Keith Pavlischek
August 7, 2012
 Catastrophes such as the Wisconsin Sikh temple bombing bring just war theory and pacifism into focus. (Photo Credit: thestatesman.com) |
Shortly after the terrorist attack on September 11, I wrote a commentary called Seamless Silliness. In that piece I called attention to a statement, “A Message of Peace, from a Christian Community” issued by the Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC. These folks were a member of the “seamless garment network” committed to the so-called “consistent ethic of life.” They proclaimed, “If we kill as a response to this great tragedy, we are no better than the terrorists who launched this awful offensive. Killing is killing, and killing is wrong.”
A lot of Christians these days seem to agree with the sentiments of this statement. Others think that sentiment is rather silly. You can no doubt tell from the title of my piece where I stand.
Let’s briefly consider, the implications of this point of view with regard to the murders at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin this past weekend. According to theWashington Post, “During a religious service, police said, a man entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and sprayed automatic-weapon fire, killing four people inside the building and two more outside. He then wounded one police officer before being shot to death by another officer. Three people were injured, including the temple president.” News reports have subsequently said that the officer who killed the attacker saved more people from the slaughter.
The first and most obvious point to stress if were we to take the statement of the Catholic Worker House seriously is that the actions of the police officer who “shot to death” the attacker was “wrong.” From this point of view, such “killing” can never be “justified,” no matter how many lives are saved and no matter how many people were prevented from being seriously injured. If you prefer stronger terms of moral approbation, you would have to say that the police officer’s actions in killing the murderer were evil or wicked. According to this line of reasoning the moral status of the actions of the police officer is indistinguishable than those of the man who killed the Sikh worshippers in the first place, apart from the rather incidental fact, from a moral point of view, that the killer of the Sikh worshippers killed a few more people than the police officer did. No doubt these pacifists would admit that killing fewer people is a more preferable state of affairs than killing more people. But killing even one person is “wrong,” and that is what the police officer did.
Second, since the lethal force applied by the police officer is “wrong” it is hard to understand how you can simultaneously declare it an act of “justice” and hence his action cannot be termed “just.” This is why a lot of people these days reject the idea of “just war,” and you hear quaint little bumper sticker slogans declaring that no war is just or that it is not a just war it is just a war.
Third, from this point of view it would have been morally preferable for the police officer to do nothing and allow the killer to kill more people than to respond with lethal force. To be sure, the pacifist who embraces this view will argue that while they are pacifists they are not “passive” in the face of evil. They believe in “creative nonviolence,” in such situations. I see no reason not to grant their point. If you honestly believe “creative nonviolence” of some sort would prevent further slaughter and keep the murderer at bay, then you should go ahead give such nonviolence a try. You might be in favor of having the police officer say “stop shooting” but you may never say, “or I will have to shoot you.” That would be “wrong.”
But what if you determine that such nonviolence will not be effective? In such a case, the Seamless Garment pacifist is driven to the conclusion that ineffective nonviolence is morally preferable to effective lethal force. In other words, it would be morally preferable to let the mass murderer kill many more people than for a person to do “wrong” and kill even one person.
Fourth, because the police officer’s actions are wrong (or immoral, or evil or wicked) these pacifists will typically argue that Christians in particular should not put themselves in a position in which the threat and/or application of lethal force is part of the job. Simply put, these pacifists, to the extent they would be morally consistent believe it would be “wrong” for a Christian to serve as a police officer, at least as police officers whose duties would require them to respond to an event where one would be expected to use lethal force against a mass murderer. Another way to state this is that these pacifists believe that the “office” or “calling” of the police officer is “intrinsically immoral, if the police officer’s duties require him to threaten or use lethal force.” A Christian can no more assume the office of “police officer,” in this view, than a Christian man could serve as a pimp in a house of prostitution or a woman as a madam in a house of ill repute.
Fifth, to the extent that a Seamless Garment pacifist would resist these conclusion and defend the actions of the police officer, that pacifist must be willing to embrace something like a utilitarian ethic and concede that the police officer should do wrong (or evil or wickedness) so that good (few innocent deaths) may come.
Now, while pacifists who reach these conclusions try to muster biblical and theological reasons for their views, most Christians, needless to say, are not inclined toward this kind of pacifism or towards this way of thinking about law enforcement officers, the use of deadly force, or whether Christians should be police officers (or soldiers). They generally would not say that the use of lethal force by the police officer was “wrong” but that it was commendable. But after a few decades spent trying articulate the fundamental theological and moral logic grounding the just war tradition of moral and political reflection, it is equally clear to me that Christians have a remarkably difficult time giving solid biblical, theological and philosophical reasons to reject this type of pacifism. In future posts, I will try to summarize the principle Christian alternatives to this type of “seamless garment” pacifism.
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