Ethics and Religion Talk: Guns, violence and pacifism, Part 1

The format for our column this week is a bit different. This week, we invite R. Scot Miller, an ordained minister of outreach and education at Common Spirit Church of the Brethren in Grand Rapids, to share a long-form essay on the topic of guns, violence, and pacifism, followed by a brief Hindu response. We’ll follow up next week with two Christian and my Jewish response.

R. Scot Miller writes:

At a time when my neighbors were preparing to defend their homes, I took my own firearms to be locked in my neighbor’s gun safe. Two men had escaped confinement in Newaygo County and they were known to have broken into homes in my community. In fact, a local elementary school in Moline took measures to secure the students. The men had stolen weapons and were assumed dangerous.

As a Quaker and Church of the Brethren minister, I believe God calls me to witness against violence, and practice behaviors that indicate a love of both neighbor and enemies. If these men came to my home, we would offer food and counsel. Without my guns I would not have the means to kill or harm them if incited. The men never did come, but my decisions reflect what Jesus and Paul clearly state. I feed and clothe enemies rather than resist evil with evil.

Variegated human experience, social and economic status, and lack of resources impact the way we receive any text, work of art, or socio-political message. Pacifism as an ethic is every bit contingent on perspective and experience as is the question of violence and state-monopolies on the use of violence. My reading of the text is informed by an experience of extraordinary levels of violence in Detroit neighborhoods, poverty and homelessness, and observations of institutionalized racism and its outcomes.

My ethical practices are intended only to witness to faith in Christ, who liberates us from bondage to privilege, and exclusion or exclusivity. Christ presents alternatives to a world that relies on dominance and power to control outcomes. I have no wish or motivation to demand non-violence or pacifism from others. I admit the potential that violence may be a necessary response to oppression or to promote self-determination and access to resources. I have no credible evidence that violence is always immoral.

Politically, violence will not resolve conflict. Nor will non-violence. They are engines for change, not solutions for oppression or human degradation. I believe evidence supports my belief that external influences do more damage than does liberating violence. Retributive violence damages all involved, even if it produces liberating political outcomes. It is an abuse of privilege for those not impacted by violence or oppression to suggest passivism to those who have a so-called dog in the fight. It is at best uninformed emotivism that holds others accountable for the preferences and hopes of privileged liberalism. It is a greater abuse of privilege to use violence as a reason to escalate oppressive policing or militaristic suppression of self-determination according to non-binding moral preferences.

My own pacifist stance is not motivated to produce just political outcomes. It is based on witnessing to an alternative realm which rejects violence in favor of voluntary associations with assemblies that embody faith in a God who will vindicate our care ethics over the coercive application of rights and justice which generally benefit the oppressive social order that produces militancy. This is a practice in faith that my own suffering or sacrifice will be vindicated. I have no faith or belief in a non-violence that holds others accountable to outcomes they neither subscribe to, nor can benefit from.

That being said, all persons of faith must be willing to sacrifice their own privilege or health on behalf of those who suffer. As Jesus shows me through his faithful life and the fact of the cross, there is a world worth dying for, but nothing worth killing for.

Fred Stella, the Pracharak (Outreach Minister) for the West Michigan Hindu Temple, responds:

“I would submit that the vast majority of people who call for an end to violence are not pacifists themselves. That is, most people agree that rioting in the streets by those protesting unjust conditions of any kind is wrong. Yet they are willing to live with their country at war; often for specious reasons. We cast a halo over our own armies decimating populations in the name of ‘freedom.’

“For true pacifists, holding to this moral stand is anything but privilege. It is one of the most difficult disciplines to practice. Passive resistance is not really all that passive. It requires the individual to suffer brute force (possibly death), arrest and incarceration without thought to personal protection. I do agree that colonization is a form of violence. But this does not mean that it must be met with violence to be overcome.”