“Once you start using violence, there is no way back,” the young peace protestor said to me, his eyes shining with conviction. “Bush is determined to drag us into war in Iraq, and we have to stop it.”

“I'm not anxious to go to war either,” I replied, but even as I said the words, I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. “I'm just not sure that peace is the answer.”

Maybe this was a mistake, I thought to myself. Driving through the Green Mountains of Vermont on a beautiful October day, I had come across this small antiwar demonstration in a local town square. Stopping for lunch, I had gotten embroiled in a discussion with the protestors on the hot political topic of the day: Iraq. It was thirteen months after 9/11, and with all indicators pointing to an imminent invasion, peace protests were popping up all over.

“Peace is the only answer,” the man responded, looking at me in slight disbelief. I had the feeling he could sense that I was genuinely uncertain about the issue, and perhaps he thought he could pull me back to the light. “If we use violence, how are we better than anyone else? Violence just feeds on itself. We have to find another way. Peace is the only answer,” he repeated.

I found it disconcerting to be on the other side of the demonstration. After all, a few years earlier, it might have been me saying those words. I had spent many years passionately supporting the peace movement. In fact, one of my early heroes had been the great twentieth-century spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti—a committed pacifist, who remained so even in the midst of WWII, a morally unambiguous war if ever there was one. But that was then and this was now.

For the first time, I noticed the sign that the protestor was carrying. Scrawled with magic marker on white cardboard was the phrase: God is on the side of peace. “Do you really think God is on the side of peace?” I asked. “Well, let me put it this way,” he said with a smile. “I'm quite sure that he's not on the side of war.”

As I headed back to the car, I reflected on the growing wave of protests. The demonstrators were certainly right that our president seemed quite intent upon war. As the administration's attention was slowly but inexorably shifting from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was looking like a man in the crosshairs. And the Western world was having to come to terms with the fact that for the first time in a generation, the future was looking more dangerous than the past. The wreck of the World Trade Center was in the process of being made into a memorial, the anthrax killer was still at large, and on the radio, Bruce Springsteen's “The Rising” was paying musical tribute to the 9/11 firemen who had the faith and strength to walk “up the stairs, into the fire.” Fear and uncertainty still lingered in the air as the American populace adjusted to the new color-coded “threat levels” signifying the likelihood of imminent terrorist attacks. For a period of time, the barrage of warnings—some frightening, some bizarre—was fast and furious. Jogging by the local country lake in the morning, I remember having strange images of Al Qaeda scuba divers coming up out of the water, as per Ashcroft's recent suggestions, ready to launch massive chemical weapons assaults on local farmhouses.

As the initial unifying shock of 9/11 was beginning to wear off on the American polity, two very different visions of our role in the world were emerging in the fractures. One was held by the more conservative, or neoconservative, faction—a majority if you believe the polls—who were gradually coming to accept a more interventionist role for America in the world. They believed in the use of military force and were ready and willing to head into the minefield of Middle East politics to rid the world of a dangerous dictator. In the name of democratic values, the argument went, we must be willing to break the back of tyranny in a part of the world that has often been the seedbed for terrorism. On this end of the spectrum were much of the traditional religious community—mainstream Christians, Evangelicals, American Baptists, conservative Jews, and so forth. And the implication of the position, whether stated directly by the Pat Robertsons of the world or simply suggested by Bush's “axis of evil” doctrine, was that God was on the side of America in this particular confrontation—that God was a supporter of freedom and of democracy and would like nothing more than to see the American eagle triumphant in the unfortunate but fundamentally good war on the globally destabilizing reality of rogue states and international terrorism.

On the other side of the fence was the more liberal cross-section of the country, including parts of the Democratic Party, which staunchly opposed the idea of war and roundly denounced the administration. This faction included the more liberal, ecumenical members of the mainstream religious community, and they were joined by a number of other spiritual or pseudo-spiritual movements, including American Buddhism, the self-help movement, the New Age, New Thought Christianity, et cetera. They took a resolutely pacifist stance, criticizing all talk of war. And the strong implication was unavoidable: that God, the spirit, or at least the moral and spiritual high ground, was in fact on their side—the side of pluralism and tolerance, the side of peace and reconciliation, the side that would not so easily kill in the name of a dubious American agenda to unilaterally order the world as we saw fit. “God is on the side of peace,” read the man's sign in Vermont.

God is on the side of peace. As I drove through the golden hills on that warm autumn day, the phrase tumbled around in my mind. Is God really on the side of peace? It did seem almost a truism. God and peace, in many people's minds, go together like America and apple pie. And it was hard to imagine God taking the side of war. Moreover, wasn't peace an essential message in the teachings of just about every religious tradition in history?

For me, peace had always been a word with powerful associations. More than a good idea, it was an orienting vision for life, a sort of mythic ideal that called out from the future with the promise of a better world to come, a new and more tolerant way to live on this small earth. Peace was a spiritual, philosophical, moral, and political statement all wrapped up into one, and I had spent much of my own life trying to make that statement in the best way I knew how. And I wasn't alone. Peace and nonviolence were ideals that captured the moral imagination of an entire generation as they sought to find a deeper humanity in a world where, for the first time, weapons of war could spell the end of life as we know it. But as I listened to the chanting of the antiwar protestors on that autumn afternoon, and as I watched the various peace movements rise up around the world in concern over American hubris, I couldn't help but notice that, for me at least, that special magic was gone. The moral power of the peace movement to move my soul and fire up my idealistic passion seemed distant. A parade of former activists from the Vietnam era came forward in the media to tell the world that, this time, the movement was going to grow and grow and overwhelm the country. Activist Ron Kovic, whose life was portrayed by Tom Cruise in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, came on CNN and said that this peace movement was going to be an “extraordinary crossroads” and a “turning point in American history,” the beginning of a nonviolent revolution. And I wondered: Could it really be true?

I was certainly sympathetic to the concerns of the peace movement. Indeed, it wasn't so much that peace seemed like a bad idea—just an inadequate one. Like it or not, we were living in a world full of conflict—not only conflicts of arms but of ideologies and worldviews. And like many Americans, I was concerned about how we were going to respond to the numerous pressure points that were threatening the fragile cohesion of our global society. We were living in a world where, despite the relative peace and comfort of the West, chaos and barbarity were just down the neighborhood block. The horror of ethnic cleansing was practically becoming a seasonal item on the news; kids were hanging body parts on their guns in Burundi; Pakistan was operating the Middle East department store for weapons of mass destruction; oil and water were growing more and more scarce; ecological catastrophes were looming; new diseases were threatening; and Al Qaeda sympathizers were plotting to overthrow or at least destabilize a nuclear-enabled Pakistani government. Against that backdrop, it seemed like a real leap of faith to imagine that all of our problems could be dealt with peacefully and nonviolently. But for many spiritually minded people who care about the state of the world, the ideals of peace and nonviolence are simply unimpeachable. They have a sort of sacred Teflon coating that repels all critical analysis of their pragmatic value. Why, I wondered. Is God a pacifist? Are higher human endeavors always oriented toward peace?

It's been almost two years since the autumn day when I stood in that Vermont town square, and in the intervening time, these issues have grown increasingly, even desperately, urgent. Indeed, as we stand at this crucial point in human history—thirty-five hundred years after Moses came down from the mountain with the simple commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” three thousand years after Krishna instructed Arjuna to fight and “conquer his evil-doing enemies,” twenty-five hundred years after Socrates drank the hemlock of the Athenian state refusing to fight or flee, two thousand years after the Romans crucified a Jewish rabbi who told his followers to “turn the other cheek,” nine hundred years after the Christians pillaged their way across the Middle East to take back the land for God, sixty years after an Indian lawyer brought the British Empire to its knees with no weapon but his own conscience, and just a few years after three thousand civilians were murdered in a carefully executed act of war on American soil conducted in the name of Islam—the question of if, when, why, and how to use violence is more confusing, more complex, and more important than ever.

THE CULTURE OF PEACE

“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”

General Douglas MacArthur

It is one of the ironies of history that war has often been the greatest benefactor of peace. And never was that more true than during the twentieth century. With the destruction wreaked by the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the unleashing of nuclear weaponry on the Japanese mainland, the cry for peace grew louder than ever before as the sheer physical, moral, and spiritual exhaustion with the human capacity for violence reached unprecedented levels. “The more ruthless the world, the more it needs idealistic compensation,” peace historian Carl Becker was once quoted as saying. And more than a few people over the last decades seem to have taken this message to heart. Indeed, our post–world war culture has seen a veritable explosion of scholarship, research, activism, university programs, and international institutes all dedicated to understanding the nature of peace, nonviolence, pacifism, and religious violence. Spiritual and philosophical contemplations of war and peace have ancient roots—scholars claim that some form of peace activism can be traced all the way back to the ancient civilization of Sumer—but for both scholarship and activism, the twentieth century is unequaled.

So if we want to understand how to approach the all-important issue of peace and nonviolence in the twenty-first century, it might be best to start by looking at how these concepts are understood in contemporary religious and secular life. After all, we live in a time when the ideal of peace has become embedded in the very fabric of our culture. Once an edgy and dangerous countercultural rallying call, peace is now the sober subject of doctorates and dissertations. Once a rare and religious form of idealism, peace has, in its modern incarnation, transformed itself into an almost secular principle. In the boardrooms of NGOs and the strategy sessions of policymakers, we are applying modernity's ample talents to the subject. We are dissecting its component parts, analyzing its constituent processes, testing new methods of implementation, and publishing position papers on how to achieve results better and faster. Presidential candidate and congressman Dennis Kucinich has even proposed a peace department that would be a cabinet-level part of the executive branch. Calling Washington, DC, a “font of official violence,” Kucinich is determined to “challenge the idea that war is inevitable.” Imagine another Pentagon, one filled with thousands of government workers poring over the history of conflicts around the globe, studying new ways to resolve tribal wars, exploring better methods of on-the-ground peacekeeping, flying in lightning-quick special forces to mediate in trouble spots around the world. In Kucinich's vision, these sorts of things would be commonplace.

Some manifestations of peace in contemporary culture are more lighthearted. Judging by the back bumpers of our nation's cars, we seem to be busy either building peace, creating peace, thinking peace, teaching peace, giving peace a chance, waging peace, or visualizing world peace. We have books that promise “forty more ways to be a peaceful person” and “108 steps to create a more peaceful world.” And in a society where The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq was recently published, I imagine that Peace for Dummies can't be that far behind. What do Miss America contestants want to work for? World peace. In a time when war and conflict are still so prevalent around the globe, sometimes it seems that the only place peace has broken out consistently is on the bumper stickers, key chains, and T-shirts of countercultural chic. Peace, it seems, has become a commodity of cool.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this postmodern plethora of peace, but it does raise the larger question of what we really mean by the term. Is peace a spiritual concept or a political one? Do we mean peace with other countries? Peace in the Middle East? Peace with Al Qaeda? Do we mean peace between races or peace with racists? Do we mean that politically popular concept of “peacekeeping”? Or do we mean that well-worn and slightly vague notion, “inner peace”?

Perhaps the most common thing people mean by peace is simply pacifism. “Pacifism means the rejection of war fighting,” explains Dr. Michael Nagler, who founded the Peace Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early seventies. It may sound simple, but be warned—like the proverbial Eskimos and their many different kinds of snow, peace studies professors have drawn some fine distinctions on the many forms of opposition to war and violence. John Yoder, one of last century's great scholars of pacifistic thought, actually managed to identify twenty-nine unique types of religious pacifism alone.

For example, there is the pacifism of utopian purism (for those seeking to create a utopia), the pacifism of absolute conscience (for those whose personal conscience will not let them kill), the pacifism of the categorical imperative (something to do with Kant), and the pacifism of nonviolent change (for those who are seeking social justice). How many ways can you protest war and violence? Well, believe it or not, someone's been counting. But without spilling the subtle secrets of graduate peace courses, the big picture of peace advocacy goes like this: Pacifism is generally understood to be a rejection of violence—usually, as Michael Nagler points out, a rejection of war. It is often called “nonresistance,” a term derived from the biblical phrase, “Resist not him that is evil” (Matthew 5:39), presumed to mean that Christians should uphold Jesus's example of not fighting back against injustice. Think of the Mennonites or the Quakers. Both denominations have strong pacifistic sensibilities, and during times of war their adherents often take what the government calls “conscientious objector” status, which allows them not to participate in war-related activities. That is pacifism. Now, if they start demonstrating against the war—staging sit-ins, burning draft cards, and getting arrested—that's different. A true-blue pacifist would tell you that they are now engaged in active resistance, a euphemism, the pacifist might say, for a kind of fighting. They have crossed over into active social protest, and assuming that they don't start overturning cars or firing RPGs, you could say that they are now practicing “nonviolent resistance,” or just “nonviolence.”

The term “nonviolence” entered the English vocabulary in 1923 as a translation of ahimsa, a Sanskrit word adopted from Hindu scripture by Mohandas Gandhi. Ahimsa means “the force that comes into play when every vestige of the desire to harm is eliminated,” says Michael Nagler. And force is probably a good word to use because nonviolent resistance is hardly passive. Indeed, in the capable hands of the “half-naked Indian fakir,” as Churchill described Gandhi, the ideal of nonviolence began to define a revolutionary new way of interacting within the political sphere. A whole new method of applying force was born, a middle way that existed somewhere between outright violence and turning the other cheek. Gandhi brought together Jainism's teachings on nonviolence, Henry David Thoreau's idea of civil disobedience, and the Bhagavad Gita's call to “do your duty and fight for this just cause,” and the resulting fusion changed the face of the twentieth century.

THE FORCE OF NONVIOLENCE

“Some people draw a comforting distinction between 'force' and 'violence.' . . . I refuse to cloud the issue by such word play. . . . The power which establishes a state is violence; the power which maintains it is violence; the power which eventually overthrows it is violence. . . . Call an elephant a rabbit only if it gives you comfort to feel that you are about to be trampled to death by a rabbit.”

Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, founding president of Zambia

Someone once remarked to Gandhi that he seemed to be a saint masquerading as a politician. Gandhi considered this description of himself and his work for a moment, and then he corrected the individual. “No,” he said, “I'm a politician masquerading as a saint.” Whatever the case, Gandhi brought together spirituality and politics like no one before him. He plucked the idea of nonviolence from the world's religious traditions and proceeded to use it as a force for massive social protest. He showed the twentieth century that radical social change was possible without resorting to violence, and he inspired individuals across the world to take up the cause. Without employing the weapons of war, they overthrew repressive social systems, from Soviet tyranny in Poland to Marcos' regime in the Philippines to segregation here at home. They fought a war without arms, a war of conscience. But make no mistake—it was still a war. Gandhi's God may not have known how to wield a bayonet or a bazooka, but he or she knew how to wield force to maximum advantage and did so with great effect.

“Nonviolence is not necessarily pacifism,” explains Dr. Arun Gandhi, director of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. Dr. Gandhi is the grandson of the great leader of Indian independence. “Pacifism suggests that we do not retaliate in any way at all, but nonviolence is a very active philosophy. It means that we nonviolently stand up against injustice, and it means that we sacrifice our lives if necessary.”

“If you want to make omelets,” Vladimir Lenin is famous for saying, “then you have to break some eggs.” Well, Gandhi broke a lot of eggs in his day, but he resolutely refused to use violent means to achieve his ends. He proved that there are many forces in this world more powerful than the barrel of a gun. Yet he was quite militant in his intention to eject the British from India, and he did not hesitate to provoke conflict. For some pacifists, that was going too far. “Gandhi's program is not one of . . . peace,” one of the great Mennonite pacifists, Guy Hershberger, was quoted as saying. “It is a form of warfare.”

Peace has always had a strained relationship with nonviolence. The focus of nonviolent resistance, from Gandhi to King to Walesa to Mandela, has really been on change, on the evolution and transformation of an unjust society. And all of those individuals have been concerned with that transformation over and above the maintenance of any state of peace or quiet social harmony. “Look at Martin Luther King. He was going throughout the South during the civil rights movement getting arrested,” says Jim Garrison, cofounder and president of the State of the World Forum. “Look at Jesus. Jesus said to love one another, but he was so confrontational with the Orthodox leaders that they killed him. They wouldn't have killed him if he was just sitting there in the temple saying, 'Let's sit here and pray.' ”

Evolutionary biologists like to tell us that, in nature, external stress is what forces an organism to change and adapt to new conditions of life. “Stress is the only thing that creates evolution in living systems,” biologist and author Elisabet Sahtouris emphasizes. And much the same could be said of human culture. Gandhi may not have been a biologist, but he applied this principle well, and the power of his movement increased the stress on the British colonialists to the point that it became intolerable for them to continue their unjust occupation.

Gandhi's revolution was not just a social revolution. It was a revolution in the way that we understand the nature of power and force. Gandhi used tremendous force—what he called soul force—but he did so nonviolently, and it raised a host of new questions for political theorists to consider. Questions like: What are the limits of the principle of nonviolence? Would it work in all situations or just in particular circumstances? Is it possible to govern according to nonviolent principles? In South Africa, where nonviolence was used so effectively to win the moral high ground, anti-apartheid activists underwent some profound soul-searching around these questions during the course of their struggle. “There are some remarkable people who believe that no one is ever justified in using violence, even against the most horrendous evil,” explained Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1986. “Such absolute pacifists believe that the Gospel of the Cross effectively rules out anyone taking up the sword, however just the cause. I admire such persons deeply, but sadly confess that I am made of less stern stuff. . . . Nonviolence as a means toward ending an unjust system presupposes that oppressors show a minimum level of morality.” Many contemporary scholars of politics and nonviolence continue to debate the issues raised by Gandhi, Tutu, and others, perhaps the most well-known being Gene Sharp. Sharp is the founder and senior scholar at the Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an organization dedicated to studying and promoting the strategic use of nonviolence worldwide. His magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, has been consulted by activist groups around the world looking for help in their struggles against tyranny. If Gandhi and King were the Christ-figures in the nonviolence movement, Sharp is its Augustine, analyzing the strategic use of nonviolence with more depth and thought than perhaps anyone else in history. In his work, he has reflected at length on how power is exercised in society.

“It is widely recognized,” Sharp writes, “that conflicts are common in society [and] that important issues of both principle and human welfare are often at stake in these conflicts.” In World War II, for example, most would agree that there were quite important issues of both “principle and human welfare” at stake. We were fighting, in other words, for a good cause. Sharp goes on to say that “the exercise of power of some kind is unavoidable in such situations unless one is to abdicate responsibility for influencing the outcome of those conflicts.” Indeed, if we had not exercised power in World War II, we might all be speaking German today, or maybe Japanese. If we do not exercise power in the world, then we surrender influence over the world to those who do. Sharp points out that “ultimately such power involves and at times depends upon the application of some kind of sanction or means of struggle.” Now here is the important question: Does that “sanction or means of struggle” inevitably imply some form of violence? It is a question not just for politicians. It is a question our religious traditions have been struggling with for millennia.

IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU MEAN BY “KILL”

“Oh Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire . . . help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land. . . . We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love.”

Mark Twain

“I think that to someone who has spiritually awakened, it's self-evident that God is a pacifist, no matter what tradition they awaken in,” declares Christian monk Brother Wayne Teasdale. “If they have awakened to that deep experiential level that puts them in touch with transformation, they realize that non-harming is an essential element of mature spiritual life and is an element of enlightenment itself.”

Scholars tell us that Teasdale is accurate about the cross-cultural nature of pacifism in our religious traditions. Every tradition has teachings that discourage war and violence. And every tradition encourages peace. The only problem is that most traditions also have exception clauses that render both injunctions null and void.

For example, at the foundation of the Western traditions is the classic statement of spiritual pacifism, “Thou shalt not kill,” enshrined in one of the most ancient and revered scriptures—the Ten Commandments. It is a crystal-clear imperative delivered high on the slopes of Mt. Sinai to one of the most influential figures in Judeo-Christianity. And it is a fundamental tenet of not one but three of the world's major religions. Nevertheless, if we took it upon ourselves to ask some Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, or Islamic clerics about the discrepancy between this religious principle and actual political practice, we would likely get a very philosophical response about exceptions to this absolute rule. “Thou shalt not kill, except . . . when x, y, and z.” And God's pure pacifistic intentions for human behavior, so black and white in the stone tablets of Moses, soon would begin to take on a few subtler shades of gray.

Eventually we would hear about scriptures that contradict or balance the sixth commandment, scriptures that tell us when war and violence are appropriate. In order “for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. . . . Secondly, a just cause. . . . Thirdly . . . a rightful intention,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas in his thirteenth-century masterpiece Summa Theologica, establishing the basis on which Christians could rightfully go to war.

Self-defense, we might learn, is often considered justification for the use of violence, even deadly violence. “To those against whom war is made, permission is given [to fight], because they are wronged . . . Allah is most powerful for their aid,” the Qur'an instructs Muslims. Additionally, the Jewish Talmud has very simple and practical advice regarding self-defense: “If a man comes to kill you,” it tells us, “forestall it by killing him.”

Look hard enough, and sooner or later we would find a number of other exclusions that void the sixth commandment: protecting one's family, defending one's tribe or religious faith, saving innocent lives, preventing a more deadly conflict in the future. After a while, “Thou shalt not kill” will start to look less like a commandment and more like a thirty-five-hundred-year-old legal contract, constantly renegotiated and filled with all kinds of loopholes, side clauses, and legalistic phrasing. Granted, we would probably have to speak to a lot of people before “protecting oil fields in the Middle East” would show up as one of those side clauses. But the Reverend Edmund Browning, the former head of the Episcopal Church, was confronted with just this issue on the eve of the first Gulf War. Browning received a phone call that night from President George Bush, Sr., who requested his prayers and support as the war was about to begin. Bush was calling on Browning as the top religious leader in Bush's Episcopalian tradition, and Browning had to ask himself the question: Does removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait fall within the boundaries of the long-established Christian notion of a “just war”? His answer was “no.” And he offered the president of the United States his prayers but withheld his support, saying that a war to continue America's dependence on cheap oil was not justifiable within the context of their mutual Christian faith. Billy Graham spent that evening at the White House instead of Browning, as Operation Desert Storm was launched.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” proclaimed Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In Judaism, “shalom” is the common greeting, which simply means “peace.” And in Islam, Allah is often referred to as “the source of peace.” There are endless such examples. Yet, taken as a whole, the practical and theological legacy of Western religion is not really one of peace or of violence. If anything, it is a legacy of profound ambiguity. Marc Gopin, director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia, concurs. “I think it's hard to say 'yes' to the question, 'Is God a pacifist?' All the Western religious traditions suggest some serious contradictions in that regard. There are competing voices. A variety of texts suggest that God is very committed to violence—commandments to engage in revenge against enemies, capital punishment for all sorts of crimes. These would all indicate that God is not a pacifist. And yet there are also strictures and rebukes for those who commit acts of violence.” Many theologians will draw a distinction between God's nature (Is God a pacifist?) and what he or she intends of human beings (Does God want us to be pacifists?), but in both cases, ambiguity prevails. “Does God want us to be pacifists? Well, I see a lot of evidence for that,” says Gopin. “But I see counter evidence too.”

Nowhere is this ambiguity more perfectly encapsulated than in what Sufi scripture calls the ninety-nine names of God. These represent the many attributes of divinity, the numerous ways in which God can manifest. Pacifism may be on that list somewhere—for example, As-Salam, the sixth name, means God as the bestower of peace, and Al-Latif, number thirty-one, is God as the most gentle and kind. But two or three out of ninety-nine don't exactly carry the day, especially when the list also includes names like the eighty-first—God as the avenger, the lord of retribution.

EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST

“All tremble at violence; Life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should neither kill nor cause another to kill.”

The Buddha, Dhammapada

If we turn our attention to the wisdom traditions of the East, we find what first appears to be a different story. Indeed, some of the most profound examples of nonviolence have arisen out of the mystical depth of the Asian mind. The Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of the Jains, were actually contemporaries in sixth-century BCE India. Over the course of their lives, they delivered some of the most renowned teachings ever given on nonviolence, teachings that have deeply influenced not only India but the rest of the world for countless generations.

“Avoid killing or harming any living thing” is a principle that lies at the foundation of Buddhist morality, and ahimsa or nonviolence is a fundamental tenet for anyone who practices Jainism. Legend has it that Mahavira would even allow insects to crawl upon his body and bite him, so resolute was his intention to kill no sentient being. Simply put, Buddhism and Jainism are unmatched by any other tradition in the emphasis they have placed over the centuries—in their teachings, scripture, and practices—on upholding a nonviolent relationship to life. And it is perhaps not surprising that today's most famous advocate of nonviolence, the Dalai Lama, is a Buddhist—though it must be said that he also has not taken a purely nonviolent position, recently acknowledging that it might indeed be necessary to fight terrorists with violence and withholding his judgment regarding the war in Iraq.

Hinduism has also long been a strong promoter of nonviolent principles. “To be free from violence is the duty of every man. No thought of revenge, hatred, or ill will should arise in our minds. Injuring others gives rise to hatred,” said the great twentieth-century Hindu sage Swami Sivananda. And he is but one of hundreds, if not thousands, of great mystics and religious leaders in Hinduism's rich history who have nurtured its tradition of nonviolence down through the centuries. One of those leaders was Guru Nanak, the sixteenth-century founder of the Sikh religion. Born a Hindu, he enshrined pacifist sentiments in the very heart of his new faith, exhorting his followers to “take up arms that will harm no one; let your coat of mail be understanding; convert your enemies into friends; fight with valor, but with no weapon but the word of God.”

However, violence—including religiously justified violence—is hardly absent in the spiritual legacy of the East. Hindu scripture is replete with references to war, from the Vedas to the Mahabharata. One of the greatest philosophical inquiries into the morality of war and peace is contained in the legendary battlefield conversation between Krishna and Arjuna. At the end of the long dialogue between spiritual master and student, Krishna tells Arjuna that sometimes it is necessary to resort to physical force. “If you do not fight in this just war, you will neglect your duty, harm your reputation and commit the sin of omission,” he says. “Having regard to your duty, you should not hesitate, because for a warrior there is nothing greater than a just war.”

“When all other means have failed, it is but lawful to take to the sword,” wrote Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru in the Sikh tradition, who was also a great general. Sikhism, despite its founder's strong pacifism, has over the years developed a more militant culture: Strict practitioners carry a ceremonial dagger as part of their attire; the symbol of the religion is made up of five weapons; and there are clear teachings on when and how to fight “righteous wars.” And it has also engaged in more than a few. Moreover, it has earned the dubious distinction of fostering within its ranks one of the most violent extremist movements in recent decades, the Sikh militants in the Punjab region of India.

Buddhism and Jainism, with their extraordinary emphasis on nonviolence, are in a fundamentally different category than most of their brother and sister religions. Neither has developed teachings on “just” or “righteous” wars, and neither has ever engaged in anything remotely resembling a holy war or crusade. It is hard to imagine a Buddhist jihad or a crusading army of fierce and righteous Jain monks. At the same time, part of the reason these traditions have managed to keep their reputations unstained is that they have generally steered clear of politics and have been relatively unburdened by the difficult issues of war and violence that inevitably arise in the wielding of state power. It is something that Buddhism, at least, has come under increasing criticism for. Sulak Sivaraksa, a celebrated Thai Buddhist activist, points out that pacifism has long provided an important moral touchstone in Buddhist life but has also effectively kept the tradition from playing any greater role in affairs of state. This lack of political consciousness, he explains, has resulted in what often amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the governing status quo. And in pre-war Japan, that uncritical acceptance devolved into the most reprehensible kind of warmongering. According to Buddhist scholar Brian Victoria, author of Zen at War, Japanese Buddhist leaders in World War II, far from being antiwar, in fact happily supported some of the worst elements of war-fevered jingoism. The recent violence on the part of the Buddhist government in Sri Lanka has been another problematic marriage of Buddhism and politics. Jainists, for the most part, have steered clear of such entanglements, but they have also stayed even further away from the machinery of government, especially in recent years.

Now just because the overall message of our religious traditions regarding peace and pacifism has been inconsistent down through the ages does not necessarily mean that God does not prefer nonviolence. Perhaps God has been desperately pulling his or her hair out for millennia, watching our violent history unfold. As Brother Wayne Teasdale puts it, “Violence is not part of the divine reality. It's part of the human reality in the state of ignorance.” Yet it is also clear that no spiritual tradition has ever promulgated a teaching of pure pacifism, or pure nonviolence. They have all concluded that a perfected state of nonviolence is, for all practical purposes, unattainable. So does that mean that we are destined to live lives aspiring for a state of existence that we will never reach, looking for salvation in an ideal of peace and harmony that will lie forever beyond our grasp, at least on the physical plane? Even Gandhi believed that complete nonviolence was impossible in this world, convinced that there was some inherent violence in even the “will to live.” The best we can do, he felt, is to minimize the violence we commit during our sojourn in the flesh.

But some see a different lesson to be gleaned from the history books. “We have this notion that God is pacific and we are violent; that God is eternal and we are temporal; that God is the great exception to everything that we witness in nature and in the universe,” says Jim Garrison. “But I think Jung's great insight was that we are part of a universe and part of a divine drama that is in deep struggle with itself. And the struggle inside the inner heart of the individual is a microcosm of the struggle that one sees in nature, in the universe, and by projection, in the Godhead itself.”

THE WILL OF GOD

“What puzzles me is not why bad things are done by bad people, but rather why bad things are done by people who otherwise appear to be good—in cases of religious terrorism, by pious people dedicated to a moral vision of the world.”

Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God

“Not my will, but Thy will be done” is the timeless declaration of surrender—spoken by Jesus, the Bible tells us, in the Garden of Gethsemane, before the drama of his arrest and crucifixion. For Jesus, “Thy will” meant pacifism, at least on that particular morning. He did not resist the Roman guards, and he stopped his disciples from drawing their weapons. Now, if scripture is correct, he seemed to have a clear sense of what God intended for him to do. But ascertaining the “will of God” has long been one of the most delicate and dangerous challenges of the religious life.

“At a given moment, any two religious actors, each possessed of unimpeachable devotion and integrity, might reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the will of God and the path to follow,” writes religious scholar Scott Appleby. “Violent as well as nonviolent acts fall readily within that range.” Appleby is pointing out that even suicide bombers—however much we decry what they do—could very well be acting on the inspiration of genuine moral and religious conviction. That does not mean that Osama bin Laden is doing the will of God. But it does challenge some of our usual conclusions about what constitutes religious action and what does not. Indeed, as we witness the horror of car bombs, smart bombs, and human bombs exploding like firecrackers across the Middle East, it is tempting to automatically declare all religious violence immoral and inherently bereft of any spiritual authenticity. But that would be a mistake, says Appleby. “To define all acts of 'sacred violence' as ipso facto irreligious is to misunderstand religion and to underestimate its ability to underwrite deadly conflict on its own terms,” he explains.

Consider this statement by Marc Gopin soon after 9/11:

Politically incorrect or not, this war is about religion. In case anyone thinks that it is not about religion then they should take a good hard look at the document written by the terrorist mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, Mohammed Atta, in order to help his soldiers prepare for their sanctified deaths. It is one of the most profound religious documents I have ever seen, and its preparation for a beautiful death and afterlife is so compelling that I almost forgot, as I read it transfixed, that it was really about mass murder. I felt tempted to join the journey myself. If I felt tempted as a non-Muslim, how much more tempting to tens of millions of alienated young Muslim men in search of significant lives and meaningful deaths.

Martyrdom has long been a hallowed act of religious sacrifice, sacred in almost all traditions, and even in some secular movements—“Give me liberty or give me death” was the great declaration of the martyr's instinct during the American Revolution. But few would grant Mohammed Atta anything but the distinction of being one of the more brutal and misguided killers in modern history.

Some acts of religious violence, however, express not only authentic religious conviction but a deeper and higher morality. When the German pacifist and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer abandoned his nonviolent principles and attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1943, it was an act of great courage that, if successful, would have been praised around the world. As we commemorate the sixty-year anniversary of the Normandy invasion and honor those who gave their lives to liberate the world from the Nazi threat, we can only imagine how many might have been saved had Bonhoeffer's act of principled violence succeeded. It is the regret of history that he failed and was martyred for the cause.

So if we cannot condemn religious terrorism merely on the grounds that it is violent, where does that leave us? Are we destined to live in this fragile global society with religious actors running around the world stage committing spiritually “justified” acts of violence based on some very dubious interpretations of the sacred? At the very least, it is important to understand, as Appleby points out, that one can have authentic religious devotion and still manage to draw some extremely dangerous conclusions about the “will of God.” As he puts it, “The numinous power of the sacred—conveyed through the imperfect channels of intellect, will, and emotion—does not come accompanied by a moral compass.”

The well-known Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki echoed this sentiment in 1946 when he lamented the profound lack of critical thinking employed by Zen priests before and during World War II. They had happily joined the emperor's jingoistic parade and were waking up after the fact, realizing that the power of their own enlightenment had done little to stem the moral disaster of their complicity in Japanese warmongering. “With satori alone it is impossible for [Zen priests] to shoulder their responsibilities as leaders of society,” Suzuki declared. “By itself, satori is unable to judge the right and wrong of war. With regard to disputes in the ordinary world, it is necessary to employ intellectual discrimination.”

In our postmodern world, we have begun to deconstruct the idea that spiritual experience and moral development always go hand in hand. Some contemporary philosophers such as Ken Wilber have even explicitly separated the states of spiritual experience from the stages of moral development. But whatever model we use, it is becoming more and more clear that how we interpret spiritual experience may in fact be much more important than the experience itself, more significant even than direct contact with “the numinous power of the sacred.” As Suzuki wrote over a half-century ago, “I wish to foster in Zen priests the power to increasingly think about things independently. A satori which lacks this element should be taken to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and sent straight to the bottom!”

NONVIOLENCE: THE LUXURY OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY

“Ultimately there are two sources of power: force and legitimacy. People obey out of fear of violence or out of respect for authority. Civilization and order come from putting force at the service of legitimate authority. . . . But both force and legitimacy remain essential to order. Force without legitimacy brings chaos: legitimacy without force will be overthrown.”

Robert Cooper, former advisor to Tony Blair

“Who would Jesus bomb?” is a telling phrase being bandied about by some in the peace movement. It is a play on the slogan, “What would Jesus do?” (or “WWJD”), which has spread through Christian communities like wildfire and can be seen on everything from mugs to mousepads to baseball caps. The phrase is supposed to remind one of the moral standard that Jesus set in his life and actions, hopefully inspiring similar aspirations. And given his clear predilection for peace and nonviolence, similar aspirations could well be taken to mean pacifism. In fact, since the early history of the church, scholars tell us, those who have sought to emulate Christ have adopted a strong antiwar stance. The early Christians would not join the Roman army, and many chose martyrdom rather than kill in the name of Caesar. Many of the original Christian writers were resolute pacifists, and it was a stance that lasted for several hundred years after the crucifixion. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Christians started fighting in the Roman army. St. Augustine set the tenor of Christian thought on the subject with his doctrine of a “just war.” War could be permitted, the reasoning went, if it was waged for just reasons, a standard that still informs Christianity to this day.

But what really changed? The answer is more political than theological. The Christians came to power. Emperor Constantine converted, and the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire. And the philosophy of pacifism looks a little different when you are the one holding the reins of authority, responsible for administering affairs of state. Indeed, more often than not, nonviolence and pacifism are the luxury of the opposition party, of those who don't have to deal with the challenging realities of practical governance. It's one thing to call for peace; it's another thing altogether to have to come up with workable solutions for a world that unfortunately doesn't yet conform very well with the vision set out in the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today's peace movement might do well to take this message to heart, as they have tended toward “rants against the Bush administration” combined with “pacifist rhetoric,” as political analyst Mark Satin puts it. Religion commentator Alan Wolfe could just have easily been speaking about much of the antiwar movement when he wrote recently that “liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.” But if we blindly cling to the ideals of peace and nonviolence even when they fall short of real-world application, then we run the danger of leaving the day-to-day realities of governing to those who may not bring the same degree of conscience and concern to the use of deadly force. This point was illuminated during the process of researching this article. In a conversation with Professor Abdul Aziz Said of American University, an inside-the-beltway peacemaking expert and a deeply spiritual man, I asked if he ever saw the need for the use of violence in politics. “No, I couldn't use violence,” he said. “I try to only use nonviolence.” Moved by his conviction, I nevertheless had to ask: “Do you think that in government, there are times when we must use violence?” He paused for a moment and then chuckled, “I think that that is why I've never been in government.”

Whatever our attitude toward the machinery of state, we are all still beneficiaries of government power. We enjoy the relative peace and security provided, for example, by a police force. After all, what is the purpose of the police if not to enforce the rule of law under the carefully applied threat of state-sanctioned force? “There comes a time when one cannot preach nonviolence without recognizing the hypocrisy of enjoying a security provided by violent means,” said the South African activist Frank Chikane, at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in the eighties. What would happen, for example, if you removed all law enforcement from North America? The implicit force of law is always there in the background, exerting a subtle tension to behave within certain boundaries, and to uphold common standards in the way we conduct our lives. “Pacifists may be individuals who have gone beyond a level of violence in themselves,” says author David Rieff, “but it does not mean that we live in a global society of individuals who have done the same.” However much we have evolved over the decades and centuries, we have not evolved beyond the rule of law. And it is that implicit power, and the threat of force that lies behind it, that allows for a freedom we might otherwise never know. “Law is the persuasive application of conscience,” says Jonathan Granoff, president of the nuclear watchdog organization the Global Security Institute. And that “application of conscience,” sometimes forceful, provides a tension that is evolutionary, exerting a constant upward pull on the general society to conform to a higher level of social organization at a local, national, or even global level. It can be a foundation not only for peace but for a freedom that makes higher human endeavors possible. And as we take tentative steps toward global governance, the creative ways in which we are able to apply legitimate and beneficent force, either through skillful means, subtle persuasion, or strength of arms when absolutely necessary, will go a long way toward determining the success of any attempts at greater international solidarity in the years and decades to come.

“You need force for any social organization to endure,” explains Jim Garrison. “Those utopian communities that think, 'Well, we're all liberated, so we can do without force,' quite quickly, as we see in example after example, fall apart. The proper appreciation of force comes out of the recognition that the shadow side of the human being is not quite integrated yet and needs to be kept in check, sometimes at gunpoint. It is actually a full appreciation of the role of force that is the genesis of real freedom. Without force, anarchy ensues and freedom is destroyed. But with order, with an appreciation of hierarchy and the force that's needed to enforce hierarchy, people can really experience a civility and freedom that are not possible without it. Force and violence to me are not bad things that we overcome when we're enlightened. Rather, they're constitutive parts of the natural process itself.”

THE POLITICS OF EVOLUTION

“Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

“We are star stuff, contemplating the stars” is one of the many mind-expanding statements credited to Carl Sagan. And he was correct—science has discovered that many of the elements in the human body were manufactured in the cauldron of distant exploding stars. The natural creative process that has brought us to life and created the abundant world we live on is inextricably linked to the violent processes of massive stars that long ago vanished into the cosmic void. So in the same way that violence, or at least some kind of force, may be important to the functioning of a healthy social organization, it can also, we are coming to learn, play a vital role in the evolutionary process of life itself.

“I would say quite categorically that God is not a pacifist,” declares Jim Garrison. “The natural order is full of violence and cataclysms, star systems bursting into supernova status, whole galaxies exploding and transmuting into something else. And if you look at nature on earth, and the food chain, everything eats everything else. The further up the food chain you go, the more ferocious are your eating habits. Whoever God is, God is manifested through his handiwork. And I don't see a pacific universe.” Garrison's observations about the nature of nature are hardly novel—“red in tooth and claw,” the old saying goes—but his observations about the universe are a product of more recent revolutions in science. Indeed, in the last half-century, scientists have begun to incorporate into their theories the awe-inspiring recognition that we live in an evolving universe, one that is billions of years old. Over those vast tracts of cosmological time, we now know, our universe has changed, developed, and evolved through what physicist Paul Davies calls “a long and complicated series of self-organizing and self-complexifying processes.” And those processes haven't exactly been calm and peaceful, as Hubble has shown us, revealing cannibalizing galaxies, exploding stars, colliding nebulae, and all kinds of cosmological train wrecks displayed across the heavens for high-powered telescopes to see. “Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being,” writes eco-theologian Thomas Berry. Simply put, we don't live in a Leave-It-to-Beaver universe. It's violent, it's wild, it's out of control, but it does have one extraordinary thing going for it. It's evolving, it's changing and developing, and no one could question the unbelievable success of the evolutionary process—from the Big Bang to the Big Dipper to the Big Apple—that ultimately has created all of us.

So what about peace and pacifism? Where is the God of Peace in the heavens above, or for that matter, in nature all around? Peace, order, and equilibrium are simply not as central in this new conception of our cosmological heritage. Gone is the once-dominant paradigm of a steady-state universe in equilibrium. Gone is the notion of a natural world that exists in some relatively pristine, peaceful, unchanging state. We live, as complexity scientist Stuart Kauffmann points out, in a universe that is expanding, self-organizing, and always creating “novelty and diversity.” And we live in the midst of a biosphere, scientists tell us, that is dynamically poised on a dangerous edge of disequilibrium, a creative sort of chaos that contains just enough order to keep it from spinning out of control.

“The universe isn't just a happy, friendly, creative, harmonious, have-a-nice-day kind of place. It's also chaos, violence, destruction, and breakdown,” says Christian minister and former environmental activist Michael Dowd. Dowd has spent the last couple of years studying and teaching the spiritual implications of our new understanding of cosmological evolution, and he points out that nature's acts of violence are often creative and serve larger evolutionary ends. “Evolution, by and large, does not proceed by peace and tranquility,” he says. “Evolution proceeds by the greatest amount of conflict or tension that the organism or living system can creatively bear.” God, at least as expressed through nature, may have a violent temper, but, as Dowd explains, he or she also has a specific motive—a motive that, in the end, is not peace or violence, but creative development toward higher levels of complexity, harmony, and integration.

This evolutionary vision has already begun to impact the work of a number of pioneering philosophers, mystics, and theologians, who see in this conception of nature not a pacifist God, but a creative, self-transcending divine impulse seeking ever higher expressions of itself in this world. And as this vision begins to work its way through our culture, many believe we will see paradigm-changing effects on the way we think about a host of issues, not the least of which are war, peace, and conflict resolution. As Thomas Berry points out, “Everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of our present antagonisms, rather than to peace, in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. . . . Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place.”

Dr. Don Beck, who worked in South Africa to help that society transition out of apartheid, uses a new model of cultural development based on similar evolutionary principles. He explains that human nature and human culture are also governed by the same deep principles that we find at the heart of living systems across the universe. If we want to genuinely resolve conflicts, he suggests, then we would do well to pay attention to how they work. “What we have to be able to do is learn how to manage emergence—not peace, but emergence. Trying to create peace means we're operating in a closed system, and then once we bring tranquility, harmony, and unity, everything will be fine. But that's homeostatic, equilibrium thinking. It's not human nature. Human nature is evolutionary, dynamic, always shifting. So, if our attempts at peacemaking are based on homeostasis—getting this group and this group to stop fighting—it won't work out.”

Understanding the big-picture vistas of evolution and human development does not necessarily answer the nitty-gritty questions about if, where, when, why, and how to use violence. Nor, for that matter, does it tell us the right thing to do in the sands of Mesopotamia. But it can begin to expand the context in which we are asking these crucial questions, and make us deeply consider what our goals are, as we look to transform the tremendous conflicts that beset our world. Peace, pacifism, and nonviolence will no doubt continue to play a role as important moral sensibilities that inform our personal and political lives, but they may have to share the limelight with other emerging spiritual values. Our rich cosmological and biological heritage is giving birth to a new vision of the spiritual impulse, one that incorporates the evolutionary principles at the heart of living systems. The more we understand about the developmental processes of life, including our own lives, the more we can develop solutions appropriate to the complex, multidimensional human world that we live in. We can hope that those solutions may be more effective at leading us toward a lasting and comprehensive peace, but that does not mean that peace itself will be the ultimate goal of our efforts. “If people try to put peace ahead of evolution, they won't get either,” says Michael Nagler. “If they put evolution ahead of peace, they'll get both.”