An essay I wrote for a history class in 2017
When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war. And as a Christian, I have been compelled to ponder afresh words very different from the ones my commander spoke, and words that are vastly more common to a church setting: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God (Matt. 5:9).
If you asked a random stranger today who he or she thought has been the most influential promoter of peace in the world, there is a good chance the answer would be Mahatma Gandhi. With the early 20th century in the background, his fame is not difficult to understand. Gandhi’s popularized commitment to nonviolence stands in such contradistinction to the aura of his time — a century suffused with as much violence as the world has ever known — that the merit of his methods seems practically self-evident. In a modern century as bloody as any before it, a commitment to nonviolence stands out as a light shining in the dark. And that is, I think, the way Gandhi saw it as well, and why he named his version of nonviolent resistance satyagraha (roughly translated as “truth force”), both to differentiate it from the philosophies from which he borrowed, and to promote it as the ultimate force for good. Satyagraha was, hence, not just an alternative to war and violence, but it was a complete replacement, able (alone) to accomplish what violence never could.
In the West, there is probably no greater example not merely of the failure but of the complete inability of violence to resolve conflict or hatred than the American Civil War. As the Civil Rights era struggled to complete the unfinished business of the postbellum years, it was clear that war had not solved the underlying issues of slavery and racism in America. In 1868, Father Paul Joseph Munz wrote, “The North can free the slaves with force, but it cannot civilize them and deliver them from contempt and mistreatment.” While the first victory had been won by force of arms, the ultimate victory would require another approach. To fight contempt, we need a very different force than the one war offers. For this task, only a nonviolent force will do, and to this end Martin Luther King, Jr. employed Gandhi’s methods with great success.
With the virtue of Gandhi’s method in mind, King said he believed that “more than anybody else in the modern world, [Gandhi] caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.” As I think about that statement, I have to wonder why I’m so inclined to disagree. Jesus did teach, after all, in the Sermon on the Mount, to turn the other cheek rather than resist an evil person (Matt. 38:39). In a moment of introspection, I’m tempted to think that the part of me that thoughtlessly cheered at the notion of destroying homes and lives is the same stubbornness and pride that keeps me from embracing a more passive political stance. I’m sure that may still be part of it, but it has been fourteen years since I heard my commander give that speech, and today I am not the least bit moved by it. Yet, even stimulated by a fresh hatred for violence, I still find something in satyagraha distasteful. In fact, the very same thing that makes me hate violence is also what drives me to reject Gandhi’s approach. In all its historical detail, I’m sure the problem would be more complex, but as I see it, it is Gandhi’s approach to truth that causes the most significant problem.
Let me return to Iraq for a moment. I had been there for about a week when she showed up — a beautiful eleven-year-old girl, barely clinging to life. Though I cannot use her real name, I’ll call her Jaleesa. I remember setting up for the surgery, not knowing her face or who she was, knowing something only in the abstract: a transfer was coming in and we needed to do an emergency laparotomy for an abdominal blast wound. Within fifteen minutes, she was in the room. As the surgeons began operating, one of the national doctors realized that she had been his patient only a day or two before, on the other side of the Tigris River. He had performed an emergency surgery after she was badly wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. Not believing she would live long, he stitched her up as best he could and left. Yet here she was again, about 10 miles east, still fighting to live.
Jaleesa stayed with us for a couple weeks, receiving several operations and spending much of the time with a hideous-looking ABRA system holding and stretching her belly together. Eventually she was transferred to a hospital in Erbil, where she died about a week later. It is both wonderful and shameful for me to admit that I don’t think I have ever loved anyone as much as I loved that little girl. In the many hours I spent with her, in the operating room or sitting next to her bed, I grew to hate the thought of what a bomb can do. And whether war is right or wrong, necessary or not, I grew to hate that part of me that was ever inspired by such things. How many little girls like her had been casualties of what I so thoughtlessly cheered for? (Think about that the next time those fighter jets fly over your favorite football stadium.) At this point, however, rather than turning to a theory of nonviolence, this is where I would put Gandhi to the test, and where I inevitably find his theories wanting.
Imagine for a moment that Gandhi was there in Mosul that day, watching from a distance. An ISIS fighter is about to drop a shell into the barrel of a mortar, the arc aiming at his 11-year-old daughter. With a sniper rifle in his hands, if Gandhi pulls the trigger, the ISIS fighter dies; if he does nothing, his daughter spends the next several weeks in pain, and dies. It’s not a very original scenario, I know, but it remains an important one. What do we think Gandhi would do if he were there? We can be fairly certain what he would do because he told every mother and father in Britain to do the same thing when he encouraged them to “allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered” by the Nazis rather to resist them. I don’t doubt that it is an interesting philosophical and historical thing to ponder — what the world would look like if the Allied Powers refused to fight — but it remains impossible for me to consider it noble, if it isn’t in fact criminal, for Gandhi to choose nonviolence if he were given the opportunity to save Jaleesa — that he would choose a principle over a child.
As I said before, I think the fundamental problem lies in Gandhi’s view of truth, or, more specifically, in his view of God. Bhikhu Parekh wrote that Gandhi did not ultimately believe God was truth, but that truth was God. For Gandhi, God was either reduced to or overshadowed by a principle: “His cosmic spirit was therefore not a creator but a principle of order, a supreme intelligence infusing and regulating the universe from within.” In other words, Gandhi believed that ultimate reality was an impersonal force. And therein lies the problem: what is truth without love, and what is love if it is not personal? Committing myself to a universal principle of nonviolence does not provide me with a noble answer to the problems of violence. Instead, it conveniently removes me from the personal nature of those problems. Rather than being moved by personal love, I am forced to ask what an impersonal force requires of me. This, I think, is why Gandhi could tell every British parent to let the Nazis kill their children (and why he could so arrogantly advise the Jews to adopt his method — as though resistance to the British was somehow on par with resistance to Germany).
Gandhi borrowed much from the Christian faith, and he quoted from the Bible often, but, as Parekh points out, his studies “did not involve understanding religious traditions in their own terms.” Aside from the fact that this approach itself is inherently untruthful, it means that he misunderstood the fundamental point of Christianity. Jesus did not simply point to the truth, as Gandhi would have liked to believe, but he claimed to be the truth. For the Christian, ultimate reality, virtue, knowledge — these are all found in a person. To overcome doubt in times of trouble, the author of the letter to the Hebrews encouraged his readers by reminding them where to fix their attention — not on a principle of virtue or hope, but on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of faith.” For the Christian, the question is not what principle to adhere to, but how best to love and protect life in honor of the Life to which they continually look. Even love itself is not a principle that exists on its own, but something found in the character of the person who reveals God to us. The truth is always and in every way personal because we find and know it most clearly in a person, not in a force. For Gandhi, it was the principle, which (ideally) provides only one option. For the personal, however, the question of whether violence is justified will always remain an open question, with different situations leading to different answers. That means that someone could very well be compelled to use violence in the name of love and truth, an idea rooted in the personal nature of morality, which Gandhi seemed intent on eliminating.
It’s important to note that I’m not talking about repaying evil for evil. It was not uncommon for us to treat members of ISIS at the hospital, and it has not escaped my mind that one of them may very well have been the one to kill Jaleesa, or any of the other victims we treated or never got the chance to treat. Trying to understand how violence may justifiably be used against a man in one situation does not imply that one may not try to save his life in another. These situations are difficult, and they require careful attention, not quotable maxims. In Iraq, the duty was not to maintain strict adherence to a principle of nonviolence, it was to love and care for the victims of war — in this case, to love and care for a person named Jaleesa. In her entire life, before or after her injury, she was never in need of a principle, or a “supreme intelligence.” Once she entered the room, the abstract procedure became personal. The truth was no longer that we needed to perform a surgery, but that we were compelled by love to save the life of a little girl. She did not need a principle to comfort her; she needed love and protection that was personal.
Though fourteen years have passed since that speech, I can still feel the chills as I think about my commander’s words now, but I feel them for very different reasons. Many questions remain, but at this stage in life, I think I can say that I long for an end to violence as much as anyone. For Christians, especially in a world that seems to take the “authority” and “power” of violence as a given, Gandhi’s method of satyagraha still stands as a modern reminder that Christ showed a better way. Contrary to King, however, I think for anyone who wishes to understand that way, Gandhi’s satyagraha will be a disappointment. And I think it should be disappointing, for the immense personality of Jesus Christ cannot be summed up by the words “Thou shalt not kill.” And everything that it means to walk among the world as a peacemaking child of God cannot possibly be simplified to a principle or an impersonal force.