United Methodism’s Board of Church and Society, the United Methodist Women and United Methodist Drew Theological School in New Jersey joined religious and left-wing groups in sponsoring a “Truth Commission on Conscience in War,” last month at famously liberal Riverside Church in New York City. The Presbyterian Church (USA) was also a sponsor. (Click here for the full list of sponsors.)
The Truth Commission’s purpose was to “launch conversations about just war, international law, and greater freedom of conscience for our nation’s service members.” Specifically, the event was supposed to focus on four issues: the moral and religious questions facing soldiers both before and during combat, the moral and religious criteria of just war, international agreements governing the justification and conduct of war, and the limits of military regulations on Conscientious Objection.
Conscientious Objection received the most attention. Without dissent, the speakers were clear that U.S. policies governing conscientious objection are overly strict. The conference complained that U.S. policy requires that a soldier demonstrates a “crystallization of conscience,” having come to oppose not just the war in which he is engaged but all war, before Conscientious Objector (CO) status is granted. In an all volunteer army, arguing that you oppose all war can be difficult. After all, why would a pacifist join the military? Even if a crystallization of conscience is shown, processing a CO appeal can take years.
The Truth Commission opened with an excerpt from “Soldiers of Conscience,” a 2008 documentary about four soldiers’ attempts to gain CO status. After the clip, two of the soldiers from the film, Camilo Mejia and Joshua Casteel, spoke. Mejia explained his evolution: “My journey of conscience began as that of a person who viewed war and military intervention as justified in some cases, certainly not in the case of Iraq; so you could say that I was a selective conscientious objector even as I deployed to Iraq because I was against that particular war. And selective conscientious objection is something that I fully support…Because of my experience in Iraq and because of everything that has happened since that experience, I have become a conscientious objector that opposes all war.”
Casteel, who worked at Abu Ghraib as an interrogator, took a broader view than Mejia, focusing not just on conscience in war but conscience itself. “What we believe on the inside can never be removed from what we do on the outside. There is no private conscience. And what I think we’re trying to do today…is to say, what does that then mean for legislation? What does that mean for what we teach kids in schools? For what we teach kids in churches, in mosques, in synagogues, in temples?” Casteel argued that U.S. policy should reflect this understanding of conscience and not make separate rules for conscience in times of war.
The difficulties of the CO process Mejia and Casteel described were summarized by the event’s honorary host, retired Army Chaplain Herman Keizer, Jr. “Almost every soldier, sailor, air force, marine, and coastguard person has schooling on the just war theory and the international laws of land warfare,” he said. “And it struck me as kind of ironic that we should teach our service members and leaders of our service members in just war theory and in the laws of international warfare and try to educate their conscience about war, and then to deny protecting that conscience that we educate. I think that is criminal.”
J.E. McNeil, Executive Director of the Center on Conscience and War, not only criticized the U.S. CO policy but also the premise that government should be the arbiter on matters of individual conscience. She complained: “We so often get bogged down into the definition that the government has given us for conscientious objection that it means only someone such as the government has decided, in their wisdom, who have [sic] jumped through those hoops.” Despite her obvious discontent, McNeil offered no alternative mechanisms for processing conscientious objection claims.
Beyond the discussion of moral conscience in war, the Truth Commission strayed from its self-imposed agenda. Often the speakers’ presentations sounded like referendums on wars and violence, both in general and specifically those in which the U.S. is presently engaged. Many speakers expressed their opposition to war in political rather than moral terms. Just after explaining how he became a conscientious objector, Mejia confessed, “I believe that a great deal of why I opposed the Iraq War was based on politics, based on my inability to believe and support the justifications that led us to Iraq.” Similarly, Celeste Zappala, the mother of a National Guardsman killed in Iraq, said that for many soldiers, “their disillusionment about the truth with the Iraq misadventure, along with the orchestration of lies and excuses and patriotism, leaves them no way out.”
Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey tried to give a more philosophical critique of war. But her attempt proved to be abortive. Lightsey is the Associate Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students at United Methodism’s Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. Her doctoral research focused on “classical and contemporary just war theories from a Pan African perspective.” According to her resume, Lightsey’s current research interests include “queer theology” and “black and womanist theology.”
Lightsey examined current U.S. military engagements from the perspective of just war theory in her talk called “Religious Understandings of Just War.” Her comments on just war seemed mostly traditional until she explained that one requirement of a just war is a just cause, Lightsey said, “That just cause can include self defense, protection of the innocent, punishment for wrong doing, threat of aggression, or restoring property.” Shifting to her area of expertise, she added, “I found that intriguing, particularly since we as African Americans have been talking about reparations for quite some time.” Lightsey quickly moved on, leaving the impression that she finds at least a partial just war justification for “restoring property” to African Americans in the form of restorations based on slavery.
In other wonderings, Dr. Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist and expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, rhetorically asked: “Are service members, particularly officers, slaves of the state?” Unsatisfied with the shock value of a single question, he continued, “Are officers slaves of the state? And let that question settle in the pit of your stomach and curdle there.”
The last speaker of the night was Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times. He denounced war as “betrayal of the young by the old, betrayal of soldiers and marines by politicians, and the betrayal of idealists by cynics.” Hedges then made it clear that he believes that terrorism against the U.S. results from past American violence. Referencing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at Riverside Church in 1967, Hedges called the U.S. the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
“We speak almost exclusively to the rest of the world in the language of violence,” Hedges claimed about the U.S. “That language of violence is one that we taught the world to speak back to us. It is the language the hijackers on 9/11 spoke. Where else did they learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a form of communication?”
Hedges urged looking at war and its costs from a global perspective. “The pain that was evident here, behind this podium – the pain of a mother who lost her child, the pain of veterans who must carry with them the weight of killing – is a pain that we have visited on Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians [that] dwarfs any of our own pain,” he asserted. “And I ask tonight that when we leave we begin to see that the pain that we endure is the pain that they endure, and that our true brothers and sisters are those who carry this burden and with whom we must reach out…to make solidarity with and to rebuild a broken world.”
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