A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace

by Brian Zahnd

And lest this sound like crass Christian triumphalism, my real question is this: Do we Christians secretly wish that Jesus were more like Muhammad? It’s not an idle question. The moment the church took to the Crusades in order to fight Muslims, it had already surrendered its vision of Jesus to the model of Muhammad. Muhammad may have thought freedom could be found at the end of a sword, but Jesus never did. So are Christians who most enthusiastically support US-led wars against Muslim nations actually trying to turn Jesus into some version of Muhammad? It’s a serious question. It’s a serious question because freedom is just another word for … what?

To endorse the dominant view that the employment of violence is compatible with Christianity requires no courage at all—that’s just following the crowd. But to differ from the dominant view on the sanctity of state-sponsored violence may require an uncommon reservoir of moral conviction. Pacifism is not a popular position in America, and especially not among patriotic evangelicals who have ardently sought to amalgamate the American state and the Christian faith into one hybrid entity.

But I actually don’t claim the label of pacifist for this reason: pacifism is a political position on violence. It’s a position one could adopt apart from Jesus Christ—as for example, the great writer and humanist Kurt Vonnegut did. But I am not a political pacifist. What I am is a Christian. And as a Christian, we can talk about how Christ informs humanity on the subject of violence.

On the Sunday of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem, the crowd of Passover pilgrims waved palm branches and shouted hosanna in a patriotic remembrance of the Maccabean revolt two centuries earlier. (It would be similar to how Americans remember the Revolutionary War and celebrate the Fourth of July.) What they were clearly anticipating was that Jesus was about to do it again.

When Jesus wept and said, “If only you had known the things that make for peace,” he wasn’t talking about spiritual peace or inner peace or emotional peace; he was talking about peace from the literal hell that is war. Today there is a tendency to overspiritualize the way Jesus spoke of peace. By making peace primarily a privatized spiritual peace, we are free to carry the banners of war down the road and keep the world as it’s always been—just one more war away from peace.

When the peace of Christ is confined to the private realm of individual emotions, it is not taken seriously as an alternative political vision for humanity. Post-Constantine Christians have learned to be quite comfortable in claiming the peace of Christ while waging war upon their neighbors. We have made the Pax Christus a private affair while holding to the Pax Romana as the only way to arrange the world.

Christians may claim that war is a necessity, but they cannot claim that Jesus endorses this idea. Jesus was quite plain in teaching that a people who won’t repent of (or rethink) the worn-out idea that war is a legitimate means of making the world a better place are doomed to a horrid self-inflicted judgment.

We have become so accustomed to interpreting all of Jesus’s warnings of impending judgment as references to a postmortem hell that we often screen out his actual message. (Is that our subconscious intent?)

The point is this: it wasn’t enough for Jerusalem to hail Jesus as the coming king—they did that! They also had to believe in the new way of peace the coming King was proclaiming. Did you catch that? It’s not enough to believe in Jesus; we also have to believe in the Jesus way!

Quite simply, it’s not enough to just believe in Jesus. In fact, a reckless assumption that because we believe in Jesus and therefore God is on our side can actually aggravate our addiction to Armageddon. It’s happened before. In America. And it led to America’s bloodiest war.

The preservation of an institution that systematically dehumanized millions of people for the sake of economic gain was not a thing that made for peace! Inevitably that kind of cruel exploitation would overflow its cup and unleash death and hell, bringing everything that is the opposite of peace.

But in a tragic irony that will help make my point, a spiritual revival had swept through America during the decade before the Civil War.

Across the country revival was on, churches grew, conversions multiplied. People got saved, praised Jesus, and talked about heaven. Then they went to hell. Or at least the same kind of hell Jesus had warned Jerusalem about during his final days.

What had gone wrong? Millions had accepted Jesus and shouted hosanna, but they did not know the things that make for peace. They prayed a sinner’s prayer, “got right with God,” and kept their slaves.

In the chapter entitled “You Can’t Pray a Lie” in Twain’s beloved novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn has helped hide Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. But Huck thought he was committing a sin in helping a runaway slave. Huck had learned in Sunday school “that people that acts as I’d been acting … goes to everlasting fire.” So in an act of repentance in order to save his soul, Huck wrote a note to Miss Watson and told her where she could find her runaway slave.