Ted Grimsrud—November 18, 2025
My journey as an American citizen may be characterized as a radical reversal. I switched from a young adult ready to take up arms to serve the wishes of my nation’s leaders to an advocate for unrelenting resistance to those wishes. The reversal happened quickly back in the mid-1970s due to an intense simultaneous immersion in both a pacifist reading of the message of Jesus and a critical reading of the American Empire in light of the American war on Vietnam.
My sincerity in wanting to follow Jesus helped me to turn from the uncritical nationalism I grew up with. Jesus’s message helped me be ready to see the immorality of my country when it became apparent in unprecedented ways at the end of the war on Vietnam. The timing was significant. The hold of my embedded theology of uncritical nationalism was weakened due to Vietnam at precisely the moment I encountered the pacifist Jesus for the first time.
These blog posts have traced how I have deepened both the biblical grounding for my peace theology and my critical interpretation of the history of the American Empire in the years since 1976. I read that history through the lenses of Christian pacifism. Those lenses helped me ask questions I never would have imagined as long as I affirmed the uncritical nationalism I grew up with. When I have learned how the dynamics of imperialism have always shaped US policies, I have seen an endless series of choices for domination and exploitation that have determined the character of my country—a character full of violence, domination, and exploitation. Such choices have put the country on what now seems like an irreversible path to self-destruction.
In this concluding set of reflections, I think about how Christian pacifist convictions might contribute to the task of moral engagement within our empire. As I accept this task with utmost seriousness, I also recognize the relative powerlessness of the Christian pacifist. We do not command a massive following that we might mobilize to transform society. And the kind of power we seek to exercise is the power of service, of presence with, of compassion and love. That is, it is a kind of powerless power.
Christian pacifism
I use “pacifism” mainly to refer to a set of convictions that leads a person to oppose war. The initial meaning for me when I became a pacifist centered on the conviction that I could never support war. As I have lived with pacifism as a centerpiece in my moral orientation, I recognized it to be much broader than simply a refusal to go to war. I now think of pacifism most basically as a conviction that love matters more than anything else. No loyalty or ideology or institution or ideal can take priority over the responsibility to see each other person in my world as precious. I gain this conviction about love from Jesus, who taught that the greatest commandment is to love.
I believe Jesus taught the centrality of love in order to speak of Torah’s heart. Torah does not simply indicate a list of rules. It reflects the living core of the way of life to which God called the people of the promise that makes visible God’s will for humanity. God liberated the enslaved Hebrews from the Egyptian Empire so they would know God’s liberating love and live it as a witness to the world. Torah’s way of life had at its core Sabbath observance (meaning rest and healing that contrasts with life in the Empire). A Torah-centered community would always remember God’s liberating love that paid special attention to vulnerable and oppressed people and that judged the health of the community on the basis of the health of the most disadvantaged.
When understood in light of Jesus, Torah, and the prophets, the Bible as a whole becomes a book of the politics of love. A key application of the Bible will be to use its political sensibility as a guide to how to respond to the politics of whatever nation one finds oneself within. A central element of this sensibility, as we saw above in our posts about biblical politics, will be a deep suspicion of all nation-states, a rejection of uncritical nationalism, and a refusal to support war.
To keep the Bible’s politics central will place people of faith mostly outside the centers of power. They will keep a critical distance from the interests of nation-states. At the same time, the call to love neighbors requires them to work for the peace of the city where they find themselves (Jeremiah 29). They will seek relentlessly to overcome evil, but only in ways that do not add to the evil. The active nonviolence of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., shows that a commitment to resist evil without adding to the evil helps activists discern paths to healing that may be more effective than violence-oriented interventions. Pacifism cannot claim always to be the most effective form of resistance to injustice. However, it helps us to perceive distinctive avenues to change and transformation. These avenues may well be ignored by or even invisible to those who turn to violence as a necessary element of resisting injustice. As well, pacifism offers insights into the value of compassion and presence in the real world and helps to underscore the relevance of service as a social strategy.
The American Empire
I grew up as a citizen of what I saw to be a benign American Empire. This America was a bastion of democracy that embodied these famous words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We only fought necessary and just wars for the sake of the good—and we always won them. My parents had both served willingly as US soldiers during World War II. Our family did not make a show of patriotism, but we were proud Americans.
I expected to serve in my country’s military, even to go to war if called upon. Though I had little interest in enlisting, I was ready and willing to go if drafted. The possibility that I would indeed be called upon loomed large as the Vietnam War raged on. Up until I went to college in 1972, I had little sense that this war did not fit with my ideals about America and her wars. In high school, I enjoyed my history classes and paid attention to the news. America’s intentions in Vietnam, as they had always been in earlier wars, were honorable. I felt no tension between my moral values and the likelihood of being part of my nation’s current war.
My disposition toward the American Empire changed gradually during college. At first, everything I learned supported my embedded patriotism. Only at the end of my sophomore year did I begin to see some new things. Specifically, I met a number of Vietnam War veterans who helped open my eyes. One vet in particular told me stories of suffering, injustice, extreme violence, and brokenness. He did not so much critique the war as simply help me see its pain and trauma. This exposure led me to pay more attention to the actual story of the war—and, for the first time, to be open to the possibility that the American Empire might not be so benign.
Then, suddenly, the backpack full of blank check nationalism I had struggled (without realizing it) to keep on my back started slipping and soon fell completely off. My awareness of critiques of the Vietnam War grew when I made my pacifist commitment and started to try better to understand why war is so wrong. At the same time, as I began better to understand the Bible and other elements of peace theology, I also began better to understand the story of our Empire.
The story of the US, when read with a pacifist perspective, becomes a story of conquest, domination, greed, expansion, and spiraling self-delusion. We have many current crises—broken democracy, out of control militarism, environmental crises, unaccountable policing, economic stratification, and white supremacy. These seem not so much recent aberrations of a basically healthy nation but innate characteristics of a fundamentally unjust society. The crises are the end point of a long, gradual descent. The baked in toxins that came from the genocide of indigenous Americans and enslavement of forcibly imported Africans finally poison the entire body politic.
The benign Empire I affirmed had a positive reputation, not fully unwarranted. Economic opportunity, freedom of religion, creative mixes of the music and food from the various cultures of the American melting pot, and other virtues all exist. However, the positive reputation fed into blank check nationalism that blinded me (and most others) to the true nature of our Empire. A combination of my further education about the dark side and of my embrace of the gospel of peace as a lens through which to perceive the Empire led me to an entirely different orientation.
Christian pacifism within the Empire?
The gospel of peace seems to call people to two tasks that often may be in tension. One task is to love: work for healing in the world and bless all the families of the earth. The second task is to critique: offer a sharp No! to the powers that be insofar as they oppress and exploit. Pacifism means to engage, to act to help make lives whole. This requires direct participation in the lives of human beings in the real world. Yet, according to core pacifist convictions, the participation, while often oppositional, must always also be shaped by love and must remain nonviolent. And it must always refuse to give too much loyalty to fallen, coercive, and often idolatrous human institutions such as nation-states, large corporations, and political parties.
The gospel contains the call, “come out from her” in relation to empires, idolatrous societies, and other social structures that compete with God for ultimate human loyalty. Yet we also have the clear message, “seek the peace of the city where you find yourself.” The “come out” seems mainly to be a call to moral separation from the practices and values of injustice and domination that characterize human nation-states and cultures—more than a call literally to separate yourselves and live in isolated, self-contained enclaves.
To hold together being present in “the city” with being agents of peace and healing will lead to various strategies. We need communal solidarity as we engage with society’s brokenness and ideological oppressiveness. Pacifists need close connections with others who share their convictions in order to have the clarity of mind and the critical awareness to resist the pressure to turn from core beliefs. Study groups, worshiping communities, public protests, shared service projects, neighborhood organizing, alternative businesses (e.g., food co-ops, farmers markets, credit unions), and many other expressions will be necessary guidance and sustenance.
In the Empire, we face constant pressure to accept the story of the Empire’s goodness and worthiness of loyalty. Blank check nationalisms underwrite the warism, unjust economic system, practices of police control and retributive criminal justice, and “divine right” of the wealthy to determine the nation’s policies. Living in the US means being surrounded by popular culture that in countless ways reinforces idolatrous American values and makes resistance very difficult.
Those who would step away from those values and live according to the moral vision of the gospel must work at it. They need critical media literacy that will help them perceive the ways even “objective” news reporting in the corporate media empowers the Empire’s agenda. They need to understand the inherent violence that has shaped the American social system from the beginning. They need to be able to identify and critique the various anti-human assumptions so omnipresent in our culture—such as deference to people in power; the need to punish wrong-doing; various dynamics of “othering” the non-white, the non-wealthy, the non-heterosexual, and the non-male; and passivity in face of corporate domination and environmental destruction.
The challenge of living in the Empire but not of the Empire, of being a healing presence while also resisting the systemic evils, requires a positive vision for what human life can be. The reasons for pacifism should be understood, cultivated, and self-consciously embraced. We need to know why we seek the kind of world we seek in order to sustain the quest.
[This is the 23rd of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 22nd post, “The Fatal Alliance: The US and Israel,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 24th post, “Conclusion: A Christian pacifist in the American Empire (part two)” may be found by clicking on this link.]
Thinking Pacifism 
Wow! An inspiring summary of your journey! May God continue to bless you and use you to lead, inspire and correct us all (I first wrote “others” but the othering was just too obvious!).
Ted, I really appreciate where you’ve gone with this post… recognizing the difficulties, identifying some of the ways of presenting and living out actual “good news” that goes beyond hoped-for individual “salvation” (never really the focus of either Torah or the NT writings, although beginning to edge into the latter).
As you’ve alluded to, one of the hardest things is to undue Empire from within. That is, to rise to enough political power to potentially diminish undue power (which often takes violent or coercive forms), and not to be seduced or compromised by that power.
That is one way of expressing why I’ve devoted a large portion of my discretionary time for over 8 years to seeking to bring power back down to more local “centers”, whether cities or even smaller units, or potentially “communities of communities”. And this via already-proven structures and methods… and new emerging ones and the tweaking of existing ones (e.g., participatory budgeting, “local living economies”, genuine town halls – for candidates, issues, etc.).
I encourage everyone to follow curiosities or senses of “calling” and both plug into what’s already going… locally especially… as well as to find out what else is happening beyond one’s locality. Some of it might be able to be applied in one’s locality.
I could give a long list of principles and excellent organizations and groupings of them… into what I think one could call a “movement” of sorts. To keep this readable, however, let me just throw out this:
As a lifelong Protestant, until recently I’d paid very little attention to what goes on in the Catholic world, especially when it comes to social services, “Catholic social teaching”, political involvement, etc. Many non-Catholics are, like I was, generally aware of Catholic Worker communities, or (unapplied) “Just War” theory. But there is so much greater breadth and depth of thought and activity, of which not even most Catholics are aware.
Pope Francis was largely responsible for seeding some of the recent encouraging internal Catholic or Catholic-participating developments. I was pleasantly surprised by the readability and inspiration of Fratelli Tutti (encyclical of 2020) and recommend it highly. It was soon followed (and/or preceded by) Francis’ call for a “politics of love”, as you well used the term also. It’s also sometimes called “a better kind of politics”.
Out of that commitment came a small but important move established by the US Conf. of Catholic Bishops, “Civilize It” (CivilizeIt.org). It calls on Catholics or others to sign a pledge for personal conduct as to conversations (depolarization), posture, etc., and points to some resources. Essentially, this is anti-Empire in nature and effect, to the extent people take it seriously.
What else is important is that in small ways, here and there, the ecumenical and interfaith efforts that Catholics and many Protestant groups have long participated in, is turning more practical. Among other things, they seek to bring peacebuilding and problem-solving collaboration among Christian churches, organizations, and also between Christian ones and those of other faith traditions. My sense is that motivation to work on this harder, producing lots of new initiatives, is one tiny “silver lining” to the horrible actions and posture of the current administration.