Last week, in the midst of Holy Week and on the eve of Passover, William Sloan Coffin passed away.

As you may know, Bill Coffin was an important voice in the U.S. peace movement, and his vision was an important part in forming ICPJ.

Often, in our early years, if we were spinning our wheels here at Interfaith Council for Peace (this was before we added Justice to our name), our founder, Barbara Fuller, would say, “We need to get Bill Coffin here.”

He brought a clarity and dedication to peacemaking that the world will miss. He also carried a gift for music, and could have as easily been a concert pianist as he was chaplain at Yale University, senior pastor at the Riverside Church, and founder of Clergy and Laity Concerned. Often, his visits would include time at the piano at Nancy and Lloyd Williams house.

And William Sloan Coffin joins Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi and others who even in death remain guiding lights in the movement for justice and peace.

War Is the Coward’s Escape from the Problems of Peace

by William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Let us pray:

O God of earth and altar
Bow down and hear our cry
Our earthly rulers falter
Our people drift and die.
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us
But take away our pride.

I’m sure many of you recognized that prayer as the first verse to C.K. Chesterton’s great hymn, “O God of Earth and Altars.”

War is humanity’s most chronic and incurable disease. Said Plato: “Only the dead have seen an end to war.” Historian Will Durant estimated that in all recorded history only twenty-nine years could be described as free of war. And of all centuries, the last set records for bloodletting.

Time and again, truth has proved the first casualty of war. That is because wars need lies to justify them, ust as lies often call on violence for their defense. Certainly it was moving to see Iraqis celebrating their long-awaited and much deserved liberation; thankfully, means that call for repentance can often achieve some good ends. But let’s not kid ourselves: “Operation Iraqi Freedom” hardly states the reason for our invasion. All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality. Were the defense of freedom a goal of American foreign policy why, years ago, just off our shores, did we not cry bloody murder at Battista before Castro, at Trujillo, at “Papa Doc” in Haiti, and at Samoza before his overthrow by the Sandinistas? Franklin Roosevelt, in private at least, was candid. Asked why we were in cahoots with so evil a dictator as Somoza, he replied, with a wicked grin, “Because he’s our dictator.”

For years in the ‘80s Saddam was our dictator in his war with Iran. We aided him greatly, and, were figs the country’s chief export, we can be sure no GI would be there today. The second verse of Chesterton’s hymn begins

From all that terror teaches
from lies of tongue and pen
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men….

The first casualty of war is truth, which is why, along with all the dead, wounded, and bereaved, war is always cause for remorse, never for exhilaration.

Not that I question the sincerity of Vice-President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle; on the contrary, what’s disturbing is their passionate conviction of the rightness of their cause. And they spell it out in detail in published papers such as the “Project for a New American Century” (note the title) written in 1997; the “National Security Strategy” released in September of last year; also in Robert Kagan’s rather eloquent book, Of Paradise and Power.

The reasoning is as follows: the United States has just entered a long era of American hegemony. We are, and intend to remain, the dominant strategic force in both Europe and East Asia. Beyond that, we are prepared to stake out interests in parts of the world, like Central Asia, that most Americans never knew existed before. Because we are so powerful militarily we are ready to deal with such dangerous countries as those represented in Bush’s “axis of evil.” If other countries wish to join us in these vital missions, fine, but we are prepared to go it alone. If to others preemptive wars are illegal, so be it; but they are part of the National Security Strategy. By contrast Europe is militarily weak. The days of Napoleon and Bismarck are long over. Today European countries are busy sharing sovereignty and their economies. In their military weakness it is natural that they should favor the force of law over the law of force; that they should see in place of “rogue states,” “failed states”; that they should look favorably on the UN and askance at America’s unilateralism. The Security Council is a substitute for the power they lack. So, in Kagan’s famous phrase, Europe is from Venus, and the United States is from Mars. And the world should be grateful.

What are Christians to make of this far-flung imperial rule? You will recall that in the fourth chapter of Luke it is written: “And the Devil took him up to a high place, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, ‘To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me.’”

American Christians need forcefully and fearlessly to remind our leaders that it was the Devil who tempted Jesus with unparalleled power and wealth. And it is the Devil in each American that makes us love to feel powerful.

Small wonder the Pope sent a Cardinal to tell President Bush God was not on his side. No wonder the Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, and the Coptic Orthodox Archdiocese of America—all these national church bodies opposed the war, as did the Security Council and virtually all world opinion.

The cost of Christian discipleship is rising in America. Christians after all press for a world governed by an urge for compassion, not by a will to power. And powerful nations have always to be reminded of Ezekiel’s lament over proud Tyre: “Your heart was proud because of your beauty, you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor,” and to remember Shakespeare:

But man, proud man
Drest in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

America’s Christians also must ask who is to pay for this war if not those who always pay: the poor and particularly their children. They will be met by closed doors at Head Start programs and at community branch libraries, and by ever longer lines at health clinics. For sure we know that the ranch at Crawford, Texas, will not be up for sale; that Halliburton that earlier gave Vice President Cheney over $30 million in severance pay, now has received, with no competition, a multi-year contract for work in Iraq worth many illions of dollars; and that according to the IRS, tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda save American businesses $75 billion a year—the Administration’s first estimate of the cost of the war. American hegemony in the world has its counterpart here at home in the hegemony of the rich and powerful.

And the war in Iraq doesn’t spell the beginning of the end, only the end of a beginning. As Bill Buckley said, “Iraq is only a convenient first step.” When Iraqis rule Iraq, they will be our lraqis. We are there for oil all right, but oil less for fuel than for power. We want our hands on the spigots of Middle East oil. That way we’ll enormously influence the economies of the world from Chile to Japan. I am reminded of the Athenian spokesman who said, as Athens prepared to invade a smaller neighbor, “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Before winding up, I would like to address the question: “What are we going to do about North Korea and ther unfriendly countries intent on owning their own nuclear weapons?”

It was a critical coincidence that the Cold War and nuclear weapons arrived on the scene together at the end of World War II. Admittedly nuclear weapons were a horrifying expedient, but so too was the threat they presumably kept at bay—world domination by a totalitarian power.

But now the weapons and the Cold War are untangled, which should allow us to see anew that nuclear weapons represent “forced cohabitation with honor, a shotgun marriage with final absurdity” (Jonathan Schell).

Something else has also changed. No longer can it be argued that nuclear weapons are solely for deterrence. Growing apace, nuclear proliferation is far more an invitation than a deterrent to catastrophic conflict. And that raises the question: “How can nuclear proliferation be stopped as long as the current nuclear powers consider nuclear weapons indispensable to their own power?”

What the United States and other nuclear powers have been practicing is really nuclear apartheid. A handful of nations have arrogated to themselves the right to build, deploy, and threaten to use nuclear weapons while policing the rest of the world against their production. The fact that India and Pakistan successfully obtained these weapons was totally predictable, as nuclear apartheid has no more chance of succeeding than did racial apartheid in South Africa.

That is why Kofi Annan repeatedly says, “Global nuclear disarmament must remain at the top of the UN agenda.” Shouldn’t nuclear disarmament also be at the top of the churches’ agenda?

Pope John Paul II, the National Council of Churches, and other religious leaders have frequently expressed their moral outrage at nuclear weapons. To people of faith, God alone has the authority to end all life on earth. All we human beings have is the power. As such power is clearly not authorized, the mere possession of nuclear weapons must, in the sight of God, be an abomination. Further to entrust the use of such destructive power to a handful of people, all of whom are fallible and some malicious, is reckless, to say the least.

Likewise generals and admirals of many nations, our own included, such as General George Lee Butler, former commander of the US Strategic Air Command, and Admiral Andrew Goodpaster, former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, have called for the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons under the most stringent possible inspection. Experience has told them that the possession of nuclear weapons by some states is the strongest stimulant for others to acquire them. Therefore these military leaders view the multilateral, verifiable abolition of nuclear weapons as the world’s best chance to prevent further nuclear roliferation.

The International Court of Justice at The Hague unanimously called for completing a treaty on nuclear elimination. Three years ago, pursuant to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, pledged an “unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

But the Bush Administration has changed course—drastically. Far from furthering disarmament, the recently signed treaty with Russia calls only for the storing, not for the dismantling of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon plans to develop “usable” nuclear weapons for “preemptive action” against “evil states,” a policy that would continue to be in blatant violation of international law and one certain to alienate more allies and create more terrorists. Finally, the administration is bent on spending now, in hard times, billions of ollars building a missile shield when the enemy is less a rogue state than a band of stateless rogues, more apt to come to harm us by boat, bus, or small plane than by an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Clearly it will not be tomorrow or the next day that our government will be persuaded to accept a time-bound framework in which all nuclear weapons will be abolished. But if today, religious people start thinking about it; if with a quickened sense of conscience, we Christians begin to speak out, joining with others in writing, lobbying, and demonstrating, then slowly, surely, the promise of a nuclear-free world will defeat the peril of nuclear war.

Americans are blessed to live in a democracy. In a democracy dissent is not disloyal; what is unpatriotic is subservience. Apathy in the face of evil is morally unacceptable. Consequently, the sobering, demanding question is not “why abolish nuclear weapons?” but rather “why not?”When thinking of the war in Iraq and future preemptive attacks, let us remember Thomas Mann: “War is a coward’s escape from the problems of peace.” Certainly peace requires more courage than war, especially when super-patriotism stirs the blood and narrows the mind, constricting the heart. And, God knows, humility is far nobler than pride. As regards the abolition of nuclear weapons, let me close with Abraham Lincoln’s words to the Congress in December of 1862 about the abolition of slavery, words no less pertinent to nuclear abolition: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must dis-enthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country”—and let us add, the world.

Let us pray the final verse of Chesterton’s hymn:

Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall;
Bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation,
aflame with faith and free,
Lift up a living nation,
single sword to thee.

Amen.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., born in New York City in 1924, became a peace movement legend in the 1960s and 1970s when he was chaplain at Yale. Subsequently he spent a decade as minister of Riverside Church in New York City and another three years as head of SANE/Freeze; he remains active as a writer and lecturer. This speech was presented upon his acceptance of the Union Medal, presented by Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, on May 15, 2003.

©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation

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