Conclusion: A Christian pacifist in the American Empire [part 2]

Ted Grimsrud—November 21, 2025

I have found Christian pacifism, properly understood, to be a most helpful framework as I try to understand the world I live in. In this series of 24 blogposts, I explain how I came to affirm pacifism and what it means for me. I have also showed how my pacifism shapes the questions I raise and criticisms I offer in relation to the American Empire. In this final post, I offer reflections on moving forward to live in the Empire in light of pacifist convictions.

Rethinking power

Christian pacifism posits two central affirmations— (1) We are called to resist and to seek to overcome evils in the world (“evil” most simply understood as that that harms life) and (2) We must work against evils in ways that do not add to the evil. The practice of pacifism helps us hold these two affirmations together. Committed to overcome evils, we engage the American Empire, the source of so many evils in our world. Committed not to add to the evil, we seek to find consistently nonviolent means as we strategize and act. One of the main ways human beings have tended to add to evil is to resist the wrong through the use of violence and coercion.

The American Empire cannot realistically be transformed in any immediate way. To try too hard to transform the Empire may lead us to take moral shortcuts that change us in ways that result to our actually adding to the evils that the Empire is doing. Violent resistance uses evil means to seek what might be good ends and may transform the effort into something that adds to the evil. On the other hand, many people try to reform the Empire through efforts that all too often actually result in compromise with the Empire on key issues and little genuinely changes.

We should recognize, then, the problematic character of conventional, top-down politics. Let’s use the term “Constantinianism” for politics that both tries to control history by making it turn out right and uses top-down power that is coercive and dominating. The embrace of such methods ensures that our efforts will add to evil, not overcome it. Pacifism understands power in a different way. It recognizes that we are not in control and that the only way to overcome evil is always to act consistently with love. One of the great insights of Gandhi and King was to recognize that ends and means must go together. We only achieve genuine healing when we act in healing ways. Violent and coercive means cannot achieve healing ends.

Such a philosophy accepts the relative powerlessness of one’s approach— “power,” that is, as commonly understood. To overcome evils, we need to recognize that we will only succeed when we bring healing in ways that do not add to the evil. With our world’s power politics, such commitments mean that one may need to act outside of the usual political structures.

Rather than an unrealistic, utopian fantasy of an ideal world, pacifism provides a way to see this world. It recognizes that the seeming irresolvable crises of our world follow from years and years of systems that choose for violent and exploitive approaches to human social life. Our choice now, if we want to resolve those crises, will be simple. Pragmatically, we must choose for the good and against evil no matter what. Otherwise, we are doomed. If it is true that we can’t see how the Empire can realistically be transformed, nonetheless we must still act in ways that are consistent with the healing we need. We do this no matter how “unrealistic” and doomed to fail such acts may seem to be. The essential first step in such an approach is simply to recognize the character of the US Empire as a force for evil in the world and to resolve to quit giving it our loyalty. No support for its warism, no consent for its economic system, and so on.

Love is the way

Christian pacifism has more to do with means and present life than with ends and future outcomes. We orient our lives toward creating sustainable lifestyles and public policies for the sake of future generations. However, we recognize our limited ability to control outcomes, and, remaining committed to peaceable means, we refuse to let good ends justify unjust means. The hope that love empowers is hope in the inherent value of our humanness, hope that love elicits love, hope that truth is unconquerable. A pacifist sensibility believes in the healing of creation. However, this belief does not stem from a guarantee of certain outcomes at the end of history. Rather, it understands “end” as purpose more than as final resolution. Our purpose is love and because of that we may trust that love brings healing.

The relevance of hope does not focus on short-term transformation of the Empire through political striving or sophisticated policies. It has to do with convictions about the inherent value and fruitfulness of all acts of caring, witness, solidarity, and repair. We hope such acts have concrete and transformative political effects. We seek to be as insightful as possible. However, we recognize that the best we can do is to stay consistent to the vision of Torah and the gospel for life’s inherent value and meaning even when things do not visibly change. The conviction that love matters most serves as the ultimate foundation of hope. Pacifism, with its commitment to not make effectiveness the most important criterion for action, may not lead to the most obviously pragmatic or realistic short-term outcomes.

However, pacifists should insist that their politics actually may be the most pragmatic in the long run. For example, to find mutually acceptable solutions to conflicts leads to sustainable peace in ways that defeating opponents cannot promise to do. Warfare in the Western world has led from one war to another as the sources of the conflicts remain unresolved. Those who are defeated seek to find future ways to retaliate and to defeat the victors, and the conflict continues.

Pacifism recognizes that the only way to find genuine peace will be to value everyone and to include everyone as a legitimate part of the human community. To do otherwise will ensure that future conflicts will arise. However, pacifism also recognizes that human beings are social creatures with a natural tendency to affiliate with each other. We base our hope not so much on expecting human beings radically to change and figure out ways to go against our aggressive nature and get along with each other. Rather, we believe that we naturally affiliate, though we have been powerfully socialized toward conflict. Because of our affiliating nature, we may hopefully work to learn skills and find paths to reconciliation. Every act of restorative justice amidst conflicts, no matter how small, will be valuable and hopeful.

Create space to be human

The domination of warism and the myth of redemptive violence seem irresistible in our world. The strength of the current that pushes the US toward self-destruction seems all too powerful. Until we actually reach the abyss, though, people who hope for wholeness on earth will (must!) always seek to slow the current enough that it may be redirected. However, I see little indication that the strong current toward the abyss will actually be redirected. This is our paradoxical, almost unbearable situation: We must redirect our culture away from the deadly outcome toward which we are headed. But we actually have very little hope of doing so.

In the eight decades since the end of the most destructive war in human history, the nations of the world have failed to utilize the possibilities for peace that were present in 1945. However, many citizen-led efforts have pointed toward new possibilities. In the US, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s remains especially instructive and inspiring. In the few words I have left here, though, I want briefly to mention a different example.

The movement in Central Europe that in the 1970s and 1980s resisted Soviet domination gives us a crucial image. Activists recognized that large-scale, top-down reform seemed impossible. Violent resistance against the systemic violence of the communist regimes tended actually only to empower the sword-wielding state. The state always has more guns, and violent resistance stimulates the state to crack down harder. So, thoughtful resisters, recognizing that acquiescing to the system was intolerable while overthrowing it through violent resistance was impossible, articulated their hopes in exceedingly modest terms. They spoke simply of creating spaces to be human. In doing so, they self-consciously rejected the story of reality told by the System. At the same time, they did not devote their energies to large-scale reform nor to violent overthrow through direct revolution. They focused on creating relatively small spaces where they could build communities, where they could express creativity, and where they could patiently chip away at the portrayal of reality that filled the official media—that is, to become human.

As it turned out, we now know about these small acts of resistance and counterculture formation because they coincided with large-scale crises of legitimacy at the top of the Soviet Empire. The System crumbled and major changes happened. And, as it turned out, sadly, the changes did not go as far as needed in enabling genuine self-determination and disarmament. For example, the US-led militarization of Western alliances through NATO absorbed several of the former Soviet-bloc nations. These new NATO members provided wonderful markets for military hardware and strongly supported NATO’s disastrous proxy war versus Russia in Ukraine.

Nonetheless, this emphasis on creating spaces to be human remains instructive and inspirational. If it is the case that a top-down transformation for peace seems impossible in our current warist national milieu, the possibilities for small-scale spaces for “being human” in peaceable ways do exist. And we never know what impact cultivating those spaces might have on the bigger picture.

We should also notice that the ways of creating spaces to be human practiced in the Central European freedom movement were not separated from an awareness of issues on national, social policy levels. The activists did not require “seats at the table of power” to embark on their transformative practices—but they were ready and willing to participate in the larger arena when opportunities arose. And in some cases, as the breakdown of Soviet domination grew, they participated in ways that remained at least somewhat faithful to their core convictions.

For pacifists within the American Empire today, our ways of making peace, our practices of resistance, and our creating of alternatives do not depend upon “getting seats at the table.” To be effective over the long term we likely need self-consciously to avoid extensive compromises that would gain approval from political and corporate elites. Pacifists do need to think in ways that allow for exercise of effective influence on as wide a scale as possible while they remain faithful to their core convictions.

The core conviction that rises above all others, I believe, is the conviction that all of life is precious. The biggest failure of the American Empire going back to its very beginning have been practices that repudiate that conviction. The biggest cost of the Empire’s many wars and other practices of domination has been the loss of a sense of human solidarity, that we are all precious beings who need to be treated with respect and care. As a direct consequence of World War II, the war that changed everything, the US has for the past 80 years greatly accelerated its process of diminishing the value of human beings. It has created and deployed weapons of unimaginable mass destruction. It has sought for domination around the world at the cost of millions upon millions of deaths that have resulted from its wars—each one fought for unjust causes using unjust means. An unwavering commitment to the preciousness of life provides a powerful interpretive key for understanding and responding to the American Empire’s national security state with clarity, conviction, and resolve.

[This is the 24^th and last of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The 23^rd post, “The Fatal Alliance: The US and Israel,” may be found by clicking on this link.