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    Does ISIS Prove Nonviolence Wrong?

    Making Peace with Just Warriors: An Interview with Ron Sider

    By Ronald J. Sider

    January 23, 2015

    Available languages: Deutsch

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    • Clint Baldwin

      Thoughtful & helpful interview on a subject that is often a paradigmatic shift in consciousness for people -- and therefore can prove difficult to consider well. Thanks, Ron. I would like to offer a few strategically oriented texts/authors/orgs that might prove useful for some. These are not "faith-based" per se -- there are of course many of those to be recommended too. 1. A Force More Powerful (text & documentary) by Peter Ackerman & Jack Duvall 2. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011) by Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan [which won APSA's 2012 Woodrow Wilson award]. 3. Gene Sharp's works [see also the Einstein Institute]. 4. USIP (United States Institute of Peace) 5. ICNC (International Center on Nonviolent Conflict) There are many others; these are meant offered as a few sources of aid. Of course, Plough Books -- the source of this interview -- offers many excellent resources as does Ron Sider that I highly recommend.

    • Steve Dintaman

      I applaud Sider's efforts to encourage Just War folks to apply their criteria with more rigor, but it's really kind of hard for me to take the theory very seriously. Show me one Christian denomination that actually has the polity structures in place to APPLY the Just War theory. Sure, its a great discussion topic for theologians and church folks, but unless there is an actual plan of implementation its not serious. You would need to have some mechanism in place to seriously examine every potential war situation, make a decision for or against on a denomination wide level that is somehow binding on church members. Can you imagine a church saying "this is not a just war by our criteria, therefore we call on all members to refrain from any form of participation in it, including our active military members, since participating in an unjust war is tantamount to committing murder"?" When this happens I will take it much more seriously.

    • John Stoner

      The notion of "just war" has been given far too easy a pass as meaningful Christian thought and action. Let's test that idea by spending a decade making the case for "just bullying," and see where that takes us. The lie on which both are based is Satan's persistent offer of redemptive violence. Nobody makes a case for violence, but millions of "Christians" and "Christian" leaders do not blush to make a case for redemptive violence. Think about it.

    • Berry Friesen

      What I miss in this otherwise good interview is the subversive framing of the biblical worldview. One simply cannot imagine a biblical writer attempting to solve a significant problem of violence/injustice within the categories presented by the empire. Instead, a biblical writer would re-describe the problem within a YHWH-oriented frame of reference and then speak to what should be done in response. Thus, we need to acknowledge right off the bat that the empire (that's the USA and its allies) has since 1979 actively supported the arming and training of extremist (Wahhabi) Muslims. This strategy began in Afghanistan and has been used repeatedly since in various other places. So to stop ISIS, we must take seriously the possibility that it is the U.S. government and its allies that are at the root of the terror. There is much evidence that in fact ISIS is another iteration of the imperial strategy first launched in Afghanistan with the mujahadeen. But even if one assumes otherwise, Jesus-followers betray the radical core of the gospel when they take on the task of solving empire's problems within imperial categories of thought. It won't work and only elicits contempt for the gospel.

    • Janusz

      Non-violence works against entity with some moral character, Gandhi or MLK would not be successful in Nazi Germany and extremely unlikely to be successful in Stalin's Russia or currently against ISIS. Tibetans seem to have no luck against Communist Chinese

    • Mathai Mathen

      Non violence works in a Christian civilisation with democracy as a catylst. Do you have any evidence that it works against other cultures? Dalai Lama has been at it for ages but how can you fine tune it against a non Christian opponent.

    • Luis

      Sorry but you are wrong the soviets didn't go away it just changed its face and a step back to gain momentum.

    • Daryl

      The argument as to which way is better is a false argument. The only valid discussion is - which way is biblical? Until the Just War side can produce one single NT verse to support their Just War heresy, they remain servants of satan trying vainly to disguise their bloodlust with false doctrines.

    • Redhawk Brown

      The question of what type of intervention in the contemporary face of global terrorism stems from the most fundamental Christian ideals and further calls into question the united response as a people, who statistically are Christian and whose leaders/government are technically separated from the church. What will it take to bring nonviolent action as a culture to the bails of government and social justice? Socratically responsive action that enlightens the people's position of social justice through nonviolence with a legitimate take on just war theory as a staple, is only a difference and matter of habit that technically and theoretically saves more lives, resources, and time per capita than we are at the present course of terrorism interdiction. When we have been swimming place to place for so many years, our webbed and finned extremities make dry ambulance seem like moonwalking to a pedestrian.

    • Timothy

      You've pointed out that true Christians - whether they are Just War theorists or pacifists - must be ready to lay down their lives, in the same way soldiers are, if they want to engage in true nonviolent direct action. That's a difficult thing to ask for, yet it seems like it would be the natural conclusion anyone would come to after reading the Gospels. Why do we Christians find that so difficult?

    Leading Christians have lent moral backing to military action against the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS), citing the Just War doctrine. Christian pacifists, meanwhile, have struggled to suggest convincing alternatives at a time when preaching nonviolence can seem naïve, even heartless. But does the Just War tradition give its adherents a blank check in such a situation? We turned to Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action and a dean among Christian pacifists, who lately has been talking about a truce with Just War Christians – while challenging all of us to go beyond easy answers.

    Plough: In your forthcoming book Nonviolent Action: What Christian Ethics Demands but Most Christians Have Never Really Tried (Baker, 2015), you argue that both Just War Christians and pacifists have an obligation to confront injustice with nonviolent resistance. Can you elaborate?

    Ron Sider: Nonviolent action is an ethical demand that applies to both pacifists and Just War Christians. All Christians are called to be peacemakers. But neither pacifists nor Just War adherents have made much careful, systematically planned use of nonviolent action, even though again and again nonviolent action has proved to be effective. So that’s the core of my message. Nonviolent action, if given a chance, is stunningly successful. For example, the Solidarity movement defied the Soviet Union and they won.

    Over the past half year, ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria have committed horrific atrocities. Most people, including many churches, believe that nonviolent methods won’t work. Do you agree?

    People committed to nonviolence do not always have instant solutions to the messes that military policies get us into. There is plenty of evidence that shows how in different kinds of situations nonviolent strategies have been amazingly effective. But in the short run, nonviolent actions are not always, or automatically, successful. It’s not very likely, at least at this point, that ISIS will respond to a nonviolent peacemaking team, or even to substantial numbers of nonviolent people taking action.

    Of course, military action isn’t always automatically successful either, and often has unintended consequences. ISIS terrorism, according to some, has only been able to flourish because of the decisions made by the United States and its allies in 2001 and 2003 to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. What’s your view?

    sad boy

    A young boy at the funeral of a fighter from the Women’s Protection Unit, a militia made up of Kurdish women. The fallen fighter was killed in action defending the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani in November 2014. Photograph by Aris Messinis / Getty Images

    ISIS has certainly not come out of a vacuum. In 2003, except for some American evangelical leaders, the global Christian community said that even on the basis of Just War criteria, invading Iraq was not justified. The Pope said it. Christian leaders around the world said it. Many American Christian leaders said it. So I think one thing peacemakers, including pacifists like myself, need to do is to help their societies actually apply the Just War criteria carefully and consistently. That doesn’t mean presidents won’t ignore us, but if enough people speak out and enough political pressure builds, it can make a difference.

    Yet even apart from ISIS, the idea of nonviolent action strikes most people as unrealistic, somewhat like the medieval Children’s Crusade.

    This is why we must re-educate people. We now know that nonviolence works. It has worked again and again, as we have seen especially in the last fifty years. And it has worked even without very much training or very much analysis. I don’t pretend to be a sophisticated tactician of nonviolent campaigns, but I tell story after story in my book about amazingly successful nonviolent campaigns.

    For example?

    We can go back to the first-century Jews who offered to die rather than allow Roman military standards to be displayed in Jerusalem, causing Pontius Pilate to remove the standards. In the fifth century, Pope Leo I rode to meet Attila the Hun and his armies as they approached Rome and turned them back. Then there’s the nineteenth-century truce between Argentina and Chile that was effected by a bishop from each side who preceded the troops. The twentieth century was rich with examples, the best known of course being Gandhi’s leadership in India and Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful Civil Rights Movement in this country. But there are countless others from across the globe: peaceful demonstrations in El Salvador and Guatemala that contributed to the collapse of violent dictatorships; a “nonviolent fleet” consisting of three kayaks, three canoes, and a rubber raft that blocked the path of a huge freighter and helped stop the flow of arms between the United States and Pakistan; the Alagamar land struggle in Brazil in the late 1970s; and the list goes on. Christian Peacemaker Teams have had real success in reducing violence in Colombia.

    In addition, there are historical might-have-beens, such as in the early 1990s at the time of the collapse of Yugoslavia, which led to war in the Balkans. Nonviolent action would have had a powerful effect if at that time leaders from the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches had marched into the region of conflict and said: “We come here in the name of Jesus. You can kill us if you want to, but we’re going to stand between you and your religious and ethnic enemies.”

    Similarly, I believe nonviolent direct action might have worked in confronting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

    Okay, but are there no exceptions?

    My intent is not to convince people that nonviolence always works quickly or easily; I’m not going to argue that in every situation of violence there is a short-term nonviolent solution. Rather, my argument is this: Look at all the historical successes of nonviolent action, despite the fact that we haven’t invested much of anything in terms of time, money, study, and strategizing. With that in mind, what we need to do across the board in the Christian church, whether you are a pacifist or a Just War person, is to call for a lot more investment in nonviolent action. We need something comparable to the war colleges – academies where we can carefully analyze nonviolent tactics and determine what works and what doesn’t. Compared to what we have for military training, for nonviolent action we have almost nothing.

    I think that Christian Peacemaker Teams and other such interventions are one way to do that; they ought to be vastly expanded. But it’s also important to keep in mind the broader context, as Glen Stassen points out in the book Just Peacemaking. He and many other scholars – some of them pacifist and some of them not – have shown that there is a wide range of nonviolent ways that can help resolve conflict in the world. I think an honest, realistic, sophisticated analysis of how, when, and why nonviolent tactics work will help us understand more clearly where it’s wise to invest time and to engage.

    lone muslim man

    A Kurdish refugee in Mursitpinar, Turkey, who fled the fighting around Kobani in October 2014. Photograph by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús / Wikimedia Commons

    You’ve said that nonviolent action is a mandate of Christian ethics whether one believes in Just War doctrine or in pacifism. In fact, your book carries a foreword by Richard Mouw, the former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, who calls himself a “defender of Just War theory.” How might Just War adherents and pacifists work together?

    Pacifists and Just War Christians need to assess each situation together. With some frequency, there will be situations where applying the Just War criteria will lead us to conclude, “This war should not be fought, this invasion should not take place. An alternative must be found.” There may be, however, other situations where Just War Christians will conclude that they must go to war.

    But the Just War theory requires that war is a last resort, and until you’ve tried all reasonable nonviolent alternatives, war is not a last resort. Unless Just War Christians are ready to test all reasonable nonviolent alternatives, the Just War position has no integrity. Likewise, pacifists have no moral right to pretend their way is better unless they are willing to run the same risks in a nonviolent struggle against evil as soldiers do in battle.

    You’ve been at this work for decades, calling on Christians to live justly and to take responsibility for peacemaking. Do you see signs of progress?

    It’s been thirty-seven years since my book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger was published – I’m just revising it for the sixth edition, which will come out next year. At the time I wrote it, most evangelical leaders said that the primary mission of the church is saving souls and doing evangelism. There was a huge debate for several decades over whether or not social action and working for social justice was also an important part of the mission of the church. That debate has been won almost across the board. Evangelical leaders now advocate that we’re supposed to do evangelism and we’re supposed to do social justice. By contrast, in theologically liberal and mainline circles such a holistic approach hasn’t been so readily embraced. If you don’t believe in the deity of Christ – if you don’t believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation – then there’s not much point in proclaiming the gospel. But among most evangelicals around the world today, evangelism and social action are an integral whole.

    Take for example the International Justice Mission and the way it has grown so fast, or think of the Justice Conference and of all the younger evangelicals who are involved in it. And as a matter of fact, over the last four decades poverty has been substantially reduced in the world. Of course, there are still around 1.2 billion people who try to live on $1.25 a day. There is still desperate poverty in the world, yet the progress has been enormous.

    In Christian circles nowadays, it sometimes seems that “justice” has become an overused word. Are we in danger of losing sight of the power of the gospel and how it can change people’s lives?

    I’m actually quite worried about this. I want to say: “Hey, do you care as much about evangelism as you do about social justice? Do you care as much about how there are millions of people who have never heard about Jesus as you do about the fact that there’s enormous poverty and injustice in the world?” I certainly do not want to go back to a one-sided emphasis on evangelism, but neither do I want to see a repeat of a one-sided social gospel movement whose only concern is to improve the outer conditions of the world.

    You’ve recommended that the church should make a massive investment into nonviolent action by researching tactics and building institutions to carry it out. How would you respond to those who say, “Hold on – is that really the church’s task?”

    As I’ve said for decades now, the first thing the church should do is be the church. If it’s not being the church – whether it’s crossing racial lines or working for justice for the poor – then preaching policy changes to the government is nothing but hypocrisy. It’s a farce to try to persuade Washington to do what we Christians don’t live out. Our first priority is to be the church and to live out the justice and peace of Christ.

    But as we do this, we will also be compelled to reach out to others, and in so doing we will not only tell people about Jesus, how to follow him and accept him as the Lord and Savior he is, but in his name and motivated by his love we will work to change society. Christ called us to be peacemakers and to spread the gospel of peace in every way we can. That is where we need to put our energies and resources.

    Interview by Peter Mommsen on October 9, 2014.


    The Criteria: What’s a “Just War?

    Just War doctrine is accepted by a wide range of Christian traditions. As summarized in the Catholic Catechism, it requires that the following “strict conditions” must be fulfilled for a war to be legitimate:

    • The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
    • All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
    • There must be serious prospects of success;
    • The use of arms must not produce evils or disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. (CCC, para. 2309)

    Although Just War doctrine goes back at least as far as Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), it was not the teaching of the early church. In fact, Christian leaders of the first centuries overwhelmingly prohibited the use of lethal force for any reason. See Ron Sider, The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion, and Capital Punishment (Baker Academic, 2012).

    Photograph of a sad boy by Aris Messinis / Getty Images
    Contributed By RonSider Ronald J. Sider

    Ronald J. Sider is a well-known evangelical speaker, writer, and editor. He has a PhD in history from Yale University and is president of Evangelicals for Social Action. He has written more than thirty books.

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