Dialogue and its obstacles

My brother, blogger, activist, Christ-follower, and soldier @iamLoganMI recently posted some thoughts about the necessity for and path to dialogue within the Christian family on issues of non-violence and Christian calling. Here are four connected tweets:

Here are some of the things I love in these tweets:

• “Intellectual sloth gets in the way of real dialogue.” This is often most visible in working definitions. If we cannot define and agree to common terms, we invariable end up talking past each other. It requires real mental effort to either define our own terms clearly enough to be understood or to reframe our thinking in the terms of our conversation partner.
• Thinking those in the “military are all good or all bad…flattens the story of #Christiansoldiers into tired caricatures.” We participate in the Body of Christ by recognizing that “all of us have sinned” and that “Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person.” Even as each of us still experience “desires that fight to control [our] bod[ies].”
• The idea of “war” to those who have not experienced is “abstract, often imaginative pseudo-fiction.” Words cannot communicate the experience of combat and our theories of war (as all theories do) err on the side of generalization. No amount of study, conversation, or observation can help me understand the combat experiences that would lead my grandfather, a WWII vet, to wake in the night choking my grandmother. I can’t wrap my heart, mind, and soul around combat from a theoretical perspective.

Even as there is much I agree with my brother about, there are still some important needs for change. It is hard for me to grasp how one can argue for the individualized nuance of combat vs. war while reiterating a line of demarcation between “pacifists and patriots.” If dialogue is harmed because those who teach non-violence fail to appreciate Christian soldiers in all their complexity, isn’t it also harmed when we fail to appreciate those who believe the way of Jesus is non-violence in their complexity?

Admittedly, some shorthand is needed to communicate in 140 characters. Nevertheless, suggesting that the dialogue occurs between pacifists and patriots reinforces the idea that those who oppose military interventionism are somehow lesser patriots than those who don’t. Was Major General Smedley Butler not a patriot because he opposed military interventionism? Is Senator Ron Paul not a patriot because he attempts to dismantle the military industrial complex? These men have strong pedigrees of patriotism yet might be lumped by some into the camp of pacifist.

As one who is learning to embrace and believe that the way of Christ is a way of non-violence, calling me a “pacifist” results in a flat caricature of who I am as a human. It ignores my attempts to join the military as a young man and the subsequent rejection due to depression sparked by my brother’s death while serving in the Air Force, it ignores the childhood experience of a father serving a career in armed forces, it ignores the stories from my grandfather and great uncles that illuminate 1950’s separate bedrooms more as a function of survival than prudish morals.

Furthermore, it flattens my desire to see America flourish into the narrow mold of “unpatriotic” when in reality, it feels more patriotic to challenge the racket of war than to defend it. If War is an abstract concept, then combat is a concrete crucible in which the alchemy of greed warps the bodies, minds, souls, and dreams of our brightest (and often poorest) into gold for an elite few. What is more patriotic than demanding that this factory be stopped, that the debts be repaid, and that our children no longer feed the unbridled greed of an elite few?

What is more patriotic than acknowledging that our violation of international treaties, human rights, and civilized combat codes weakens our international standing, recruits additional extremists, and destroys the economic stability of our country at home? When we see a tragic failure on reality singing shows, we collective exclaim “doesn’t anyone love him/her enough to tell them that they are terrible?” Just as it is not love that permits American Idol contestants to suffer under the delusion of competence; it is not love to permit a country to destroy itself, its people, and the world while proclaim it to be the greatest, best, or most just.

Our intellectual energy, our refusal to caricature, and our commitment concrete personal realities must be commitments on both sides of a discussion for dialogue to occur. The tired dichotomy of pacifist/patriot is a failure in all categories. I am a patriot committed to peace. My brothers are/were patriots committed to peace. I believe that peace comes through non-violence; they believe combat plays some role. If we avoid intellectual sloth, caricature, and abstract pseudo-realities, it becomes clear that most Christians are peace seeking and patriots — but our understandings of what Jesus models are miles apart. Let’s not selectively condemn; let’s comprehensively reform.