Book Critical of Pacifist Organizations Stirs Controversy

April 1990

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In 1988, Eerdmans Publishing Company released Guenter Lewy's book Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism in which the author argues that from the time of the Vietnam war, four major pacifist groups have moved away from strict adherence to non-violence and reconciliation and have come to support armed struggle and guerrilla warfare. The four organizations are the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League.

Sound hard to believe? You can now judge for yourself, with help from a second book that grew out of a round-table debate of Lewy's book. The new volume is edited by Michael Cromartie and published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) here: Peace Betrayed? Essays on Pacifism and Politics (1990).

Peace Betrayed? features a summary by Lewy of his argument in Peace and Revolution, followed by fifteen responses and a conclusion in which Lewy responds to his critics. The book not only puts Lewy to the test, with criticism coming from many pacifists, but it opens up a wider discussion of politics and moral judgment which should be of great interest to Christians.

Lewy highlights the thesis of his original book by contending that it was growing opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960s that set the stage "for a mass movement of political protest that eventually was to create a symbiotic relationship of pacifism and New Left politics. By the time 'the Movement,' as it became known, had run its course some ten years later, American pacifism had assumed a new political identity." The pacifist groups named above became part of "an amorphous collection of political groups that regard the United States as an imperialist nation responsible both for the poverty of the Third World and for starting and maintaining a dangerous arms race that threatens nuclear catastrophe." Today, those groups "affirm their solidarity with Marxist- controlled guerrillas in various parts of the world. They defend the violence carried out by these guerrillas as inevitable when the oppressed struggle against the violence of an unjust status quo" (pp. 28-29).

John N. Swomley, a pacifist and author of Liberation Ethics, responds that "it is difficult for me to take his [Lewy's] attack on pacifist organizations seriously. He omits important material that does not support his thesis, quotes out of context, distorts major pacifist decisions, and in general uses a 'smear' technique unworthy of a person with academic credentials" (p. 88).

EPPC's new president George Weigel, on the other hand, says that though he may not agree fully with every judgment made by Lewy, he believes nonetheless that Lewy's "chief critical contention is true: over the past two generations, pacifist organizations have tended to abandon pacifist commitments in world politics for the sake of what they judged to be higher moral goods" (p. 69).

Somewhere between Swomley and Weigel, Charles Fager, a Quaker, steps up to say that he is unhappy with much of Lewy's book but admits that the Quakers owe him a debt for making "it more difficult for us to continue evading the hard choices" (p. 122)—hard choices about how Friends should conduct organized political efforts.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas says that Lewy misunderstands the nature of pacifism when he [Lewy] suggests "that the problem with contemporary pacifism is that it has gone political." Pacifism is by its very nature "a form of politics" (p. 135), says Hauerwas. Just because American pacifists may sometimes take political positions opposed to the actions of their own governments does not mean that they have opted for the violence perpetrated by others. But, says Hauerwas, Lewy's book does challenge pacifists to "make clear to those whom we join for concrete political purposes that our vision is captured by more determinative, or [at] least different, loyalties than theirs" (p. 140).

John Richard Burkholder, who teaches at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana, directs a similar criticism to Lewy. The standards that Lewy puts forward for pacifism are not those which many pacifists accept. "Lewy never really defends or expands his ethical grounding; he provides no compelling reasons why pacifists must be judged by his standards" (p. 199). Burkholder reaffirms his commitment to non-violence but contends that this is not the same as being anti-political. Critics of the Vietnam war who stood up and said that such violence is not God's way certainly may have appeared to be arrogant. "But is this kind of appeal any more arrogant or dangerous than to tell people it is God's will for them to take up arms, to go out and kill other human beings, to be prepared to die by the thousands, in order to attempt to preserve a given political order?" (p. 206).

Lewy responds to his critics by saying, among other things, that even though many pacifists have maintained a consistent posture of non-violence, even in opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the fact remains "that the four major pacifist organizations gradually came to favor the Vietnamese Communists and, once committed, did everything possible to facilitate their victory. This was the conclusion of prestigious pacifist leaders like Hassler, Bloomstein, and Robert Pickus who were well acquainted with the thinking of their colleagues" (p. 231).

—The Editor