"I'm a pacifist because I'm a violent son of a bitch." A profile of Stanley Hauerwas

Progressive, The, April, 2003 by Colman McCarthy

In his talk to the Servant Leadership audience, Hauerwas recalled that Bush, after urging Americans to go shopping, immediately proclaimed, "We are at war." Hauerwas explained that peculiar juxtaposition this way: "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."

In his lecture, he also took on just war theory. Later, he expounds on his critique.

"As far as just war is concerned, I think it's a terrific theory," he tells me. "Unfortunately, it has no purchase in reality. For example, I note that the reason people think the theory can be used in Iraq is because we have the capacity (and the `we' means the United States) to fight a war in Iraq. Did `we' get that capacity on just war grounds? No, the United States got that capacity on the grounds of political realism shaped by the Cold War. So, just warriors need to get serious and tell us what would a just war foreign policy, shaped by an equally just war Pentagon, look like."

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 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 writes: "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. 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, a Protestant pastor in the late nineteenth century, 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."