The loneliness of the pacifist

Many of us depend on some kind of psychic gyroscope to keep our lives on track. A deeply personal symbol or totem of what we feel matters, it steers us through the rough times. It might be love of country, or the more restricted patriotism of allegiance to an alma mater, even rabid loyalty to a sports team.

For Steve Pedigo, it is a single sentence in the Bible: “Thou shalt not kill.”

It remains in the forefront of his mind even as, along with other Americans, he has been in a state of shock since Sept. 11. But he is painfully aware how out of step he is with the rest of his fellow citizens.

Three decades ago, Pedigo noticed a peculiar thing about those four words from the Old Testament. He’d read them many times. But he recognized something he’d missed as a kid in Sunday school. There are no ifs, ands or buts attached to the injunction.

The 10 Commandments are not prefaced by an explanation that they are an ideal to be pursued even as we know we’ll fall short. There are no footnotes citing exceptions from the rule against taking human life. It doesn’t say thou shalt not kill except in time of war. There is not even a clause for self-defense.

It simply says we must not kill, a principle that ever since has formed the core of Pedigo’s religious commitment. That straightforward reading of the Bible inspired him to be a Quaker. Now he is a pastor in the Society of Friends, as the group is formally known -- one of the four so-called Peace Churches, small Christian denominations sharing an unbending commitment to pacifism.

Pedigo is not about to surrender an inch of his vow to abstain from violence, even though he recognizes that those who crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon make a mockery of his compunction against killing. He is just as angry at the terrorists as those Americans who say we ought to hang them from the nearest lamppost, then bomb back into the Stone Age whomever gave them sanctuary to plot their evil.

The only difference is that Pedigo remains a committed pacifist, even as the rest of the country is flying the flag and psychologically itching for war.

He knows that, to many people, he might seem a ludicrous figure: A man of peace in a violent world. But then, he has been playing that role for the 26 years he has pastored a small Quaker meeting, as their congregations are known, in the Cabrini-Green public-housing project on Chicago’s North Side.

“In this community,” said Pedigo, 49, “we’ve been experiencing terrorism for a long time.”

Signs of violence

His ministry has made him something of an expert on instruments of violence. Recently, he showed a visitor through the former public-school building that serves as the congregation’s meeting place. It also houses an after-school program he and his wife, Marlene, run in an attempt to give children of the projects an alternative to the gangs. Lately, there has been an epidemic of sniper fire, as rival gangs strive to keep poachers off their turf and the lucrative drug trade that goes with it. There is a new hole in one classroom window made by a bullet that crashed into the wall behind -- fortunately when the room was unoccupied. Pedigo pointed to the high-rise building from where, judging by the trajectory, it must have come.

“No, it wasn’t a pistol that did that,” Pedigo said, shrugging off his visitor’s suggestion with the quiet expertise of a battle-hardened veteran. “From that distance, it had to be a high-powered rifle.”

Pedigo is quick to admit that he cannot deduce from his pacifist faith any easy solution to the problem of how, except by force of arms, the U.S. might protect itself against future acts of terrorism.

“Right now, I don’t have an answer,” Pedigo said. “For myself, I only know that I have to continue to plant seeds of peace.”

By that he means doing just what he has been doing: Walking the meanest of the city’s mean streets as a personal example of an alternative to the chronic violence there.

The pacifism of Pedigo and his fellow Quakers, like that of the other Peace Churches -- the Mennonites, Amish and Brethren -- is not quite the same as the newly revived peace movement that mounted demonstrations in Washington last weekend. Peaceniks, generally campus-bred or coming from the anti-globalization movement, base their opposition to U.S. military action against Osama bin Laden’s followers upon a moral calculus: The U.S. hasn’t the right to make war, some of their banners proclaim, because it doesn’t have clean hands. The shortcomings of our foreign policy, by this argument, created the anger that led to the Sept. 11 tragedy.

Conditions for war

That line of reasoning descends from the attempt by ancient philosophers and medieval theologians to define the bellum justum, or just war. St. Augustine outlined conditions under which violence is justified for serving some higher purpose, say, protecting a nation from enemies sworn to destroy it.

Peaceniks claim that the U.S. has no right to the posture of a righteous warrior. The Peace Churches, whose combined membership is perhaps half a million, reject the very idea of such a test.

“We don’t believe there is any such thing as a bellum justum,” said Susan Mark Landis. “All war is wrong.”

Getting the word out

Landis, who lives Orrville, Ohio, is Minister of Peace and Justice for the Mennonite Church. As the job title suggests, she has been busy getting out printed materials reminding the 100,000 Mennonites in the U.S., and especially their young people, of what may be involved in remaining committed to peace when others are marching off to war.

“There is nothing for which we will kill,” Landis said, “but we have beliefs for which we are willing to die.”

In the past, it has come to that, she added. Especially right now, Mennonites are acutely aware of their forbears’ persecutions. During World War I, when this country didn’t allow for an alternative to military service, Mennonites were drafted but refused to take a soldier’s oath. Thrown into military prisons, they refused to wear uniforms, because they were army issue. Some died from exposure.

“During the Civil War, there was a saying in the South’s army,” Landis said. “It went, `Those Mennonite farm boys, you’d think they could shoot, but don’t waste ammunition on them. They just shoot in the air.’”

Quakers, too, have suffered violence because of their commitment to non-violence. During the American Revolution, they were attacked by other Americans for refusing to support the War of Independence because of their conviction that no cause, however just, justifies violence.

“We are the people,” the Quakers said in 1776, “that must stand in the gap, and pray for the putting away of wrath.”

That line of thought ultimately traces back to the Hutterites, a small group of radical Protestants during of the Reformation. “If the governing authorities require anything that destroys peace,” a 16th Century Hutterite chronicler wrote, “we refuse to support it by word or deed, for we know that vengeance belongs to the Lord alone.”

Because of their pacifist stance, Hutterites were persecuted by princes and kings of all religious persuasions. Those who survived the European massacres came eventually to America, where their descendants form the Mennonite church and its theological kissing-cousins, the Amish. The latter occupy a curious position in the American imagination. The Amish abjure not just violence but most of the accoutrements of modern life. They don’t own cars, use electricity or have phones in their homes. That makes their farming communities a tourist draw for other Americans weary of consumerism and the 9-to-5 rat race. In time of war, though, that image is subject to revision, notes David Kline, an Amish farmer in Holmes County, Ohio, one of the largest concentrations of Amish in the country.

During the Vietnam War, Kline did alternative service in a Cleveland Hospital.

A nurse there kept bugging him for being a slacker while other boys were risking their lives in the jungles of South East Asia.

“Then this doctor from Germany spoke up,” Kline said. “She told that nurse: `I lived in Dresden during the terrible bombings of World War II. I respect anybody who doesn’t kill.’”

Confusing situation

Kline, who has written about the Amish experience, says that the terrorist attacks have left him as confused as anyone else. “It is leading me to the edge and forcing me to look out,” he said. He can even entertain the fantasy scenario of finding himself face to face with terrorists, perhaps in the mountain lairs or on a hijacked airliner. He says he would go after the culprits, even if that meant sacrificing himself.

“On an airplane, I’d block them, hold them down, as long as I didn’t have to kill those people,” Kline said. “ As the Bible says: No greater love has man than he who gives his life for his fellow man.”

Of course, the reality is that, should war come, it will be the non-pacifists who will make that sacrifice -- as Orlando Redekopp, a Brethren pastor on Chicago’s West Side, is acutely aware.

“I can call for peace here,” he said, “because I have a huge military machine defending me.”

Standing his ground

Nonetheless, he has consistently called for peace from the pulpit. For 10 years he refused to pay income taxes because he didn’t want his dollars going to support the U.S. military.

The present crisis has given him some of his most conflicted moments in 20 years of ministering to an inner-city congregation.

Redekopp is white; most of his congregation is black. For an African-American young person, military service can be a stepping stone out of the ghetto. So he can’t reject the young people of his church who sign up in the hopes of later going to college with their military benefits.

The evening of Sept. 11 and the Sundays that followed were especially emotional ones in his church, with people caught between their anger and outrage and their religious beliefs. Jingoism, Redekopp says, is a natural outlet for people’s frustrations. It’s a way of asking: Why would anyone want to do this do us?

Still, at the end of the day, like other members of the Peace Churches, Redekopp remains committed to pacifism, even as other Americans are prepared to follow their president into the war on terrorism he has declared.

“I still read where Jesus said: `Love thy enemies,’” Redekopp said. “What good are values, if you jettison them in a tight spot?”