Thus to embrace Holy Disobedience is not to substitute Resistance for
Reconciliation. It is to practice both Reconciliation and Resistance. In
so far as we help to build up or smooth the way for American militarism
and the regimentation which accompanies it, we are certainly not
practising reconciliation toward the millions of people in the Communist
bloc countries against whom American war preparations, including
conscription, are directed. Nor are we practising reconciliation toward
the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa whom we condemn to poverty
and drive into the arms of Communism by our addiction to military
“defense.” Nor are we practising love toward our own fellow-citizens,
including also the multitude of youths in the armed services, if, against
our deepest insight, we help to fasten the chains of conscription and war
upon them.
Our works of mercy, healing and reconstruction will have a deeper and
more genuinely reconciling effect when they are not entangled with
conscript service for “the health, safety and interest” of the United
States or any other war-making State. It is highly doubtful whether
Christian mission boards can permit any of their projects in the Orient
to be manned by men supposed to be working for “the health, safety and
interest” of the United States. The Gospel of reconciliation will be
preached with a new freedom and power when the preachers have broken
decisively with American militarism. It can surely not be preached at all
in Communist lands by those who have not made that break. It will be when
we have gotten off the back of what someone has called the wild elephant
of militarism and conscription on to the solid ground of freedom, and
only then, that we shall be able to live and work constructively. Like
Abraham we shall have to depart from the City-which-is in order that we
may help to build the City-which-is-to-be, whose true builder and maker
is God.
It is, of course, possible, perhaps even likely, that if we set ourselves
apart as those who will have no dealings whatever with conscription, will
not place the pinch of incense before Caesar’s image, our fellow-citizens
will stone us, as Stephen was stoned when he reminded his people that it
was they who had “received the law as it was ordained by angels, and kept
it not.” So may we be stoned for reminding our people of a tradition of
freedom and peace which was also, in a real sense, “ordained by angels”
and which we no longer keep. But, it will thus become possible for
them, as for Paul, even amidst the search for new victims to persecute,
suddenly to see again the face of Christ and the vision of a new
Jerusalem.
Some one may at this point reflect that earlier in this paper I counseled
against people too readily leaving the normal path of life and that I
am now counseling a policy which is certain to create disturbance in
individual lives, families and communities. That is so. But to depart
from the common way in response or reaction to a conscription law, in the
attempt to adapt oneself to an abnormal state of society, is one thing.
To leave father, mother, wife, child, yea and one’s own life also, at the
behest of Christ or conscience is quite another. Our generation will not
return to a condition under which every man may sit under his own vine
and fig tree, with none to make him afraid, unless there are those who
are willing to pay the high cost of redemption and deliverance from a
regime of regimentation, terror and war.
Finally, it is of crucial importance that we should understand that for
the individual to pit himself in Holy Disobedience against the war-making
and conscripting State, wherever it or he be located, is not an act of
despair or defeatism. Rather, I think we may say that precisely this
individual refusal to “go along” is now the beginning and the core of any
realistic and practical movement against war and for a more peaceful and
brotherly world. For it becomes daily clearer that political and military
leaders pay virtually no attention to protests against current foreign
policy and pleas for peace when they know perfectly well that when it
comes to a showdown, all but a handful of the millions of protesters will
“go along” with the war to which the policy leads. All but a handful
will submit to conscription. Few of the protesters will so much as risk
their jobs in the cause of “peace.” The failure of the policymakers to
change their course does not, save perhaps in very rare instances, mean
that they are evil men who want war. They feel, as indeed they so often
declare in crucial moments, that the issues are so complicated, the
forces arrayed against them so strong, that they “have no choice” but
to add another score of billions to the military budget, and so on and
on. Why should they think there is any reality, hope or salvation in
“peace advocates” who when the moment of decision comes also act on the
assumption that they “have no choice” but to conform?
Precisely in a day when the individual appears to be utterly helpless, to
“have no choice,” when the aim of the “system” is to convince him that he
is helpless as an individual and that the only way to meet regimentation
is by regimentation, there is absolutely no hope save in going back
to the beginning. The human being, the child of God, must assert his
humanity and his sonship again. He must exercise the choice which he
no longer has as something accorded him by society, which he “naked,
weaponless, armourless, without shield or spear, but only with naked
hands and open eyes” must create again. He must understand that this
naked human being is the one _real_ thing in the face of the mechanics
and the mechanized institutions of our age. He, by the grace of God, is
the seed of all the human life there will be on earth in the future,
though he may have to die to make that harvest possible. As _Life_
magazine stated in its unexpectedly profound and stirring editorial of
August 20, 1945, its first issue after the atom bombing of Hiroshima:
“Our sole safeguard against the very real danger of a reversion
to barbarism is the kind of morality which compels the individual
conscience, be the group right or wrong. The individual conscience
against the atomic bomb? Yes. There is no other way.”
* * * * *
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