Month: September 2024

On voting for warmongers—or not [American Politics #11]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 9 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—September 26, 2024

I still haven’t figured out what to do with my ballot for the 2024 presidential election. Our mail-in ballots arrived the other day and are sitting on our dining room table. There are some things I am certain about—I won’t simply throw the ballot away. I will vote (though not enthusiastically) for the Democratic Party candidates for the House and the Senate. I will not vote for Donald Trump.

However, I don’t know if I will vote for Kamala Harris. Unlike in the past, I will probably not vote for a third-party candidate. But I might leave that line blank. Or, a slight possibility, I might decide at the last minute to go ahead and vote for Cornel West (kind of for old times’ sake, I have greatly appreciated his speeches and writings over the years).

Almost exactly twelve years ago, I wrote a blog post: “Should a pacifist vote for a warmonger?” (plus, two follow-ups: “More thoughts about voting [or not] for a warmonger” and “Faith and politics [including voting]”). My answer, in relation to the re-election campaign of Barack Obama, was a carefully reasoned “yes.” That assertion elicited a truly enjoyable and lengthy conversation in the comments section of my post from a diversity of friends and other readers. Some agreed with me, and some did not. Those who disagreed were generally of a mind that not voting for president was a valid principled stance for Christian pacifists. Some who agreed with my decision to vote for Obama did not agree with my characterization of him as a “warmonger,” but were happy I was not sitting the election out.

What’s different compared to 2012?

Now, though, I am saying that I’m not yet persuaded to vote for Harris. What is different this time around? That is a challenging question for me. Before I looked at my 2012 post, I was not thinking about what I had decided back then. Now I realize that I am changing my argument. Why? Do I think I was wrong back then?

Continue reading “On voting for warmongers—or not [American Politics #11]” →

Finding peace in the Old Testament [Peace and the Bible #19]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 6 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—September 23, 2024

One of the first things that came up for me back nearly fifty years ago when I first thought of myself as a Christian pacifist was the question of the Old Testament. How can we reconcile all the violence of the Old Testament with the idea that Jesus calls us to be peacemakers? The first step for me at the time, and I think the first step for many, is to acknowledge that this is a problem but to emphasize the clarity of Jesus’s message for me. I’m not sure what the OT says, but I do know what Jesus says. The effect of this step, though, can easily be simply to set the Old Testament aside as being mainly a problem and not a good guide. I always felt uneasy about such a move.

So, one of my interests has been to work at reading the Old Testament as a positive resource for my peace convictions. I have done some recent thinking that has provided a sense of clarity about one particular angle that I want to outline in this post. I have long believed, and still do, that my pacifism does not depend on the Old Testament. However, I think pacifism is compatible with the Old Testament—and even benefits greatly from taking the Old Testament seriously.

Benefits from losing the promised land?

Lately I have read several helpful books about the Old Testament and Christian theology. At one point, I paused and thought about something I had read over and over. That was that it was such a terrible thing when the ancient Hebrews were driven from their territorial kingdom, having their temple destroyed and king dethroned. The entire story, it seems, revolves around that loss and an accompanying, long-lasting desire to restore this territorial kingdom and get their king back.

I was struck, though, with a sense that these assumptions might not be the best way to read the story. One of the books I read noted that the faith of the ancient Hebrews was established in a normative way before the people entered the promised land and established a territorial kingdom. The core elements of the faith—as found in the creation story, the exodus story, and the gift of Torah—existed independently of the territorial kingdom. As the story continues, the people enter the promised land, seek to embody Torah, establish a territorial kingdom, and, in time, lose that kingdom. Yet the peoplehood continued, based on that earlier foundation. And in the thousands of years since, the peoplehood has continued without (until very recently) a territorial kingdom. So, was losing that kingdom actually such a bad thing? In fact, might it be part of the story that territorial kingdoms are inherently problematic? Maybe the peace message of the Bible has a lot to do with precisely the point that faithful living is best pursued apart from taking responsibility for territorial kingdoms or nation-states.

Continue reading “Finding peace in the Old Testament [Peace and the Bible #19]” →

The most important election? [American Politics #10]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 27 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—September 16, 2024

I have always been interested in American politics and presidential elections. One of my oldest political memories is a dinner time conversation with my best friend’s family sixty years ago when we were lamenting that it looked like Barry Goldwater was going to win the Republican nomination over our more moderate favorites Nelson Rockefeller or William Scranton. I was ten years old. That was only the first of many disappointments for me about presidential politics.

Still, I feel like this current election is the worst in my lifetime. On the one hand, we have Donald Trump. Even with a long list of morally corrupt and warist predecessors, Trump seems to me to stand clearly as the worst person and worst leader ever to be president of this country. Yet, on the other hand we who cannot support Trump are given the major party alternative of a candidate who is up to her elbows in the administration of an overt and on-going genocide in Gaza and a US-initiated proxy war in Ukraine that is edging ever closer to a nuclear End Game.

The terrible irony for a peace-oriented citizen is that while we are being taught by the media that we live in a hyper-partisan age with extreme polarities between blue and red politics, on the issues that matter the most we face an implacable wall of bipartisan agreement. We don’t have the option of voting for peace. Both sides are all war, all the time. Probably the most disillusioning element of the consequences of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump has been the almost utter silencing of any kind of anti-war sentiment in the Democratic Party—certainly in relation to the proxy war in Ukraine and also largely in relation to the genocide in Gaza. The Democrats couldn’t even bring themselves to allow a short, innocuous, fully vetted speech from a pro-Palestinian speaker at their recent nominating convention.

Continue reading “The most important election? [American Politics #10]” →