Do Not Fear What They Fear

Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect. Maintain a good conscience so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. 
(1 Peter 3:13-17, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

On Saturday, April 25, authorities say, a man set out to assassinate the president of the United States. 

According to an email purportedly written before the incident, the assailant carried his weapons with him from California and brought them into the hotel where the president was attending an event, evading initial security precautions simply by getting his own room a day earlier and waiting. It appears he may have spent much of that afternoon composing the lengthy email some have dubbed a “manifesto.”

“I am a citizen of the United States of America,” the note reads. “What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” A sense of responsibility seems to weigh heavily on the author. He expresses regret for not acting sooner, apologizing to those he feels he failed to protect and for the suffering he seems to believe he could have prevented.

The would-be shooter imagines an objection to his decided course of action: “As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.” In response, he argues that he must act on behalf of those he believes the current administration abused, persecuted, and murdered. “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” he writes. “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

Some call this “anti-Christian” rhetoric, but he clearly sees himself working within a Christian context—though not, I think, a Christian nationalist one. (Certainly not the Christian nationalism that puts its weight behind the powers he hoped to topple.) In the abstract, one can recognize an argument justifying violence against a few as a means of preventing a greater harm against many—and Christians have embraced similar lines of reasoning over the centuries, from “just war” advocates to abortion clinic bombers.

Quakers, however, generally don’t buy into that logic.

Friends share the Christian obligation, extending back to God’s covenant with the ancient Israelites, to love our neighbors as ourselves. That means both preventing harm to our neighbors whenever possible and, when that fails, helping our neighbors heal from the harms committed against them. 

In both cases, however, as the original peace testimony submitted to King Charles II by George Fox and other Quakers says, “the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.” To understand why, we need only revisit the declaration’s opening lines:

“Our principle is, and our Practice have always been, to seek peace and ensue it and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare and doing that which tends to the peace of all.”

In particular, early Quakers rejected political violence, which “hath its foundation from this unrighteous world.” Instead, they declared themselves “heirs of a world in which there is no end and of a kingdom where no corruptible thing enters.” Violence, which by its very nature does not tend to the peace of all, can never establish that kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. 

We may sympathize with the desire to extinguish a violent force causing great harm to others. The nineteenth-century Quaker Lucretia Mott, though she disapproved of John Brown’s failed attempt to kick off an uprising of enslaved persons across the southern United States by seizing a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, nevertheless regarded Brown as a “moral hero.” And yet, despite that admiration, she maintained that abolitionists should rely on weapons “drawn only from the armory of Truth,” namely “faith and hope and love.”

Our credibility as people of peace lies in maintaining that discipline.

In a recent QuakerSpeak interview, Amber Flannery Field, a Friend from Brooklyn, reflected on the strength of the resistance shown by residents of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and nearby Minnesota communities when agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau began detaining residents, soon escalating to shooting people in the streets. Instead of retaliatory violence, Field observed, neighbors came together to monitor the persecution, alert each other to danger and provide one another with aid and comfort. “It’s fun to watch when the ICE officers slip on the ice because they’re not acclimated to the area,” Field admitted, “but the most amount of power we’ve gotten so far has not come from retribution.”

“At the end of the day, we need to be consistent about our ideology,” Field continued. “Otherwise, we lose the power that is within our faith. Our integrity is what gets us our leverage in the world.” To that, I’d add: When we tell ourselves that violence can solve our problems, we surrender ourselves to Empire’s way of thinking, and begin to fear what Empire fears.

More than anything, those who seek to wield power fear losing that power.

It doesn’t matter whether they see that power in wealth or prestige or authority over others—they want it, and they don’t want anyone else to have it, because they can only imagine others using power for the same selfish purposes they intend to use it. As one presidential advisor recently put it, “We live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

If you’re looking for an “anti-Christian” philosophy, I don’t think you’ll find one more overt than that—and the current government in the United States, like many before it, uses this proposition to claim dominion not only over its own people but, increasingly, the rest of the world. No matter how great the sins an unjust regime and its rulers may have committed, however, scapegoating them, and treating them as they have treated their victims, can never repair the damage done, neither at the individual nor the international level. It might make us feel better, for a little bit, but it won’t heal us. At best, it might buy us time to heal properly, but almost certainly at too great a cost.

By Empire’s standards, it makes no sense that faith and hope and love can win the day over brute force. Yet we are called to believe that they can, that they will—and in giving testimony to that belief, we must continue to face injustice and evil with gentleness and respect, rather than attempting to beat them at their own game.