Peace Messenger

The Myth of American Diplomacy

The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Walter L. Hixson
Yale University Press / 2008

Review/Comment

In The Myth of American Diplomacy, Walter Hixson, a professor of history at the University of Akron, puts forth the disturbing thesis that we Americans are so violent because we presume ourselves to be virtuous. He argues that the roots of our current situation can be traced back to America's Puritan beginnings and are sustained through a national narrative that glorifies violence as an instrument of moral purification and divine providence. The potent and deadly mix of self-interest and religious rationalization has created an American citizenry that turns to violence quickly, naturally and with a deep sense of entitlement. Violence has become enmeshed in the very notion of who we are as a nation.

--Timothy Renick, Christian Century, May 6, 2008

Was Jeremiah Wright -- Wrong?

That's the question Frederick Russell, pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist church addressed in his Sabbath sermon on April 26.  More on that below.

As a result of his performance at the National Press Club on Monday, April 28, the condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has extended even more widely, with many former sympathizers now expressing dismay.  Yet, to a large extent, the controversy remains more about style than substance, about isolated overstatements than the predominant thrust of his message and ministry.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, emphatically declares “I’ve had it with Wright” because the pastor’s response to his critics was so “egocentric” and overreaching in identifying his kind of church and ministry with so diverse a reality as the African American church.

Yet, says Robinson, Wright “made some good points yesterday when he entered the lion’s den of the National Press Club. I especially liked this one: ‘My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending . . . over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.’”

It would be to our own spiritual detriment if we were to use Wright’s rhetorical overkill and confrontational style as reason to avoid what he has to say about the “prophetic tradition” of the Bible and what that has to say about race relations, peace, and economic justice in our time and culture.  If anyone is truly interested in finding out who Jeremiah Wright is and what he stands for, the interview with him on Bill Moyers’ Journal is a good place to start.

And whatever we may think about Wright’s views, there are still more fundamental issues at stake for Seventh-day Adventists, as Pastor Frederick Russell brought out in his sermon last Sabbath at Miracle Temple in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his message, “Was Jeremiah Wright – Wrong?,” Dr. Russell addressed “the dangers of patriotism gone awry, so much so that it seeks to destroy anyone who speaks contrary to what it believes about itself.”

He noted that the political and religious culture of Jesus’ day joined together to “take him out, because he dared to speak something against what they perceived as loyalty to the temple, and loyalty to the culture.” This kind of patriotism “can become a religion in itself,” Russell warned, leading us to “unwittingly begin to worship the country itself.”

Will “the church of the living God” be silent while this kind of “dangerous patriotism” leads to the vilification and demonization of a religious community and its pastor based on distortions?  “As a Seventh-day Adventist Christian,” the pastor declared, “I must stand for religious liberty.”

Pastor Russell’s sermon can be view on PraizeVision or at the Miracle Temple blog

Ellen White, Slavery and Politics - III

Peacemaking Heritage - 17

Seventh-day Adventism did not enter the American South until after the Civil War, but during the war it did begin to attract a few Northerners sympathetic to the Confederate cause.  Would the anti-slavery convictions of the movement’s founders prove to be dispensable political baggage, easily separable from the religious tenets of Adventism?  Ellen White spoke to this question in 1863, during the midst of the war, in a testimony entitled “The Rebellion”:

There are a few in the ranks of Sabbathkeepers who sympathize with the slaveholder. When they embraced the truth, they did not leave behind them all the errors they should have left. They need a more thorough draft from the cleansing fountain of truth. Some have brought along with them their old political prejudices, which are not in harmony with the principles of the truth. They maintain that the slave is the property of the master, and should not be taken from him. They rank these slaves as cattle and say that it is wronging the owner just as much to deprive him of his slaves as to take away his cattle. I was shown that it mattered not how much the master had paid for human flesh and the souls of men; God gives him no title to human souls, and he has no right to hold them as his property. Christ died for the whole human family, whether white or black. God has made man a free moral agent, whether white or black. The institution of slavery does away with this and permits man to exercise over his fellow man a power which God has never granted him, and which belongs alone to God. The slave master has dared assume the responsibility of God over his slave, and accordingly he will be accountable for the sins, ignorance, and vice of the slave. He will be called to an account for the power which he exercises over the slave. The colored race are God's property. Their Maker alone is their master, and those who have dared chain down the body and the soul of the slave, to keep him in degradation like the brutes, will have their retribution. The wrath of God has slumbered, but it will awake and be poured out without mixture of mercy.

Some have been so indiscreet as to talk out their pro-slavery principles--principles which are not heaven-born, but proceed from the dominion of Satan. These restless spirits talk and act in a manner to bring a reproach upon the cause of God. I will here give a copy of a letter written to Brother A, of Oswego County, New York:

"I was shown some things in regard to you. I saw that you were deceived in regard to yourself. You have given occasion for the enemies of our faith to blaspheme, and to reproach Sabbathkeepers. By your indiscreet course, you have closed the ears of some who would have listened to the truth. I saw that we should be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. You have manifested neither the wisdom of the serpent nor the harmlessness of the dove.

"Satan was the first great leader in rebellion. God is punishing the North, that they have so long suffered the accursed sin of slavery to exist; for in the sight of heaven it is a sin of the darkest dye. God is not with the South, and He will punish them dreadfully in the end. Satan is the instigator of all rebellion. I saw that you, Brother A, have permitted your political principles to destroy your judgment and your love for the truth. They are eating out true godliness from your heart. You have never looked upon slavery in the right light, and your views of this matter have thrown you on the side of the Rebellion, which was stirred up by Satan and his host. Your views of slavery cannot harmonize with the sacred, important truths for this time. You must yield your views or the truth. Both cannot be cherished in the same heart, for they are at war with each other….” (Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 1, 358-359).

Politics, Prophecy and Peace

Politics and Prophecy: The Battle for Religious Liberty and the Authentic Gospel
Christa and Alan J. Reinach, editor
Pacific Press / 2008

In this new book from Pacific Press, nine Adventist authors collaborate to address current issues of religious liberty, building on "the conviction that there is more to modern culture-war battles than can be understood merely through policy analysis or moral discourse -- a conviction that prophetic perspective is essential." The book seeks to chart a way forward, writes co-editor Alan Reinach, that avoids the pitfalls of both "pietism and power politics," instead helping the church "to fulfill a prophetic function: to speak truth to power" (8).

Authors include John Graz, director of the Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the General Conference, and James Standish, director of legislative affairs for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, along with several others among the church's leading advocates of religious liberty: Barry Bussey, Jonathan Gallagher, Nicholas Miller, Michael Peabody, and Timothy Standish.

Merely in passing, of course, and with a humility worthy of Stephen Colbert, I also note that the book includes a chapter by the editor of this blog and the Peace Messenger electronic newsletter, described as follows by editor Reinach:

Douglas Morgan, an historian who teaches at Columbia Union College, provides a stirring warning about the abuse of American power in his chapter: “Marching to the Call of History.” He reviews the Adventist understanding of the role of the United States in prophecy, and recovers the Adventist imperative to be patriotic critics of the expansion of American power, and the erosion of republican principles.

More on Politics and Prophecy at the Liberty Blog!

Ellen White, Slavery and Politics - II

Peacemaking Heritage - 16

The previous post in this series looked at the vivid message of apocalyptic judgment on American slavery in Ellen White’s testimonies about her visions in the 1840s and 1850s.  But did slavery primarily provide fodder for a doomsday theology rather than elicit a genuine, costly opposition to the evil? Did her ministry encourage any action on behalf of the oppressed, such as that taken by the twenty-one residents of Oberlin, Ohio (above) who were jailed in 1859 for their anti-slavery activities?

In brief, her course of action was to throw herself into building up a network of believers for whom non-cooperation with the social sin of slavery was absolutized by their covenant to “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.”  While she lifted the eyes of the sabbatarian Adventist community to a higher prize than the renovation of American civic institutions, that higher loyalty led them to use their voices, influence, and, increasingly over the following decades, their votes, expertise, and resources, on behalf of justice and mercy.

While a “little flock” of a few hundred scattered believers in the “third angel’s message” was just beginning to cohere through a series of “Sabbath Conferences,” the U.S. Congress was hammering out the Compromise of 1850, which staved off the threat of disunion over the question of slavery in the western territories.  The compromise included a new Fugitive Slave Law with draconian measures designed to overcome legal hindrances in some Northern states to enforcement of existing federal law mandating the return of escaped slaves.

The law would be implemented by specially-appointed federal commissioners who would be paid $10 if they ruled that an apprehended person was indeed a fugitive who must be returned to bondage, and only $5 if they ruled that such was not the case and the accused should go free. During the 1850s, 332 persons seized under the new law were returned to slavery and eleven declared free.  The entire free black population of the North was at risk, not to mention those who had made good their escapes years, even decades, before.  Moreover, the law empowered marshals instantaneously to deputize any citizen and thereby compel them to assist in the capture of alleged fugitives.

Response to this law should be a significant measure of how far Ellen White’s opposition to slavery extended. In a testimony published in 1859, she wrote:

The law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master, we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law. The slave is not the property of any man. God is his rightful master, and man has no right to take God’s workmanship into his hands, and claim him as his own. (Testimonies 1: 202).

Adventist faith in action meant an unequivocal pledge of noncompliance with federal law, because slavery violates the foundational biblical truth about the dignity and identity of human beings, each of whom are “God’s workmanship.”

However, in the first edition of Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (Harper & Row, 1989), Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart point out that Ellen White did not speak to this issue until nine years after passage of the law and the emergence of widespread, highly-publicized opposition to it.  Her statement in 1859 thus merely “brought the church into harmony with mainstream Northern opinion” and thus cannot be taken as convincing evidence that Adventist rhetoric against slavery was more than augmentation of their convictions about the end of the world (196-197).

Assessment of Bull and Lockhart’s claim first requires questioning whether opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law is best characterized as “mainstream Northern opinion.”  Outrage over the law, combined with the impact of the best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did in fact greatly swell the anti-slavery ranks, but they remained a minority of the general Northern population.  Indeed, the Republican president elected the following year made a pledge of full cooperation with the Fugitive Slave Law prominent in his effort to convince the South that he had no intention of interfering with slavery the states where it presently existed.  That was the position of the Republican majority party, and the northern Democrats as a whole would have only been more accomodating to the slave system.  Thus, pledged opposition to the Fugitive Slave law meant being part of a distinct minority, and not taking a comfortable stance of prevailing opinion.

Indeed, even though nine years had elapsed after its passage, controversy over the law reheated during the very year that Ellen White wrote about it.  A case originating in Wisconsin (Ableman v. Booth) made its way to the Supreme Court, which confirmed the constitutionality of the 1850 law on March 7, 1859.  In Ohio, the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue Case grabbed the national spotlight for several weeks, dramatizing not only zealous resistance to the law but the powerful forces arrayed in support of it.  The twenty-one residents of reform-oriented Oberlin (pictured above) who were jailed in Democrat-controlled Cleveland for harboring a fugitive slave gained release only after four slave catchers were imprisoned as bargaining chips in Republican-controlled Oberlin.

We cannot be certain that these specific developments were prominent in Ellen White’s mind as she commented on the Fugitive Slave law in 1859, but clearly it was a current, controversial matter, not an issue that had by then become “safe.”  The main topic of the testimony in which the comment appears is the question of taking oaths in legal proceedings.  While arguing that it is not necessary to resist taking oaths in legal settings, she cited the Fugitive Slave law as one example in which noncompliance with civil authority is required by loyalty to the “higher law” of God.

In sum, whatever else it might nor might not have meant with regard to slavery, being an Adventist meant taking a stand on a highly controversial public issue, being part of a community firmly and unabashedly pledged to nonviolent resistance of a federal law intended to perpetuate the evil.

Evangelism, then, would mean expanding the ranks of those thus committed.  So what happens when a person of pro-slavery politics becomes convinced of the Adventist message? That’s the topic planned for next time.

Sources: Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (Hendrickson, 1976), 45-62; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988), 79-88, 262.

Torture: White House-Planned and Approved

An appeal from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials - including the President himself, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney.  ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses).  Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

Please help inform the public about the fact that top Administration officials were directly involved in planning the torture of high-value detainees by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your deep concern about learning that your leaders participated in the torture planning meetings and your disappointment that the media and the public have not responded to the news about the meetings with the appropriate vigor and outrage.

--Linda Gustitus, NRCAT Board President, and Rich Killmer, NRCAT Executive Director

Click here for NRCAT's sample letter and letter-writing guidelines.

The recent revelations about presidential awareness and approval of torture techniques came on the heels of another under-reported development in early March -- President Bush's veto of legislation that would have prohibited the use of brutal techniques of interrogation by American intelligence agents.  About this unprecedented, formal blessing of torture as national policy by the President of the United States, Anthony Lewis comments:

No one should be in any doubt that torture was what President Bush had in mind. No one should be fooled by Orwellian talk of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

What Congress sought to outlaw was such things as hanging prisoners from the ceiling by their wrists, beating them, depriving them of food and water, preventing them from sleeping for days, keeping them in freezing temperatures, using electric shocks on them, and subjecting them to waterboarding—an almost-drowning technique that was used by the Inquisition and by Japanese soldiers who were successfully prosecuted for it by the United States after World War II. Torture....

The corrupting effects of the adoption of torture as an American practice have been widespread. First of all, on the law. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which makes binding interpretations of the law for the federal government, issued secret opinions defining torture away to the vanishing point, saying it must be equivalent in pain to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"—and adding that Congress could not stop the President from ordering the use of torture. (The whole idea of secret official opinions defining the law should be anathema in a free republic, one that has boasted from the beginning of having a government of laws, not men. Secret laws are the hallmark of tyrannies.)

The Justice Department opinions were not abstractions. They were immediately taken up by political appointees at the Pentagon and led directly to the torture of dozens of prisoners and the killing of some at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan....

Lewis concludes his piece with this quote from Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell:

We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exorcise them from our souls and make amends.

(Anthony Lewis, "The Terror President," New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008)

Iran: Our Ticket Out of Iraq?

Maya Schenwar of truthout writes about her interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men and Overthrow:

"Every time I pick up my newspaper and read about what's coming out of Washington, my fears of an American attack on Iran intensify," Kinzer told me during an interview last week....

During our interview, Kinzer pointed to the hypocrisy of Bush admonishing Iran for intervening militarily in Iraq. Kinzer stressed that the US must recognize the legitimacy of Iran's integral role.

"The fact is, Iran does have influence in Iraq, and Iran always will have influence in Iraq," he said.

The two countries are tied religiously, politically, historically and geographically, and the US is in no position to sever those ties, according to Kinzer. Rather, he suggested, we might use them to our advantage, viewing Iran as "our ticket out of Iraq."...

"All the Shah's Men" reminds us that, when it comes to Iran, the backseat is probably where we should be sitting. The US was responsible for the 1953 coup that toppled Iran's democratic government, replacing it with the repressive Shah regime, which hastened the Islamic Revolution of 1970s, inspiring the rise of radical groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda....

Kinzer's most recent book, "Overthrow," shows how the "regime change" model has developed over the past 110 years. In our interview, he discussed the motivations behind that empire-driven mentality - and why, ultimately, it's doomed to fail.

"As long as the US arrogates to itself the right to decide which governments may live, and which must die, these interventions are never going to work out," Kinzer said.

Click here to view the interview