Speaking Peace

I have read several articles over the last few days in which individuals speak a powerful truth: violent language that is religiously-inspired promotes actual physical violence.

Yesterday's Baltimore Sun contained an op-ed by Frank Schaeffer, son of the late evangelist Francis Schaeffer, claiming personal guilt for the murder of Dr. George Tiller this week. The younger Schaeffer, for a time, contributed to his philosopher/theologian father's campaign to fight secularism with a politically-engaged evangelical Christianity. One of Schaeffer's primary areas of concern was abortion; to dramatize the severity of the issue, Schaeffer comapared America with legalized abortion to Germany under Hitler. Both, he said, demanded that Christians actively resist the evil they see, using radical means if necessary.

Frank Schaeffer acknowledges that his father would never have considered the murder of an individual as a legitimate action. But he also observes a chain of influence: his father's writings inspired Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, an organization that did pursue radical and verbally violent means toward ending legal abortions; from the verbal violence of Operation Rescue to the murder of Dr. Tiller is a single (profoundly immoral, but perhaps in a deranged mind, reasonable) step. Schaeffer admits his complicity. Then he adopts a rare posture for a public figure: remorse.

The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I'd like to say that I, and the people I worked with in the pro-life movement, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.

I am very sorry.

I was also surprisingly moved by a review by Dr. David Gushee from the Christian Century, in which he discusses a new book by Mitchell Gold and Mindy Drucker, Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America.

The book contains stories from gay men and women about the pain they experienced growing up in households (many of them Christian) in which they were not accepted. Spend any time with gay and lesbian Christians and you know that stories like the ones in this book are common. Gushee summarizes one of the 40 stories:

Matt Comer, who came from a conservative Baptist family in North Carolina, began experiencing same-sex attraction in his preteen years. Matt's preacher said from the pulpit things like: "Put all the queers on a ship, cut a hole in the side and send it out to sea." The contrast between his sexuality and the beliefs of his church and family drove Matt to thoughts of suicide. But that same religious faith told him that suicide "would have sent me straight to the depths of hell, landing me in the same spot as being gay. So, I turned to begging and pleading."

Lying on his bed at night, "crying and praying," Matt would ask God to spare him eternal damnation if he tried his very best not to feel attraction to males. But it didn't work. Finally Matt told the truth to his parents. "My mother said I was crazy and sick and told me I was going to hell."

The link between violent language inspired by religious conviction and actual violence--self-inflicted or other-inflicted--is direct and causal.

As a pastor in a very secular city, one of the main reasons that people tell me that they have rejected religion is that they have come to believe that violence (like the examples shared here) is a necessary corollary to a religion based on the Bible. This conclusion is, in some sense, understandable--Christian fundamentalists who employ violent rhetoric almost always ground their language in the many Biblical stories of divinely sanctioned violence. But to believe that the Bible, because it contains violence, requires readers to be violent, is naive. A "violent" story does not demand or require violent response--sometimes the very opposite message should be derived. Violent Bible stories exist as cautionary tales. The Bible shows us both who God is and who God is not. The stories of religiously-inspired violence serve as clear warnings of what did--and still does--happen when flawed human beings misuse God in service of our own sinful urge to conquer others.

If a so-called "Bible-believing Christian" says something violent, they have ceased to be a Christian in the Way of Jesus. Violence is sin and falls short of God. Jesus' own and only recourse against those who he deemed "enemies" was not violence, non-violence: the practice of sacrificial love.

Late 20th century Christian fundamentalism and its triumphalist (and often violent) language has done more damage to our culture's sense of true Christian practice than any intrusion of secularism ever could. Christianity is nonviolent in thought, word, and deed; even and especially in the face of the ideas, things, or people that challenge our faith.