Recently I found myself listening with great frustration to a Christian lady from the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) - an organisation that works for the reduction and ultimate abolition of the international arms trade, together with progressive demilitarisation within arms-producing countries, and is working towards a 'completely pacifist future'. CAAT held a protest rally near the Excel Centre in London's docklands (incidentally, the place in which I'll be attending the Hillsong Conference this week) demonstrating against anybody associated with the arms trade. Their specific target seemed to be the headquarters of UK Trade & Investment's Defence & Security Organisation, outside which they held an anti-arms trade fayre. Although CAAT claims to have no formal membership structure, local branches of peace organisations, trade unions, churches, and other subsidiary groups are often trying to enlist the help of Christians in promulgating their pacifistic views. 

 

Although the activities of CAAT have brought to bear my objections against a wholly pacifistic approach (it seems obvious that we need arms in a world with arms) I should not like to single out CAAT over and above any other group, organisation, or individual who adopts and promotes a pacifistic view. My own view is that they are all misjudged; for I do not think the view of the pacifist is the right one, and that is the purpose of my writing this article.

 

Pacifism is in my view little more than a fanciful form of idealism negated by the real nature of mankind. If we had a perfect world then of course we would have perfect non-violent, non-aggressive states - but our world is not perfect, therefore we must tackle the problems accordingly.  Some pacifists turn to Christ’s instruction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ as proof that they are right. I will tell you why I think they are wrong, but before I do, we must first agree that we do all know the difference between right and wrong and that our intuitive knowledge of right and wrong is as powerful as any of the senses. 

 

Our moral feeling is a strange entity - it should be admitted that there are some moral positions that we cannot be argued out of any more than we can argue a woman into tasting onion when she is tasting cucumber or arguing her into seeing pink when she is seeing grey. But it is true that some of us can have our minds changed as regards moral positions if an argument is presented to us which shows a better side to the argument. A feeling of what is right and wrong can mean two things, it can mean either that we feel compelled to do the right thing, or it can mean a judgement about what are right and wrong things. In the first sense, the moral law has the final say, and we should not argue with it or attempt to change it. But as regards right and wrong, it is sometimes more tricky; that is, people are susceptible to errors when thinking about right and wrong. It is here that we must bring in reason, for reason tells us about what is true and what is false. 

 

In the first place, we receive facts (either from our own senses or from other people’s) and we use our reason to ascertain their validity as regards truth and falsehood. Now certainly it is true that the vast majority come from elsewhere, not from our own senses, but the ones which come from our own senses are known intuitively. If a truth is self-evident, then it must be perceived intuitively, as in mathematics and, as we have just seen, in our assent to the moral law. After we have co-ordinated all the information from the minds and checked the interrelation between outside authority and our own intuition, we are in a position to ascertain them in a true/false analysis. It is true that some people do not have very good abilities in achieving this result, others do have the abilities but do not do a very good job of using them and some obstinately avoid the truth at all coasts. But the extent to which a person comes to such conclusions does not detract from the fact that intuition and perception do allow us to come to these conclusions about morality and external information. 

 

Any time we correct someone’s reasoning we are either correcting their attempts at co-ordination or we are correcting the information which they received - the intuitive facet cannot be altered. You can offer newer and better information or you can help a man with his co-ordination but you cannot show him a self-evident truth if he cannot see it. Now I do not say that this is all too frequent, for very often the term ‘can’t see’ should be replaced with ‘won’t see’, particularly in the case of people seeing the truth about Christianity. But when the person in question really does lack the cranial capacity to see a self-evident truth you cannot argue them into it; that is, you cannot elicit intuition by rational persuasion - if a person’s intuition is defective it is incorrigible. It does not automatically follow that no external influence or emotional variances will alter it in a positive way, but it is not amenable to improvement by reasoning. It is not always realised but reason itself does not tell us very much about what we know, not in comparison to external information; in fact, most of our information is not obtained from reason or rational argument. 

 

Our moral intuition therefore consists of three elements, external facts (like for example, the information needed to decide if the war in Afghanistan is moral or immoral), our intuition as regards right and wrong (our assent to the moral law), and the rationale with which we do our co-ordinating to reach a sound conclusion. Thus we see that reasoning is a very different thing to conscience on this matter. Our knowledge of what is the right thing to do can be impaired and or corrupted by some external force which belongs to our passionate striving (usually a hedonistic force), but it can also be impaired or corrupted by a feeling about good and evil. The result of which is that we are usually left with two decisions about our next action, whether it is the right action and whether we should carry it out. Here we see that reason itself should be subordinate to better authority, either our moral intuition or someone else’s, otherwise we cannot be sure that passionate striving is affecting our perception of the right action to take. In this sense our assenting to intuition is more important than the stages in which we are learning about moral reasoning or co-ordination. 

 

Therefore if we are talking about intuitive knowledge of the moral law, then we must not talk of it as though we can argue over it, for if there can be an argument or discussion in which neither one of the participants reveals either a moral vacuum or a complete nonsense then the discussion has gone beyond intuition; it has stretched into preference and conviction. We also know, as in the case of heretical holy books, that people are very good at making moral judgements which are based upon thoughts of their progenitors and mistaking the injunctions for their own moral intuition. This, I think, is one way to explain the hostility felt towards British and American troops in the Middle East even when they are doing as much as they can to help the citizens and assist in rebuilding the infrastructure and promoting democracy. 

 

In other words, bad experiences lead us to make false applications as regards moral assistance, caring and solicitude. In the case of extreme religious inculcation, a man can turn into a misogynist if he thinks it appeases his god, or he can turn to self-flagellation if he thinks it will help him expiate his guilty feelings and win favour with his god. This is our first moment of clarity as regards the question of morality and, thus, pacifism. Assent to the moral standard is of paramount importance, but our judgement about right and wrong can be tainted by bad external influences. 

 

We must also be on guard here against those who simply mistake their intuition for a temporal conviction which is liable to change at any moment. A man who makes his mind up that Hinduism is false because of a quarrel with a Hindu work colleague or a woman who makes her mind up that Christianity is false because of her Christian neighbour’s perpetual sinning offer us examples of poorly constructed convictions, they tell us nothing about sound reason, for we all know (or should know) that the efficacy of either belief system does not boil down to facts about behaviour nor about the temporal convictions of outside observers. On this showing I am sure I can convince you that one pacifist position, the one that insists that it ‘feels’ like the right position to take because all human death is a tragedy must be seen as dispensable straight away, for we know that the debate about pacifism is not based on such narrow-minded criterion. 

 

We have thus seen that every time we make a judgement about morality, we must pay regard to our intuition but also to external facts and our own reasoning. This means that so long as the information is correct and the reasoning unimpaired, my intuition should be assented to if I am to make a sound moral judgement. But if I either find a reason to dispute the facts or I never bother to explore them properly then my intuition means very little. A man might take a set of instructions from the Qur’an and reach the conclusion that these instructions are morally right because they come from Allah, but that fact depends not on his intuition, it depends on whether the Qur’an is indeed the word of Allah or whether it is in fact human instructions and is based on misjudgements. 

 

Having seen that our moral judgements must leave room for outside facts, our judgement of those facts, our reasoning, and our intuition, we are now ready to apply the question, ‘Is the pacifist position moral or immoral?’ We need not say ‘Is the pacifist position right or wrong?’, because with our demarcation policy in the opening section we have already established that the right action does mean the morally right action, therefore the two are inextricable. When thinking about the facts, and about our previously established position, we can all agree that conflict, war, killing, etc, are bad things and that all human endeavour involves an intuitive wish for the abrogation of these things.  Or as Saint Augustine said, ‘The purpose of all war is ultimately peace’. But we now have to say that the pacifist position either rests on the assumption that all non-pacifist activities are bad or do no good for the situation, or that to take a non-pacifist position is bound to do more harm than to take a pacifist position. 

 

If either (or both) of these facts were correct, then we should be in no doubt that the pacifist position is the right position to take, but this depends on the validity of this assumption - a bit like when we said that the Qur’anic injunctions depend on the efficacy of the texts themselves. So how do we find out if the pacifists’ contentions are right? Well, the only way in which one can come to a sound conclusion is to call on reason, and analyse some instances of war and try to ascertain whether the pacifist position would have improved the situation or not. The validity of the pacifists’ position rests on assumptions such as ‘If we had never fought in the two World Wars the situation would have been much better’, or ‘If we had never intervened to help in the Balkans, the situation would have been better’. It does not take much to realise that both assumptions are blatantly false, therefore the pacifists’ position is only worth considering under premises very different from actuality, that is, conditions under which there is no human violence at all. 

 

But straight away we see that this is not an accurate description of the world in which we live. If the pacifist sticks to his principles, he would have to adopt a position which makes no effort to resist evil, or intervene to help out the inhabitants of nations which are governed by cruel and oppressive dictators. In this sense that we alluded to - Christ’s instruction to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’ - it should follow with even the most moderate of analysis that loving them does not mean taking a pacifist position and failing to help them in their struggle at resisting evil and cruelty. 

 

In the second place, one cannot know for sure whether the pacifist position would have yielded better results than the non-pacifist position, the assumptions are conjectural.  In fact, it is probably true that any retrospective analysis can be rendered irrelevant and immaterial by the very fact that a rhetorical account is bound to taint any objective analysis of two alternate propositions or outcomes. Admittedly assumptions that a Nazi dominated Europe would be a worse outcome than, say, leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq seem very evidently true, but that does not help the pacifist position, for we are forced to admit that some wars are certainly better than non-resistance to evil. A war which proves to be successful in resisting evil must be better than allowing evil to get its claws in. 

 

Perhaps we might find extra clarity if we turn to intuition regarding this matter. We know intuitively that to act morally is good and to act immorally is bad, but then we must discover whether one can move on from this position to claim a wholly pacifist position without straying into grounds of immorality. If we take the principle that some wars are good and others are bad, then we cannot reach this conclusion either with reason or with intuition; that is, we cannot be wholly pacifistic and morally good. Under these premises, a wholly pacifistic position is indeed an immoral position to take. Here we see the strength of reason, intuition and information combined, for I can understand that on the very first hearing it does sound a bit odd that one could be called immoral for adopting a position which opposes war and conflict, but so it must be. We will be in error if we make an abstraction of good and bad; thus we cannot simply make arbitrary comments about good, we must also ascribe to good a specific action or set of actions if we are to reach a sound conclusion. 

 

We can agree that the less harm we have to do to an individual, the better, even if the individual is an evil war criminal, but we must also agree that if the act of the war criminal is causing pain and death to innocent civilians it is our moral duty to stop him in his actions. I also have no doubt that in some cases, such as that of Osama Bin Laden, execution might be the most efficient method of averting further violent repercussions, particularly as he is a spokesman for murdering Islamists. On this point, the Christian argument that execution deprives a man from having the chance to come to know Jesus in his time of incarceration has never convinced me that much. Such a man is perhaps just as likely to realise the afflictions of his own heart on death row as he is spending the rest of his years in prison, in fact, he might just as likely find corrupting influences in prison which he would not have found if left in introspective isolation for a few days before execution. But it remains true that the punishment must fit the crime.

 

The pacifist, particularly the Christian pacifist, also has another difficulty to surmount. The position of pacifism is really a position against suffering and evil, but this does not give any regard to broader and deeper elements within creation. To me, a secular dictator who annexes a smaller and weaker country is always to be opposed, but not in the same way as a theocratic dictator who enforces a bad set of beliefs on his country’s inhabitants. Equally two men in the trenches in the First World War both prepared to die for their country’s cause strikes me as very different to an Islamic suicide bomber who is prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper because he thinks he is doing good sacrificial work for his god, but doubtless the convictions of each man are as strong as the next man’s. 

 

Not only do I think pacifists to be morally wrong and philosophically flaccid, I also think it is rather dangerous. A nation in which all the citizens are pacifist will very probably soon find itself invaded by one or more neighbouring non-pacifist nations, for human nature finds it hard to resist easy pickings if the forces that control the country consists of bad men. 

 

Another difficulty with pacifism is that it attempts to tackle universally that which can only be tackled at an individual level. You can help a man control his tendencies for violence but you cannot do the same thing to a nation. You can help a man to know Christ but you cannot help a nation, for each situation must be tackled at the individual level. The abolition of the slave trade, the civil rights movement, and other such activities succeed because their work is accomplished within the scope of realism; pacifism does no such thing, it tries to encompass ‘all’ in a wholly unrealistic way. The scientist who finds a cure for cancer will have done more with a few micro-organisms than the cumulative efforts of all those who think they can achieve universal peace and strive to make their dream a reality. 

 

I have not at this point considered whether all human conclusions are from a sound foundation; that is to say, should we just assume that ubiquitous long-standing opinions are right? That largely depends on how we view the history of humanity. No one can argue seriously that humans have not progressed in knowledge, for it is a fact that we know a lot more know than our Bronze Age progenitors or our Victorian forefathers. That is not to say that we have to axiomatically hold that we are more moral or more intelligent, just that we are certain that we know more. Now a great deal of our collected values and convictions come from Judeo-Christian culture and teachings, and it is usually the case that pacifists are basing their convictions on this authority. This of course depends on two things, whether the Divine instructions really are from providential sources and whether they have been interpreted correctly. Thus if the Bible and the Qur’an are juxtaposed, one must assent to the one that is true, for whichever one is true you will find that that is the one in which the Divine authority can be found. 

 

Of course some Muslims might be more moral than some Christians but that does not tell us anything about the efficacy of Divine authority, only about human nature. Now if we suppose, as I do, that the Bible is the only Divine word of God, we must then approach the question thus; is the conclusion that pacifism is immoral in conflict with Divine authority? If it is, then ubiquitous human thought on this matter simply means that we have error in ubiquity. So here if I’m to show that the pacifist position is both immoral and philosophically flaccid I must show that the position of Divine authority does not point towards, or insist upon, a pacifist position. 

 

I have shown why ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ does not involve a pacifist conclusion, but what of other verses or traditions? Certainly much Christian tradition involves the belief that one must defend his or her land against unlawful people. Furthermore there is certainly nothing in scripture which makes insistences towards a pacifist position; in fact, servicemen, officials and army officers seem to be supported by the biblical teachings. What about when Christ says that we should turn the other cheek? Does He mean that if a man strikes you on the right cheek we should turn and let him do the same to the left cheek? Doubtless that verse has been used to vindicate the pacifists’ position, but I do not think that such a vindication is merited, and in pointing this out I hope to embody my feelings for other comparable verses in the Bible. 

 

It should be made known that I am of course thinking of those of us that try our very best to heed the words of our Lord. To the man who takes Christ’s words a la carte I have nothing to say on this matter; for I do not share his basic assumption nor his attempts to compromise the good news. Having established that, it seems quite obvious that Christ’s instruction to ‘turn the other cheek’ could be taken three ways. The pacifist might take it to mean (and many do) a complete non-resistance to conflict however evil the action of the enemy. Another interpretation is that it is to instruct us to be easily appeased and incur with equanimity all suffering and acts of violence that come against us. Both of these are unsound (the second more than the first) - both are, as we have seen, immoral and illogical. The third is that Christ means exactly what He says but that there will be times left to our judgement when an exceptional circumstance will occur under which the instruction may not apply. 

 

In other words, as long as there are no subsidiary factors which will have a very negative effect on people outside of the situation, we are instructed not to seek retribution or quid pro quo retaliation - the eye for an eye injunction has been replaced by something better, as is the case in Matthew 5. Okay so far, but there will be times when Christ’s instruction to turn the other cheek will be momentarily negated by a duty to disregard it in favour of another action, perhaps another one of His commands. And a moment’s thought shows that any strict and pedantic acquiescence to all instructions at all times is impossible. We are told not to lie; we are told to love our neighbour as ourselves - thus if a young man is running away from a gang of thugs and chooses to hide from them behind a large recycling bin, upon being asked by the gang ‘have you seen where that lad went?’, common sense says that it is better I lie and say ‘no’ rather than tell the truth and put the lad in the position of receiving a beating. 

 

Of course there are other things I could do to try and appease the situation, but the point still remains. Does anyone think that ‘turn the other cheek’ means that if a man tried to punch me out of the way in order to mug an old lady that I should turn the other cheek? Of course not. Does turn the other cheek mean that a mother should let her young son strike out at her every time his impulses told him to? Absolutely not. It is not difficult to see how irrational this view is; thus we find that we cannot defend the pacifists’ position on biblical instruction. As I have said earlier there are no collective assumptions be made, one must always work at an individual level, which can of course include regard for a large group of individuals. 

 

To argue a case that the military assistance in Afghanistan was justified we must argue with regard to the group of individuals that make up the whole populous of that country’s citizens, at least insofar as we do not simply lump them all together as a homogenous group. As Christ did not say to the Roman centurion ‘down tools and give up that way of life’, I am supposing that there remains an understanding between creature and Creator that military services are necessary, in fact He seems to imply that they will remain necessary and it is easy to see why whenever we look at the state of the world (reading between the lines - see Mark 13:7 or Romans 13:4 or 1 Peter 2:14 for prime examples), so there can be no justification for pacifism or pacifistic non-intervention on those grounds either. 

 

I hope all this has led you the reader and myself the author to a position where we can agree that a wholly pacifist position is not to be encouraged, and that neither the Bible nor the moral law, nor our own reason and intuition encourages or permits it. There is of course no automatic correlation between the position of the pacifist and the non-pacifist as regards subject like bravery, courage, morality or solicitude; for there will be many pacifists who have all four in greater abundance than the majority of non-pacifists. But there will be times when the pacifist’s position prevents him from acting in a way that can benefit others beyond his immediate purview. As we have seen, there will be times when we are called to briefly disregard Christ’s claims to turn the other cheek in order that we prevent a more horrific act of violence or misery or suffering. We are called to use our common sense in order than we can live for Him and glorify His name. 

 

Of course this position does not immediately imply a justification in supporting war per se, after all, there are many wars which are not easily justifiable by these principles or under these premises. But what I have hoped to do in this article is to show that some wars can be supported and that sometimes it is our duty to support them. War is unpleasant and should be avoided whenever possible, so long as avoiding it does not mean an immoral action or a continuance of human suffering. But pacifism is wrong – and the whole vocabulary of human sway is, in my view, against the pacifist.

To read the case for a Christian pacifism made by Norwich magistrate and Quaker John Myhill, click here