When They Cry "Peace Peace"

A Reflection on Peacebuilding and the Dangers of Conflict-Avoidance as False Peace.

¹³ For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
¹⁴ They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, “Peace, peace,”
when there is no peace.
¹⁵ They acted shamefully; they committed abomination,
yet they were not ashamed;
they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;

• Jeremiah 6:13-15

I am an Anabaptist Christian and am therefore a member of one of the historic peace churches. I am also a committed antifascist and I am dedicated to queer and trans liberation. To my mind these three commitments (Anabaptism, antifascism, and queer liberation) all reinforce one another. At the same time I am very well aware that a lot of people probably have the idea that they are in tension so I would like to take a moment to talk about what being committed to peacebuilding means to me and why and how it strengthens my commitment to antifascism and queer liberation.

Let me say at the outset and unambiguously that my Anabaptist dedication to peacemaking demands an absolute commitment to non-lethality. I believe that all killing of persons is wrong specifically because I believe that killing a person can never be a way of living out love for that person. I do not, and will not, compromise on that point and I hope you will understand that everything else I have to say should be understood in that context. And that moral commitment does take certain actions “off the table” for me. It shapes the sort of antifascist and queer liberationist that I am.

But this essay isn’t about what sort of antifascist or queer liberationist I am, it is about what sort of Anabaptist I am, and it is about my peace ethic. I believe that Peace is a universal vocation, that, as followers of the Way of Jesus, we are called to be peacemakers. I also believe that, without justice, anything we might want to call “peace” is actually nothing but injustice. What I am afraid a lot of people (including a lot of my fellow Anabaptists) fail to understand, is that peace is not the same thing as an absence of conflict. When people are oppressed; when their rights are violated, when they are prevented from flourishing, they may not always resort to conflict; but the absence of conflict is not peace. Peace, the peace we are called to build as followers of Jesus, is a Peace that requires True Justice. And in speaking of Justice I am speaking of the state of affairs where (to quote Lady Julian) “all is well and all is well and all manner of things is well”. Justice is what is happening when oppression, cruelty, and want are no longer. And until we have Justice, any state of Peace that we might think we are experiencing will always be a false peace.

So then what is a false peace? I opened this essay with a quote from Jeremiah 6 where God is railing against people who say “peace peace” when there is no peace. As a matter of fact, these folks are shouting “peace peace” at a time when God is furious over injustice! As humans we can all experience the temptation to shout “peace” when we want an end to conflict. But conflict happens (among other things) because oppressed people aren’t willing to quietly and passively endure their oppression.

And that creates a situation that many of us (particularly Christians, most particularly straight white able bodied Christians) tend to find uncomfortable insofar as we find ourselves situated among those who are not experiencing the oppression or if we just aren’t experiencing the worst of it. I am sorry that I have to get a little bit political to make this clear (I did warn you that all three of my commitments inform one another) but I see no way around it. One of the less well understood powers of government is the ability to camouflage oppression. When the government writes an oppressive situation into law, that oppression starts to feel like “just the way things are” and when people work (legally or outside the law) to highlight and correct that oppression, they are labeled criminal by the government which causes us to see them as “the problem”, as the ones who violated the peace by initiating conflict. And peacemakers suffer from a strong temptation to blame instigators of visible conflict for a state of conflict. But that is not True seeing—it is a way of seeing things that only makes sense if the Government’s camouflaging of the initial oppression causes you to miss the oppression that people are reacting against.

If Christians respond to conflict out of a desire to end conflict first and only engage questions of Justice second, then we will end up trying to build peace by encouraging the oppressed to return to their oppression rather than by encouraging the oppressors to end their oppression. It is, and will always be, wrong to ask the oppressed to return to their oppression as a precursor to peacebuilding. The call of God to the church is rather to stand firmly on the side of the oppressed and to work towards Peace by tearing down all tyrants and systems with the temerity to oppress the Least of These. The Magnificat is the proper statement of the peace conditions we are to work towards:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

For this reason, and with grief, I must acknowledge that many of my Anabaptist siblings in Christ are, ironically, some of worst offenders of God’s call to Peace. When pacifist Christians work to end conflict without situating themselves firmly on the side of the oppressed; when by our words or actions we value non-conflict over Justice, when we choose the short-cut to ending conflict by condemning the overtly violent oppressed rather than the covertly violent oppressor; we are bringing ourselves under the condemnation that Jeremiah spoke over the false prophets who cry “peace peace” as a cover for injustice.

And none of that should be read as a valorization or justification for lethal violence. It was, is, and always will be wrong to kill a person. What I am saying is that when violence, lethal or otherwise, is taking place it is not our calling to stand apart and proclaim “a pox on both your house”, far less is it our place to condemn the violent oppressed merely because “they started it” or because the oppressor camouflaged their original violence under the shroud of legality or tradition. We are to stand, always and immovably, on the side of the oppressed. And it is only when we have stood there for some time, taking the blows of the oppressor on ourselves and our community, that we will earn any right to start talking to our (now) fellow oppressed people about means of resistance, about active non-violence, about creative resistance, and about the Way that leads to Life. Councils of non-violence and non-lethality offered from a position of security and safety are sinful and cruel.

Non-lethality or non-violence should—and do—limit the moral means by which we must work for the Justice without which all peace is false, but if we are not already fully committed to doing that work then they are the very words of sniveling appeasement that God has condemned. As C. S. Lewis was fond of reminding us, “it is the highest angels that become the greatest demons”. And pacifism, when it becomes a handmaid to oppression, becomes a very great demon indeed.