9/11, War, Nationalism and Living as Disciples of Christ

I once received a short letter from theologian Stanley Hauerwas in response to an article I had written in Perspectives Magazine.  It was a pretty extraordinary thing for me to get a written letter (this was a bit before email responses became easy) from anyone and especially the man whom Time called the best theologian in America.

Since then I have read just one book by Hauerwas, his memoir Hannah’s Child, and I can assure you it is a wonderful read.  I read it several years ago but went back to it recently because I remembered that he was concerned with what might be called today “Christian Nationalism.”  Here are a few sentences from a Time essay he wrote shortly after 9/11:

G. K. Chesterton once observed that America is a nation with the soul of a church.  Bush’s use of religious rhetoric seems to confirm this view.  None of this is good news for Christians, however, because it tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.  As a result, Christians fail to be what God has called us to be: agents of truthful speech in a world of mendacity.  This identification of cross and flag after September 11 needs to be called what it is:  idolatry.

Stanley Hauerwas is a theologian who taught for many years at the Seminary of Duke University.  At some point in his teaching he decided to begin each class with a prayer and spent significant time crafting each day’s prayer.  Near the end of Hauerwas’s memoir, he writes about his response to the attacks on America on 9/11/01.  For about seven pages he weaves together excerpts from the classroom prayers he prayed during the early days of 9/11, along with public statements he made at the time, a Time magazine essay he had written, and conversations he had with friends to formulate his views on America’s response to 9/11.

He ended his class prayer on 9/11 with these words:  “This may be one of the first times we have prayed a prayer for peace with an inkling of how frightening it would be for you to grant our prayer.  Help us.”

Why would God’s granting the request of a prayer for peace be frightening right after 9/11?  Well, Hauerwas seems to suggest, because immediately after the attacks of 9/11, the use of religious rhetoric by President Bush as well as Christian leaders in America confused or conflated Christianity and America.  The immense war machinery of the United States was being readied for use.  Leaders around the country were saying things like, “We must retaliate for this evil attack on our country.  Not to do so would speak weakness.  We must wage war on this terrorism, for it is evil.” 

In other words, America did not want peace.  It wanted to retaliate.  It wanted to wage war.  And so it would be frightening for God to grant a prayer for peace.

In his class a few days after 9/11, Hauerwas prayed this prayer at the beginning of his class: 

September 11, 2001, we are told, forever changed our lives.  What are we, the people of your cross, to make of such a claim?  We are alleged to believe that Jesus’ death on the cross forever changed all that exists, including us.  In truth, September 11, 2001 seems more real than the hard wood of your Son’s cross.  That cross, your Son’s cross, seems “back then,” lost in the mists of history.  The horror of September 11, 2001 dwarfs Christ’s crucifixion.  Yet, surely, if we are able to acknowledge such evil and still know how to go on, we will do so only by clinging to the cross of Christ.  So, we pray that you will teach us to pray as a cruciform people capable of resisting the attraction and beauty of evil that September 11, 2001, names.

This surprising description of war as an evil that is attractive and beautiful requires some explanation, though I am not sure my explanation will satisfy.  It’s obvious to me that war is evil and at the same time, to a nation hot for revenge, attractive.  What Hauerwas means when he talks about the beauty of an evil war is inexplicable to me.  But the important point is that war, even though at that moment it seemed attractive, is evil. 

Hauerwas ends his Time essay with these words: 

If Christians could remember that we have not been created to live forever, we might be able to help ourselves and our non-Christian brothers and sisters to speak more modestly and, thus, more truthfully and save ourselves from the alleged necessity of a war against “evil.”

When asked to speak on the subject of a Christian response to 9/11, Hauerwas argued that the “Christian understanding of the cross required the church to be a counter-community capable of challenging the presumption that “we are at war.”  The “we,” says Hauerwas, in “we are at war” could not be the Christian ‘we.’” 

When Hauerwas argues that the “we” could not be the Christian “we,” he angered a number of his friends.  One of them told him that he failed to acknowledge the ways in which “our relationships with others bind us to protect them.”  The friend was upset as well that Hauerwas was forsaking “all forms of patriotism.”  In other words, he was forsaking natural loyalties.

Hauerwas told his friend that he (the friend) must acknowledge some limits to “natural loyalties.”  Otherwise, he says, why would he and his wife have had their children baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ since that means “we might at the very least have to watch our children suffer for our convictions.”

At the end of this presentation, Hauerwas prayed, and these words were a part of his prayer: 

We want to act, to do something to reclaim the way things were, which, I guess, is but a reminder that one of the reasons we are so shocked, so violated, by September 11, 2001, is the challenge presented to our prideful presumption that we are going to get out of life alive.  To go on “as though nothing has happened” surely requires us to acknowledge that you are God and we are not.  It is hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather he came to make us disciples, citizens of  your new age, a kingdom of surprises.  That we live in the end times is surely the basis for our conviction that you have given us all the time we need to respond to September 11 with “small acts of beauty and tenderness . . . .

Two motifs dominate Hauerwas’s thinking as he unfolds his thesis on war and the danger of conflating the cross and the flag.  One is that Christ’s death and resurrection changed everything, changed the way the world should function.  And those of us who have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection should be ready to die as Christ’s disciples.

 Hauerwas notes that, ironically, it is fear of death that makes so many Christians want our nation to go to war.  Not to go to war would be submission to the “evil” terrorists and invite further attacks.  So it is the fear of dying, of further attacks and death, Hauerwas says in these pages of his memoir, that makes American Christians so bellicose.  Three times within five pages he mentions this fear of death as the thing that keeps Christians from behaving as Christ would. 

Hauerwas also objected to framing the response to 9/11 as a war against “evil.”  He writes that If we believe any war we engage in must be a just war, that is, must abide by the limitations of just war theory, then the war we engage in must be “limited,” since that is a basic element of just war theory.  But, of course, a war against “evil” could never be limited.

In my  introduction to this piece, I suggested that it was going to be about Christian nationalism in America—and it is in this sense:  In a time of national trial, Christians tend to respond not as Christ-followers baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, but as Americans offended that some evil group could dare to attack America.  One of the best biblical illustrations of how Christians ought to respond in such a situation occurs when Jesus is being arrested and Peter draws his sword and begins to fight.  Jesus says to Peter, “Put your sword away.  Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”