Category: American Empire

A second conversion and a new community

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Ted Grimsrud—September 30, 2025

War and peace concerns filled the air during my college years (1972-76). I had to face the possibility of being drafted. I would have gone if called but did not like the idea. The draft ended the year I turned 19 and saved me from that. Then, I learned to know several returning Vietnam War vets. Those encounters showed me how traumatic their experience had been. I never had any kind of discussion in any of my churches about a principled opposition to war. No one ever said in my presence, to quote a John Prine song of the time, “Jesus don’t like killing, no matter what the reason for.” I am not sure I could have said what “pacifism” even meant. But the idea of going to war did weigh on my mind.

A decisive step

All of a sudden, though, something clicked for me. I took a decisive step, once and for all, and decided against war. I realized that I could never take up arms, and that in fact Jesus always opposed violence no matter how it might be justified. I did not make this move due to careful, thorough conversations with like-minded friends. I simply, at the right moment, accepted this conviction. That move set the direction of the rest of my life.

Though my turn toward pacifism meant a decisive turn away from Francis Schaeffer, he had pointed me toward an influence that became the catalyst for my pacifist conversion. I had discovered that Schaeffer had interesting colleagues such as a British scholar, Os Guinness. Guinness’s book, The Dust of Death, offered a wide-ranging and sympathetic critique of the American counterculture of the 1960s. He did note with respect the problems with American culture that protesters cried out against. He recognized the need for social change as advocated by the civil rights movement, the emerging feminist movement, and the antiwar movement. He affirmed many countercultural concerns but brought into the picture a Christian sensibility.

In the Spring of 1976, I read Guinness’s chapter, “Violence: Crisis or Catharsis?” He critiqued of the counterculture’s advocacy of violent revolution. He drew heavily on a French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, whose book, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, gave a good critique of the self-defeating nature of violent revolutions. It came clear to me—Yes, violence does not work! I immediately thought of war. I realized that I could never go to war. I realized I was in principle opposed to all war, a pacifist. Happily, I was so unfamiliar with that term that I did not recoil against it. I accepted it, found it helpful, and still do.

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How does one step away from warism?

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Ted Grimsrud—September 26, 2025

When I began college in the Fall of 1972, I had recently registered for the draft. I knew I’d go willingly if called. I accepted my place in the American warist environment—the willing conscript. By the time I finished college in the Spring of 1976, I rejected warism. I considered myself a pacifist and knew I would never go to war or support war in any way. This post will describe what led to this radical change. In the Fall of 1972 turmoil reigned in the United States. At that point I remained mostly oblivious to the currents that swirled as Richard Nixon wrapped up his presidential campaign and won a landslide victory—and planted the seeds that led to his fall with the Watergate break-in. I knew that the Vietnam War seemed to be winding down, though when I started my freshman year the draft remained a possibility.

I started at Oregon College of Education (OCE) in Monmouth, a small town about 15 miles west of Salem. OCE mainly focused on training schoolteachers, but it had evolved to be a general liberal arts college. About 3,000 students attended, mostly from small Oregon towns. Even though I knew hardly any other students, I felt surrounded by people like me. I found it to be a pleasant place to be, and I enjoyed my two years there. I felt fine with my classes. I could get by pretty easily, though nothing really caught my attention. Sports, not ideas or big questions, provided the connecting point with my new friends. In general, I experienced my first two years in college as a relaxed and congenial time. However, I did feel uneasy about my faith. I only cautiously brought up faith convictions with others. I had no luck in finding a church or fellowship group. I visited a few places but found nothing that seemed interesting or nurturing.

The ironic 1972 presidential election

I had exulted when Richard Nixon won the 1968 election. As far as I remember, I felt positive about Nixon during his first term. I certainly sympathized with him far more than his antiwar opponents. I rejoiced when the law changed to set the voting age at 18. I had long wanted to vote. I delighted that the first presidential election after the law changed would happen when I was 18. I proudly cast my ballot for Nixon and celebrated his resounding victory.

That I would have so unthinkingly supported Nixon indicates that my embedded theology of uncritical nationalism remained operative. I later learned of deeply problematic Nixon warist policies as well as of his many character flaws. Those flaws played out in ways that would have been in tension with the values of my familial embedded theology, but at the time I remained ignorant of them. Ironically, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had more compatibility with most of my values. His integrity, genuine Christian faith, and convictions about helping life be better for vulnerable people should have rung true for me. In relation to the peace convictions I would later embrace, McGovern stands as the most attractive major party candidate in the entire 20th century. The mainstream media did not give McGovern a fair shake, but even if they had, I would not at that time have been attracted to the policies he advocated.

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Competing embedded theologies

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Ted Grimsrud—September 23, 2025

In these posts, I wrestle with why so many Americans, including so many Christians, have such an uncritical attitude about the violent behavior of our country. Uncritical acceptance of a deep-seated warism flies in the face of the peaceable values most Americans and just about all Christians understand themselves to have. How can this be? To address this question, I reflect on my own life, especially my transition from an American patriot to an antiwar pacifist. I have focused on what I call the “embedded theology” of uncritical acceptance that I grew up. As I grew, though, I also absorbed a different kind of embedded theology that made my transition to a pacifist possible. This different embedded theology played an even more decisive role in the evolution of my convictions than the patriotic embedded theology. However, while I find the patriotic embedded theology difficult to name in clear ways, I find this different kind of embedded theology even more difficult to bring to the surface. I attempt to do that in this post.

Looking for a sense of coherence

When I first became a Christian, I sought to make sense of life. The Christianity I initially embraced offered a coherent worldview but ended up being at odds with what I actually sought. I took several years to figure that out. Even as I realized I needed a different kind of Christianity; I still needed more time to put the pieces together. The catalyst for the shift had to do with war and peace. However, that I could make the shift and that I make it quickly and free from trauma had mostly to do with the general orientation toward life provided by what I will call my familial embedded theology (distinct from the societal embedded theology I discussed in previous posts).

My new orientation became quite distinct from and, in time, antagonistic toward my old one. The way the transition happened—and its continued viability for me—makes me believe that all along I did not actually care that much about the certainty offered by fundamentalist Christianity. Rather, I sought the coherence that only an embrace of our essential human connectedness and love-centeredness offers. It just took some time for me to figure this out.

Growing up in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, I experienced the embedded theology of uncritical nationalism as pervasive. However, when it hit turbulence during the Vietnam War era, I readily replaced it. Something more basic to the way of being in the world that I got from my family took its place. As revised and applied through my new learnings and experiences, this different embedded theology actually provided the kind of coherence I sought.

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Fundamentalism and warism

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Ted Grimsrud—September 19, 2025

The connection between American Christianity and the preparing for and fighting wars has been long-standing. In this post, I will recount my own somewhat unusual path in navigating this connection. Growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s, I knew little of the wider world. The social and political currents I described in earlier posts certainly shaped the general sensibility of the world I grew up with. However, the impact on me was at most indirect. A key factor for me, in time, proved to be religious faith. Surprisingly, because my family had little religious involvement and my home community would have been considered largely irreligious. Yet….

On the margins of Christianity

I grew up on the margins of Christianity. In my small hometown, Elkton, Oregon, my family attended a tiny Methodist congregation until I was eight years old, when the congregation closed its doors. Our town hosted only one other congregation at that time, a community church. After our Methodist church closed, we would go to Sunday School at that church most weeks.

As a child, I was on my own in terms of faith convictions. I had a lot of curiosity and talked about religion with friends though I do not know why I was so interested. I don’t remember anything from my experience of going to church that ever piqued my interest. I didn’t get challenged by my parents to think about such things. I suspect I had a natural curiosity about the meaning of life and the religious dimension. My interest in God and the big issues intensified as I got older. I had a self-conscious perspective when I entered my teen years inclined to conclude that God did not exist. But it was an open question that I had a keen interest in.

The first move for me came during the Spring of my sophomore year in high school. A friend of mine died of cancer when he was in his twenties. His death left the community grief-stricken. During his funeral, I felt for the first time a strong sense of the presence of God. From then on, I no longer thought of myself as an atheist. About a year later, I started spending time with a somewhat older friend who had became active in a Baptist congregation that had recently started in town. My friend gently engaged me in conversations about faith. He mainly conveyed a general message of God’s love and a simple process to gain salvation. That process mainly involved the seeker praying to God a prayer of repentance for one’s sinfulness and of a desire to trust in Jesus Christ as the savior whose death on the cross opened the path to God’s forgiveness. Finally, one evening in June 1971, I offered the prayer my friend had described to me. I experienced this as a moment of genuine change.

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Resistance to the American Empire

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Ted Grimsrud—September 16, 2025

As the US embarked on a quest for world dominance after World War II, leaders’ quest for “full spectrum dominance” did not meet with total support from Americans. Opposition to newly expansive US warism received little media attention, though. It rarely effected policy makers. I knew nothing of the dissenters as a youth in my little corner of the world. For the story I tell in this series of posts, though, we should note the small pockets of dissent—both to indicate that American warism was not unanimous (people did dissent) and to recognize that the peace efforts that did shape my convictions beginning in the mid-1970s had important antecedents. 

Antiwar voices

In the late 1930s, many spoke in opposition to the US joining the War. Congress, which would not support a war declaration proposal from the president, did pass legislation for a draft in 1940, but only narrowly. Large movements of anti-war sentiment arose both from the right (the America First movement of traditional American isolationism) and the left (the popular antiwar movement that had arisen in the early 1930s after disillusionment with World War I). However, this war opposition almost immediately evaporated after the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. With the Japanese attack the “America first” conservatives quickly jumped onboard in favor of what was widely perceived to be a war of national defense.

During negotiations in Congress on the draft, representatives from the various peace churches (led by the Quakers) managed to get alternative service for conscientious objectors included. With the popularity of the war and the government’s prowar propaganda, though, only a tiny fraction of draftees took the CO option. Most of the 12,000 draftees who performed alternative service were traditional, somewhat apolitical pacifists. Only a few thousand would have been opposed politically to the war effort. In addition to the legal COs, about 6,000 war opponents went to prison as draft resisters—though the large majority of those were Jehovah’s Witnesses whose refusal to cooperate with the draft had to do with the government refusing them ministerial exemptions, not their political opposition to the war effort.

Out of the tiny handful of COs that we could understand to be anti-empire did come important leadership for the resistance that found expression in years following. Imprisoned COs such as Dave Dellinger and Bayard Rustin developed their ideas about war resistance and nonviolent social change while spending the war years in prison and emerged afterwards as important peace movement leaders. It was also the case that the experience of many of the COs during the War had a significant formative impact. For example, numerous Mennonite COs shaped educational, service, and antiwar efforts among Mennonites and in the wider society in postwar years. Mennonite pacifism tried more to influence the wider world toward peacemaking.

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American warism

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Ted Grimsrud—September 12, 2025

One main characteristic of the US during my lifetime has been the centrality of “warism” to the nation’s sense of itself. By “warism” I mean war as central for the nation’s identity. Signs of the US as a warist society may be seen in all the money that the nation spends on preparing for war and the war-related priorities in the operation of our government. American warism may also be seen in the bipartisan consensus on miliary spending, one area where Democrats and Republicans always agree. Most of our government spending goes for war and war preparation. And the US spends way more on military-related items than anyone else in the rest of the world.

The myth of redemptive violence

What I will call the “myth of redemptive violence” grounds American warism. This myth is the quasi-religious belief that we gain “salvation” (that is, a sense of security and of meaning and purpose) through violence. People throughout history have put tremendous faith in using violence for such “salvation.” The amount of trust people put in such instruments may perhaps be seen most clearly in the amount of resources they devote to the preparation for war.

Theologian Walter Wink described how this myth works. His book Engaging the Powers asserts “violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death.” This myth remains invisible as a myth. We assume violence to be simply part of the nature of things. We accept violence as factual, not based on belief. Thus, we remain unaware of the faith-dimension in accepting violence. We think we know as a fact that violence works, is necessary and inevitable. We do not realize we operate in the realm of belief in accepting violence.

This myth operates on many levels. Americans assume the need for violent state power to sustain order. We willingly subordinate ourselves with few questions to this power and regularly encounter the myth on the level of popular culture. The books we read, the movies and TV we watch reiterate the story of creation as grounded in violence and chaos. Thus, we need military and police violence to subdue chaos and dominate enemies. We must subordinate ourselves to people in authority who exercise this necessary and redemptive violence. We join in the exercise of violence against our nation’s enemies when called upon. We accept one of the world’s most powerful police systems and one of the world’s largest prison systems.

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On being a proud American

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Ted Grimsrud—September 9, 2025

An essential part of the expected disposition that characterizes citizens of the United States, it seems to me, is pride in being an American. This sense of pride characterizes Americans going back to the origins of the country. Perhaps such a sensibility reached its highest peak in the years of my youth in the afterglow of the victory in World War II and prior to the major stressors of the 1960s Civil Rights conflicts, war in Vietnam, and other challenges to the nation’s self-satisfaction. Though the prideful sensibility faced disruptions in the 1960s and ever since, it remains a significant element of many people’s senses of identity: “I am proud to be an American.” Certainly, that feeling of pride shaped my sense of identity during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. However, I came to see such pride as problematic when I learned more about the actual character of the American Empire.

Pride in America as a factor in warism: The impact of World War II

This sense of pride, I suggest, has fostered a kind of false consciousness among many Americans. We assume (our embedded theology tells us) that we should be proud to be Americans, an assumption that can lead us to believe that we have something to be proud of. That is, we seek to justify the feelings of pride rather than considering that perhaps we should not be so proud. A big part of the hostility that greeted the social change movements of the 1960s surely stemmed from perceiving those movements as threats to the sense of pride.

Along with the push toward false consciousness, the pridefulness also makes people susceptible to being manipulated to support war. One of the main justifications for pride in America, especially for those raised in the afterglow of World War II as I was, is the perceived American record of fighting in just wars and winning them. As a child, I found it important to believe that the US had never lost a war—and never been involved in an unjust war. In a kind of vicious cycle, many Americans uncritically believe that we show our country’s worth by going to war. We tend to recognize the wars by definition as just simply because our country fights in them.

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Blank check nationalism?

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Ted Grimsrud—September 5, 2025

How is it that Americans so easily devote so many resources for war? We spend almost as much on war as the rest of the world combined each year. This does not make the US military particularly effective. Since 1945, few US military interventions achieved their objectives (for example, Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and Ukraine in our present moment). Yet failed interventions have not much hindered the growth of military spending or the continued willingness of the American Empire to intervene.

My own experience growing up in this country may offer a clue about such seeming contradictions. I had a pleasant youth. Yet, when I turned 18 I without thought registered for the draft and expected to end up in Vietnam killing our “enemies.” I expected to act in ways contrary to the pleasantness of the first 18 years of my life. Though the Vietnam War violated what I believed about the goodness of the US and about how I should live my life, I would have gone.

Though I lived with moral seriousness and cultivated living justly and peaceably, I unquestioningly accepted the state’s right to take me from such a life and train me to kill on command. I accepted the state’s right to demand that I contradict my morality. I would take this path to unjustly deny the rights of people our leaders call “enemies” mainly.

Central to this big contradiction are the ways we are shaped from early on in life. Our environments condition us to accept certain values, obligations and orienting principles about life. The beliefs and practices of our families and the interests and pressures that come from the various institutions and cultural assumptions that surround us shape us toward warism.

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Is pacifism relevant in the American Empire?

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Ted Grimsrud—September 2, 2025

For the past fifty years, it seems, I have lived in increasing despair as an idealistic citizen of the United States. I have tried to think my way through what seems to be an irresolvable and terminal problem. As a child, I accepted that the US was a model society, guided by God to be a force for freedom and democracy in the world. This message formed a core part of my identity. Increased knowledge disabused my idealistic view of the US. I reached adulthood at the same time our military withdrew from Vietnam amidst many revelations of extraordinary injustices.

However, my idealism about freedom and democracy did not diminish. I turned my focus from the American nation to Christian communities. As I turned from blank-check nationalism (the willingness unquestioningly to let the state turn us toward war—what I call “warism”), I turned toward a strand of Christianity that understood the message of Jesus to be central for our social ethics. In the nearly half-century since those two decisive turns, I have struggled endlessly with a central dilemma. How do I live as an American citizen in the context of learning evermore of the injustices and idolatrous violence of the American Empire? I have developed a strong critique of this Empire based on Christian theology and a pacifist reading of the Bible. However, such work has placed me in the midst of another wrenching dilemma. I draw heavily on the convictions of a religion that is itself deeply implicated in the dynamics of the Empire.

I do not write in hopes of actually resolving these dilemmas. In offering a progress report, I mainly want to continue the struggle. I hope for more conversation on the issues I raise. I will present the case for Christian pacifism as a lens through which to view the Empire and the Christian faith. How does that make sense?

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