Beating Guns

by Shane Claiborne

  In each of these instances, Jesus is teaching the third way. It is here that we see a Jesus who abhors both passivity and violence; the third way is neither submission nor assault, neither fight nor flight.7 But all of this only makes sense when we realize that Jesus is not talking about the best ways to successfully win the age-old battle to restrain evil. He redirects this urge by saying, “Do not resist an evil person”; he has an entirely different way of viewing evil (Matt. 5:39). This third way teaches that “evil can be opposed without being mirrored . . . oppressors can be resisted without being emulated . . . enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.” This is the prophetic imagination that can interrupt violence and oppression.8

  Memorial to the Lost

  FORT HOOD MILITARY POST, KILLEEN, TEXAS (NOVEMBER 5, 2009)

  On November 5, 2009, a soldier entered a medical treatment building on base and opened fire using a 5.7mm semiautomatic pistol. Most of the victims who died that day were unarmed service people. Here are the names of the thirteen men and women who lost their lives in the shooting:

  Michael Grant Cahill, 62 Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19

  Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, 52 Michael S. Pearson, 22

  Justin Michael DeCrow, 32 Russell Gilbert Seager, 51

  John P. Gaffaney, 56 Francheska Velez, 21 (and her unborn child)

  Frederick Greene, 29 Juanita L. Warman, 55

  Jason Dean Hunt, 22 Kham See Xiong, 23

  Amy Sue Krueger, 29

  FORT HOOD MILITARY POST, KILLEEN, TEXAS (APRIL 2, 2014)

  Less than five years later, it happened again at Fort Hood. A lone shooter opened fire on colleagues on base on April 2, 2014. The weapon used was a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol. By the end of the spree three men had lost their lives and several others were injured. Here are the names of those who died that day:

  Daniel M. Ferguson, 39

  Timothy W. Owens, 37

  Carlos A. Lazaney-Rodriguez, 38

  If the peculiar people of God are to transform the world through fascination, it seems these amazing teachings should work at the center of it. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then we can walk with that child for a couple of miles. Look into the eyes of tax collectors as they sue you in court, see their spiritual poverty, and give them your coat. Look into the eyes of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love. For God actively loves all people and sends rain to water the fields of both the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). That’s why enemy-love is the only thing Jesus says that makes a person like God—perfect.

  I (Shane) have a friend who was on a train and had a knife pulled on her. The man said, “Here’s the deal: you’re going to give me your bag, get off at the next train station, and not say a word.”

  He picked the wrong person. My friend, a petite woman, may have looked like the perfect target. But he didn’t know who he was messing with. She is a spitfire activist from Brazil whom I’ve seen tell off police officers when they were acting out of line. She looked back at this man trying to mug her and introduced herself. She told him about the photos and addresses of her loved ones in Brazil, the contents of the bag he had rudely demanded. She went on to tell him there was nothing of value to him in the bag, and he most likely wanted money instead of photos. So then she said, “In my pocket is $20, which I am glad to share with you. I will give it to you, and then you can get off at the next stop and not say anything.” And so it went.

  I (Mike) have a friend who was living by herself when a man broke into her house. She got out of bed and, in her best teacher voice, sternly told the man, “Get out of my house. You do not have permission to be here.” And he left.

  Another friend arrived home after a church event, expecting his wife, who drove separately, to be just behind him. He heard a knock on the door. Thinking his wife’s hands were full, he opened the door only to find a man with a gun and a fake police jacket who immediately put him facedown on the floor with a gun to his head. Another man entered and began searching the house. My friend told them he had no weapons and that he was not a person of violence. After not finding what they were looking for, they left. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The person they were after parked his car between two houses, and they picked the wrong one. Had my friend’s instinct been to react with violence, it’s more than likely he wouldn’t be here today. His wife arrived soon after the men had left. De-escalation is an undervalued nonviolent skill.

  Such stories can be frightening to imagine. And it’s scenarios like these and other what-ifs that motivate many gun owners. But we must not let these scenarios occupy our imaginations to a degree that is out of proportion with their actual occurrence. There is nothing wrong with being concerned about keeping yourself and your family safe. But we need to refocus our imagination on what that might look like. This is what the prophets are talking about when they say we train for war no more and we no longer learn how to make war. We plot for peace. We engage in the practice of de-escalation of everyday interaction and do not plan violence for the intruder who may possibly be hurting our grandma. We can train for those situations too, but let’s not obsess over them. De-escalation of the small things helps keep the big events from happening. We are training our hearts and our brains in the way of Jesus, in the way of nonviolence. The saints must start small with peacemaking, by loving those right next to them and treating their critics like they would like to be treated themselves.

  I (Shane) recently heard another story from some of my friends at Christian Peacemaker Teams, who train in nonviolence, learning to de-escalate situations, observe, and respond to crises in some of the most troubled conflict zones in the world. One place they work is Hebron, where the Israeli military has established checkpoints that disrupt the lives of local Palestinians. One day, a Palestinian man was passing through a checkpoint with Israeli soldiers. They began to physically abuse him. He was pushed to the ground, and it looked like he could be beaten to death. A young Palestinian woman interrupted the scene, yelling at the man on the ground. “You forgot the baby. Here. You must take him. This is your baby.” She put the baby in his arms and left abruptly. The man sat stunned, holding the child in his arms, and the soldiers did not know what to do. Eventually, they stormed off, muttering under their breath. The man sat there in the street with the baby, too weak and stunned to move. My friends hung around long enough to see the woman return and retrieve the baby. She approached the man and he gently lifted the baby into her arms as they laughed with relief. They had never met, but that woman’s courage and creativity may have saved his life.

  We get another glimpse of extreme love in the musical Les Misérables, in which a priest allows a vagrant, Jean Valjean, to stay in his home, only to get knocked unconscious and robbed. The next day, the authorities catch Valjean and drag him before the priest. When they say Valjean claimed that the priest had given him the silver goods in his bag, the priest instinctively, beautifully, says, “I am so thankful you have come back, as you forgot the candlesticks.” As the guards release Jean Valjean, the priest whispers in his ear, “With this, I have ransomed your soul.”

  Sounds good (musicals can do that for you), but it’s not that easy. When someone stole a power drill from my (Shane’s) community in Philadelphia (and we all knew who), we didn’t run after the person with the drill bits saying, “Hey, my friend, you forgot these.” We wanted to teach the person a lesson of justice rather than a lesson of love.

  We can learn from other examples. We have to seek out these heroic, creative stories of compassion: they don’t often make the news. Our kids aren’t playing video games that teach de-escalation and conflict resolution. But we need these redemption stories. We think of the kids in Rwanda who lived through the genocide. In one of the most violent genocides in modern history, Hutus were killing Tutsis—nearly one hundred thousand per day. A group of Hutus entered one of the schools and asked the kids to separate—Hutus on one side, Tutsi
s on the other. The kids refused, held hands, and said, “We do not have Hutus and Tutsis. . . . We only have sisters and brothers.” They lived through that fearsome event.

  Of course, not all stories end that well.

  This kind of love takes courage—it’s willing to risk death rather than take someone’s life. This love is not sentimentality but the kind of love Dorothy Day spoke of, saying that it is such a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but that it’s the only answer.9 The only thing harder than hatred is love. The only thing harder than war is peace. Until the courage that we have for peace surpasses the courage that we have for war, violence will continue to triumph and imperial execution rather than divine resurrection will have the final word.

  Pope Francis says it well: “How I wish that all men and women of good will would look to the Cross if only for a moment! There, we can see God’s reply: violence is not answered with violence, death is not answered with the language of death. . . . The uproar of weapons ceases and the language of reconciliation, forgiveness, dialogue, and peace is spoken.”10

  It would be irresponsible not to be very clear that when you follow Jesus and the way of the cross, you might get killed. But you also might get killed owning a gun. The important thing is to stay faithful. And we know, thanks to the martyrs, that our death—if we die as Christ did, loving even our enemies—can be as much a witness to our faith as our life. As Tertullian once wrote, in the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.11 Whenever a Christian is killed, ten more are born.

  The same can be said of terrorism or violence—when we return violence for violence, we add fuel to the fire. One soldier in Iraq said he went into the military to fight terrorism but ended up realizing that they were creating it. He said that every person killed made the fire of rage and violence even stronger. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”12

  It is possible to look at history and argue that violence works. You can also look at examples in history where it looks like nonviolence has worked and others where it seems nonviolence has failed. The question for those of us who follow Jesus is this: Which looks the most like Christ?

  Ron Sider said it well when he spoke at the Mennonite World Conference in 1984:

  Unless we are prepared to risk injury and death in nonviolent opposition to the injustice our societies foster, we don’t dare even whisper another word about pacifism to our sisters and brothers in those desperate lands. Unless we are ready to die developing new nonviolent attempts to reduce international conflict, we should confess that we never really meant the cross was an alternative to the sword. Unless the majority of our people in nuclear nations are ready as congregations to risk social disapproval and government harassment in a clear call to live without nuclear weapons, we should sadly acknowledge that we have betrayed our peacemaking heritage. Making peace is as costly as waging war. Unless we are prepared to pay the cost of peacemaking, we have no right to claim the label or preach the message.13

  His words helped give birth to the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who are doing some of the most daring and redemptive work when it comes to this third way of Jesus.

  Imagine what would happen if we had as much courage for peace as we have had for war? What if we had as many monuments and holidays designated for the heroes of peace as we have for the heroes of war? What if we channeled all our incredibly gifted minds to devise ways to de-escalate violence rather than crafting new drones and bombs and guns? What if we were as willing to die for the cross as we have been willing to die for the sword? What if . . .

  sixteen

  Love Casteth Out Fear (and Fear Casteth Out Love)

  Love is more powerful than all the weapons in the world.

  —Mural in Afghanistan

  IN ALL OUR TALK ABOUT ORIGINAL SIN, sometimes we forget original innocence. By that we mean that every human is created in the image of God. We have love in our DNA. There is something in almost every person that recognizes that killing is wrong. That’s why violence is something we have to learn. In the military, folks are trained to desensitize. But in all of us there is an inherent resistance to killing. One study of folks in war has shown that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier—because there was an internal resistance to killing.1

  Soldiers experience a “moral injury,” or an injury of conscience. Undoubtedly, it is part of why the suicide rate of soldiers and veterans is so high (twenty per day) and why many of our veterans suffer from mental illness, are homeless, and are overrepresented on death row.2 One veteran told me (Shane), “When you kill someone, it does something to the one holding the gun too.” We are the victims of our own violence. When we take a life, something inside of us dies. Thank God that mercy and grace and all the beautiful things of the Spirit are big enough to heal the wounds of violence. God is healing both the victims and the perpetrators.

  James, a RAWtools gun donor, event host, gun disabler, and conspirator for nonviolence, wasn’t always that way. He grew up angry and fearful, which turned into violence. He enlisted in the military and came home in shambles, suffering from PTSD. It wasn’t until he was introduced to the red letters (Jesus’s words) in the New Testament that he became focused on loving instead of hating. His PTSD episodes dropped significantly after this lifestyle change. Sadly, he lost a friend and brother who couldn’t overcome the effects of war. His friend used a pistol to take his life. We turned it into a garden tool.3

  It is interesting to see how the evolution of violence has included a buffer for our conscience. We’ve moved from sword fighting, to muskets that shot one hundred yards, to guns that can shoot five miles. Obviously part of that is for the safety of the shooter, but there’s no doubt that part of the evolution of weapons has been our aversion to killing up close. When it comes to the death penalty, anonymity and distance are important in the execution of human beings. Firing squads even to this day (the last firing-squad execution in the US was in 2010) have a blank bullet, called the “bullet of conscience,” in one of the guns of the shooters.4 It really would take only one shooter to execute someone, but having multiple shooters, one of which has a blank bullet, gives the conscience its needed wiggle room.

  Now we have snipers and sharpshooters and drone operators. Disturbing new research shows the moral injury suffered by drone operators, those who can do remote-control killing and then go to Starbucks for coffee.5 The effect that it has on one’s soul is immeasurable. I (Shane) have heard drone operators talk about what it did to them, including how their brains had a difficult time discerning reality from fantasy. One drone operator even told me that the language they use for the kills has evolved. “We no longer call them casualties; we call them ‘splats,’” because it looks like a fly being squashed on the computer screen. What must it be like to be responsible for hundreds of “splats”? It all does something to our souls. We just aren’t meant to kill.

  Original sin is just as real as original innocence. Inside each of us is a sinner and a saint at war with each other. And each day we get to choose who we want to be. Just as our gifts and skills can be used for life, they can also be used to take life. And our imaginations continue to devise new ways of taking lives.

  A FEAR-FILLED PEOPLE

  (Note) Nearly half of Americans are afraid that our nation will end up in a nuclear war with North Korea.

  Forty percent—almost half!—of Americans are afraid they will be a victim of a shooting.

  About 75 percent of Americans admit they fear government corruption under the current Trump administration.

  More than 70 percent of Americans fear that robots will take over their lives.

  We are a fear-filled people.

  Fear and Love

  We might instinctively think that the opposite of love is hate. But maybe the opposite of love is fear, which the Bible has a lot to say about. Pastor Rick Wa
rren has said that God encourages people to “fear not” 365 times in the Bible, one for each day of the year.6 That number might be disputed, but what is not is that “fear not” is one of the most reiterated commandments in Scripture. There are hundreds of verses about fear.

  Love does not have room for fear. And fear does not make space for love. Just as love casteth out fear, fear also casteth out love. We can see all around our country what happens when a society is driven by fear rather than love. Fear leads to violence. When we create policies out of fear rather than love, we do really terrible things to people. We build walls and ghettos and prisons and defense shields. We rip apart families of immigrants and refugees, and threaten to send young people back to countries they have never lived in, all because of fear. Let’s stop there. One of the most dangerous things in the world is powerful people who are afraid.

  When fear drives us, we often turn to our guns. Some of our laws, like the stand-your-ground laws, do not even require an actual threat in order to justify taking someone’s life—they require only a perceived threat. Perceived fear is actually a legal defense in court. The color of someone’s skin may be enough to create fear. Jordan Davis, an African American teenager in Florida, was killed by a white man who said his music was too loud while he was in his car at a gas station. The man who killed Jordan said he feared for his life. Jordan was unarmed of course, as was everyone in the car with him. Though in this case the man was found guilty, presumption of fear is nevertheless a legitimate legal defense in several states.