But it is worth pausing for a moment to point out that Gandhi seemed to think that his approach could have even been useful in response to Hitler and Nazism. Gandhi exchanged letters with Martin Buber, the great Jewish thinker, that focused on this question. Gandhi stated, “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified”. Buber explained his own position as follows: “I am no radical pacifist: I do not believe that one must always answer violence with nonviolence. I know what tragedy implies; when there is war, it must be fought”. But Buber was an advocate of peace and dialogue. He even imagined that this could work in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He explained his vision of a real peace as follows: “A peace that comes about through the cessation of war, hot or cold, is no real peace. Real peace, a peace that would be a real solution is organic peace. A great peace means cooperation and nothing less”.
Despite his sympathy for Gandhi and pacifism, Buber did not agree with nonviolence in response to evil threats such as Nazism. Nor perhaps did the Christian pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was persecuted by the Nazis for his pacifism and war resistance. According to the standard account of Bonhoeffer’s life and death, he renounced his pacifism and conspired in a plot to kill Hitler—for which he was executed. Recent scholarship has challenged this account, claiming that Bonhoeffer was not actively engaged in violence: his arrest and execution were for his war resistant activity and his work to save the Jews, and not because of the plot he was associated with. This theory of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism remains contentious. Defenders of realism look at Bonhoeffer’s participation in the plot to kill Hitler as an example of the failure of pacifism; but pacifists will prefer the alternative interpretation, which views Bonhoeffer as a hero of nonviolence to the end.
A detailed consideration of whether Gandhian satyagraha would work against Nazis—or whether Bohnoeffer and other Christian pacifists remained committed to nonviolence in the midst of atrocity—is a question we cannot pursue further here. But we should note that Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolent social protest spread and were woven together with Christian pacifism. By the 1960s, nonviolent social protest had become part of the mainstream of social activism, embodied in the work of Martin Luther King and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement— and put into practice in other anti-colonial and civil rights protests around the globe, including in revolutions against the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
While Christian pacifism is discussed in more detail in another chapter, we should note that the twentieth century produced a significant amount of scholarship focused on Christian pacifism. Christian pacifists in the twentieth century include Dorothy Day, A.J. Muste, Thomas Merton, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, John Howard Yoder, Myron Augsburger, Cesar Chavez, and Stanley Hauerwas.
We cannot discuss each of these figures here. But we can highlight a few, noting that Christian pacifists were among the most radical—and most effective—forces for social change in the twentieth century. Day and her Catholic Worker Movement provide one inspirational example. Day linked pacifism with Christian charity and a general opposition to injustice and greed that was based upon Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Her model of Catholic nonviolence and social justice activism has a close connection with the work of Cesar Chavez, who drew upon his understanding of Latino Catholicism as an inspiration for his own nonviolent activism.
Another significant twentieth-century pacifist was A.J. Muste, who argued that pacifism was intimately tied to the idea that God is love. Muste worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, through which he influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., another one of its members. It was Muste, for example, who helped to send James Lawson to India, where he studied Gandhian nonviolence. Lawson was a Methodist minister who was also a conscientious objector during the Korean War. When Lawson returned from India, he worked with King and the Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee. Day, Muste, King, and Lawson recognized the need for organized nonviolent action and for the creation of institutions of peace as a replacement for the war system.
Christian pacifists developed the strategy of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience based upon the idea that when the civil law conflicted with the higher moral or religious law, the law should be broken—as King explained in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Civil disobedience grounded in Christian teaching points toward a higher law of the Kingdom of God. Related to this is the Christian pacifist call for a nonviolent revolution against existing social, political, economic, and racial systems. Muste, for example, once said, “In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist; in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity”.
At the heart of twentieth-century Christian pacifism is a commitment to a theology that makes no compromises with the secular world. Hauerwas has argued, for example, that pacifism is an explicitly theological doctrine that calls all other values—including the values of patriotism and nationalism—into question. Hauerwas follows ideas found in Bonhoeffer, as well as in the writings of Yoder and others, to reach the conclusion that a commitment to Jesus requires pacifism. In an essay reflecting on September 11 he wrote, “Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but rather the way Christians must live in a world of violence”.
The Second World War and Beyond
