- Help me with my homework on the religious right!

Hello Dear Peacenikers;

As an assignment for my Beatitudes Society fellowship this week, I am supposed to write up a short report of the religious right’s theological backing for its political issues, focusing on one issue in particular, and my chosen issue is WAR. So, I’m going to right a sermonette in the mindset of a pastor who supports rightwing policies, who is trying to explain why a war on Iraq is theologically justified (and morally requisite) as a Christian. We have talked about how actually ending (this) war will need to require us to break down the very belief that war is necessary because violence makes us safe. I figure you all have good ideas about what this mentality is and what religious beliefs ground it. What other ideas might you have about the right’s theology of war? Any random thoughts help, and I’ll weave them into my reflection. Post a comment here, and I’ll read it to make me wise.

Thanks!

- On “War Chaplaincy” for Peace

by Audrey deCoursey

A member of a historic peace church, the Church of the Brethren, tosses out some thoughts on Memorial Day, after reading the exciting spectrum of opinions about military chaplaincy over at the blog of the Adventist magazine, Spectrum.

Because I put my Christianity first in my ethical decision-making, I believe that we must end war. The only question is how military chaplaincy fits into ending war. I tend to like to expand these discussions to talk about not only military chaplaincy but “war chaplaincy.”

We as Christians (especially in peace churches) need to do better pastoral care to all victims of war: members of the military, military families, veterans, and civilian victims. We must not leave pastoral care only up to official military chaplains. If we are in the beginning of an endless, limitless, undefined War on Terror, then we must expand our ministry of peacemaking, to offer prophetically pastoral care.

Congregational pastors need to take on part of the responsibility of ministering to victims of war. (Likewise, seminaries ought not leave the job of training military chaplains to the military institution alone, but ought to provide comprehensive education for future pastors and chaplains who will be living in a warring world.) Families end up doing the pastoral care spiritual leaders neglect. Pastors and all who would minister (priesthood of all believers, anyone?) need to reach out to individual soldiers (and contractors and aid workers and peace volunteers), through letters and calls and counseling when they come home on leave. We need to connect them into their home communities’ lives, connect them into their global community’s news and life, so that the soldiers can remember who they are: not just members of the US military machine, but members of a global body. Most of all, we should strive to remind these soldiers that they (as well as every person they interact with) are beloved children, created by God to be good people.

Does this seem too much like appeasement, bolstering the troops so they can continue their ‘duty’ of war-making? I think it is, instead, radically subversive.

The military survives on a culture of isolation. It creates its own subculture, in which acts are moral that are unthinkable elsewhere. Children are not children; they are enemies or objects. (Too many graphic YouTube videos will reveal that sick underbelly of the war machine.) The only people who matter are the people in your unit, on your side. They are who you can trust. The limited geography of the battle is the limit of reality. By breaking into this sub-world, we throw light on the micro-cosmos in which the battles take place, and we remind soldiers of the wider implications of their daily choices. We support their own realizations that, even in war, they are humans in relationship with other humans.

As pacifist chaplains or citizens or congregations, we don’t need to pontificate to soldiers about the evils of war or the US military. We ought not excuse or ignore harm people have caused, either. We need to offer radical presence that reminds these victims of war (be they civilian or military) of their humanity. This is recognizing the times and places to preach our absolute moral values, and the different times and places to just be present with people in pain. Only when a person has (re)claimed herself, her self-esteem, her humanity, her confidence, can we engage in explicit discussions of our values. These discussions can only be had when we share the implicit value of knowing ourselves as human children in a world God created.

This is the prophetic, pacifist voice of pastoral care: it is reflecting back to a person who she is, in a way that makes her love and believe in herself more, so that she is better equipped with the confidence needed to make ethical decisions, on the battlefield or anywhere else. I believe that our world will know peace when we know who we really are. To claim the loving nature within each human is to plant peace and defy the dehumanization war sows.

- Occupation, Empire, Free Trade and Immigration

by Noel Andersen

The more I become involved in activism I realize how important it is to apply theory to praxis with deep analysis of the socio-political history and context in the process of raising our awareness and consciousness to see the inter-connected nature of global hegemonic systems, to which this essay attempts to draw on the relationship between the Occupation and Immigration.

Perhaps the most talked about social issue, next to the failure of Bush’s Iraq Occupation, is the subject of immigration and it is a current contentious and divisive nature within the US.

Throughout history colonization is always connected to emigration..The nature of colonization is based in crossing borders and using military or economic force to subdue the local people, use their natural resources and set up economic production that will profit the colonizer. This is historically done with the Christian justification of converting a “heathen” people or the enlightenment view of “civilizing” the “barbarian,” a rhetoric tied to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, genocide of Native Americans and today is at the roots of global racism as seen in the US government’s discourse on “liberating” Iraq.

The Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s made it very clear that Europe was to not interfere with Latin America because it was the US’s “own back yard” as Theodore Roosevelt put at the turn of the Century. There is an amazing track record of US backed military support and coups of right wing dictatorships that support free trade and US investment, so many that’s its impossible to go through all. To list just a few, massive death squad to kill Indigenous in Guatemala and El Salvador, the coup supporting the Pinochet tyranny, financial support of the Contras in Honduras fighting against the legally elected Sandinistas of Nicaraga and the list goes on. All of this and many more unjust interventions have been responsible for the innocent deaths of thousands (http://www.zompist.com/latam.html).

Most recently the neo-liberal economic influences in Mexico and Central America through NAFTA and CAFTA serve the imposition of trans-national coporations that bring industrialization and urbanization to traditionally agrarian societies. This leads to further emigration as poverty increases from suffering of local traditional economy’s inability to compete on a global-corporate level. Therefore US capital and economic interest is encouraged to cross borders, but people and labor are not allowed as they meet a militarized border and an “illegal” citizenship status upon entry.

Perhaps the only thing that saves Latin America from further military interventions, especially as South American governments move left, is how tied up the US is in the Iraqi Occupation. Without surprise, the history of US military and economic interest in the Middle East is not without similarities to that of Latin America

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations sent down a mandate to create colonial borders in the Middle East, creating political strife that continues to be seen is the region. The Cold War era brought competition for super-power control over the oil supply. In Iran, the US supported a Shah coup against Mossadeq who was intending to nationalize the oil supply and then provided funding for the Shah’s army build up. From 1980-88 the US backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in their war against Iran after the post-revolutionary Islamist government took power there was fear of their control in the region.

“The primary interest, and that’s true throughout the Middle East, even in Saudi Arabia, the major energy producer, has always been control, not access, and not profit…. a stupendous source of strategic power which made the Middle East the most strategically important area of the world. They also added that its one of the greatest material prizes in world history…. Exxon-Mobile posted its profits for 2006 which are the highest of any corporation in US history” (Noam Chomsky www.zmag.org).

Throughout history, war , colonization and occupation have been ways not only to control investment and resources for power. Many large corporations make profit from US arms trade, and “ reconstruction” or “development” projects as they expand into countries who subscribe to a “free market.” Halliburton’s prime contracts with the Pentagod jumped from $483 million in 2002 to $3.9 billion in 2003. Lockhead Martin’s contract at 21.9 billion is greater than the entire federal government’s largest single welfare program (TANF) (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?). The Bechtel Corporation whose known for its failed privatization projects creating famine in Bolivia was also given oil pipeline projects in the Middle East during the Reagan Administration. In 2003 the multi-billionaire Riley Bechtel was sworn in Bush’s Export Council to advise how to create markets for American companies overseas (http://www.corpwatch.org/).

Colonization, occupation and war profiteering are inter-twined with the same neo-liberal corporate expansion and military intervention that is at the root of emigration and greater inequity in the Global South. The same governments that support war and hegemony also work to create policies that increasingly discriminate against immigrants. Structures of power invade other countries, but freedom of people’s movement to the US is regulated, to the point that the Bush Administration and much of Congress wants to institute a modern day “Bracero”or “guest-worker” program to supply a cheap labor source without citizenship options.

As communities of faith, we need to historicize and bring consciousness to our interactions with immigrant communities and think strategically about how to actively advocate for human rights and justice for resident immigrants.