be wielded to quell injustice, as the success of the civil rights movement can attest to.
However, this philosophy poses a question to Christians everywhere. Can a faithful Christian ever truly support a country, a group, or an individual in a violent, armed conflict? Or is this pacifist and nonviolent philosophy the true exemplar of Christian love?
On the surface, pacifism certainly appears as such. And the major historical examples of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi are no mere flukes, but genuine examples of nonviolence working on a large scale. However, there is one thing that neither of these two examples were: a war.
Both were an occupation of sorts. India’s case was that of a literal occupation, while Luther engaged with the racial oppression of segregation. Neither of these conflicts, while indeed ferocious and noble, were an official war between dueling parties. And this is where the nonviolent argument begins to falter: Nonviolence only works after oppressors win in the first place. Wars are fought between an aggressor and a defender. They determine if the oppressors win and declare dominance over the defending party, or if they are repelled.
Granted, this is an oversimplification. Wars can involve two aggressors who move with equal intent of beating out the other, whether it be over natural resources, honor, or territory. There is no shortage of historical instances where wars are initiated for relatively petty and purely political reasons, and it is these wars that often entail most of the needless suffering of any conflict; needless, because these wars are fought over very miniscule reasons.
Can Christians genuinely support violent conflicts like these?
It seems that these conflicts give reverence to the nonviolent philosophy. However, those types of wars are far from the only wars that are waged. Others are far clearer in their true objective.
And those objectives are often wicked.
No greater example exists than Nazi Germany. A country that, through adoration to a wicked ideology, instigated a violent conflict on otherwise peaceful and harmonious nations. Fueled by this ideology, they inflicted wide scale and utter violence, destruction, and suffering upon the bulk of Europe, and especially in Poland. Would nonviolence be a “successful” form of defense in this instance? If you define success in this context as the effective preservation of civil and moral institutions such as the church, the family, and the community, then it would most certainly not be.
In fact, to be pacifist in this context would not even be morally neutral. It would be immoral. It would be immoral to stand aside and let an aggressor take what is yours for the sake of its destruction. And it would be gravely ungenuine to claim that doing so is the most loving or the most Christian thing to do.
To be conservative means to conserve what is good. To be a Christian means to love God, and to reflect that love by loving others. Being pacifist accomplishes neither of these things. It allows for the destruction of all that is good with willful intent. Further, it is the opposite of Christian love, which has long been understood as willing the good of the other. Being pacifist in the face of violent aggression allows for the infliction of death and destruction upon the innocent.
Is that loving?
When the presence of inaction empowers evil people to achieve victory, the state of inaction becomes itself immoral. As the famous quote often attributed to Edmund Burke goes, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Ultimately, Christians need not worry that using force, or supporting the use of violent force, forfeits their capacity for love. Love is not constrained by human fallibility. Martin Luther had all of the right intentions in his pursuit of nonviolent resistance. And his display of love for the very people who hated him for being a black man is a standard most Christians will fall short of. But with the right intentions, and the right circumstances, the use of physical force to conserve what is good is the most loving thing men can do. For as Saint Augustine of Hippo says, “when we are stripping a man of the lawlessness of sin, it is good for him to be vanquished, since nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners.”
Nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners.
As long as there are evil men in the world, and there will always be evil men in the world, the use of violent force will be necessary to retain what we hold valuable. We should all strive for the loving convictions of Luther and Gandhi when discerning wickedness and use temperance where it is appropriate. But when the evil is great, so must be the force necessary to repel it.
And when the time comes to protect what is valuable, it should be Christians who are the first to stand the post.
