Tag: American Empire

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

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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.

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23. Conclusion: A Christian pacifist in the American Empire [part one]

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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.

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Cold War redux and the Empire’s demise

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Ted Grimsrud—November 11, 2025

At the end of World War II, the leaders of the United States faced one of the most fateful crossroads in the history of the nation. What kind of relationship with the Soviet Union would they pursue? Since the Russian Revolution in 1917, the relationship had been adversarial. When Hitler declared war on the US following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, new possibilities and necessities opened up for US/USSR relations. Shouldn’t our enemy’s enemy be our friend? “Friend” would be too strong of a term for what followed, but over the next several years the Soviets and Americans formed a successful alliance that defeated the Germans.

The Cold War

As the War wound down, US leaders envisioned a new adversarial dynamic. The Soviet Union had a long history of being threatened, even invaded as in the Napoleonic wars, efforts by the West to abort the Russian Revolution, and the invasion from the Nazis. As the Soviets looked to the postwar era, the need for security would define their disposition toward the world. On the other hand, the US had hardly been under serious threat during the War and emerged with an expansive sensibility oriented toward establishing the nation as the single world leader.

The US could have gone in two different directions. One would be to respect and seek to find ways to accommodate Soviet security needs. The other would be to see the Soviets as an intractable adversary. The Americans chose the second. The alliance of World War II became a “Cold War.” The US sought, most of all, to enhance its military superiority. Between 1945 and the end of the Soviet Union, the US initiated virtually every step of intensification of the conflict. The Soviets could never match America’s lead in military capability, but they could establish a rough sense of “mutually assured destruction.” This dance deepened both blocs’ warism. Eventually, the Soviets could not keep up. Their empire imploded.

The Cold War victory left the US at another fateful crossroads. A question similar to 1945 posed itself to American leaders: Would they seek to establish a collegial and mutually respectful relationship with the new Russia? Would they recognize the major shift from the ideology of the Soviet Union? Or would they see the demise of the Communist empire as an opportunity to enhance the global power of the US as the world’s single superpower?

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The sorrows of empire

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Ted Grimsrud—November 7, 2025

The realities of the American Empire were hidden right before my eyes when I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the violence we perpetrated on the world was not hidden, it just was not part of the story we told about America. Now that I know more, I am shocked that I could have been so positive about my country. I attribute my failure to see to the power of the embedded theology of uncritical nationalism. Like most Americans, I was invested in believing the best and filtered out everything that would challenge that belief. In this post, I will give a quick overview of what I did not see with my rose-colored glasses.

The Truman Doctrine established the template for US intervention “everywhere in the world” shortly after World War II. It remains in effect down to the present. I sketch here the history of American interventions of varying severity. These engagements have been truly global, as even this quick survey will illustrate. In future posts, we will look in a little more detail at two momentous sets of interventions, America’s post-Cold War continuation of the adversarial relationship with Russia and America’s support for Israel.

The first intervention of many

Soon after World War II, American leaders justified military engagement in Greece to resist Soviet “expansionism.” As it turned out, the Soviets did not join the conflict that emerged over struggles over Greece’s political future. They kept the agreement of the Yalta Conference regarding the postwar world. Central and eastern Europe were in the Soviet “sphere of influence” (where the Soviets intervened); the Soviets recognized Greece as part of the British sphere.

In Greece, indigenous leftists fought with a right-wing monarchy that the British wanted to restore to power. By embracing military aid to the monarchists, the US affirmed the military action taken by the British beginning in 1944. The British action predated any of the military actions that the Soviets took likewise to assert their “sphere of influence” over noncooperative Soviet bloc nations. The first use of violence to resist self-determination came not from the Soviets but from the British. When postwar British leaders determined that Britain would need greatly to curtail its engagement in sustaining its empire, they encouraged the Americans to “pick up the reigns.” In Greece the Americans intervened on behalf of anti-democratic interests. The Greek civil war resulted in a victory for the right-wing forces. The victors installed a military dictatorship that oversaw an unjust political system that lasted for many years.

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The quest for a unipolar world order

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Ted Grimsrud—November 4, 2025

The several years following World War II emphatically stamped the United States as an imperial power, not one that would seek to further the ideals of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech of 1941 (such as self-determination and freedom from war everywhere on earth). As articulated in Harry Truman’s 1947 “Truman Doctrine” speech, instead the US would commit itself to be ready to intervene militarily everywhere on earth in order to defeat its enemies. Though the practices of the American Empire in the quarter century after World War II contradicted the ideals of the Four Freedoms, most Americans embraced an uncritical nationalism that prevented them from a clear-eyed view of their country’s actual way of being in the world.

From the colonial era through World War II, the North American colonies and the US pursued a domination agenda. From the start, the colonies utilized the superior firepower of European weapons to displace indigenous peoples and created an economic system that required coerced unpaid enslaved labor. While the American Empire could have made choices that moved in more humane directions, the odds for such humane choices always remained small. At the end of World War II, American leaders faced perhaps the greatest (and last?) opportunity to choose for the more humane. The US could have actually committed to the ideals of the World War II purpose statements that reflected the long-stated democratic hopes in the American tradition.

A choice of paths

American leaders in late 1945 faced two basic options. One, the US could have pursued a multipolar world order. Such had been hoped for (but not achieved) with the League of Nations after World War I. Then, during World War II, many leaders expressed the hope that this time the great powers might do it right. They hoped for structures that would allow for many different power locations that would find ways to cooperate. These hopes led to the creation of the United Nations. This time, unlike with the League of Nations, the United States embraced its role as a world leader. In fact, this time the world leadership organization would be located in the US.

Or, in contrast, the world order could be based on the dominant power of a single nation and its close allies. World opinion at the end of the War did not allow for an open affirmation of such an approach. The two powers (Germany and Japan) whose open quest for world domination had been so devastating lost the War. No other power would dare advocate such an approach. However, the War ended with a single nation having achieved a dominant global stature that had never before existed. The US could seek dominance without openly claiming to.  

The US found option two to be irresistible and embarked on a 50-year effort to establish and sustain a unipolar world order. However, the US “victory” in the Cold War did not result in American “full spectrum dominance,” an achieved unipolar world order. Rather, the years since the end of the Cold War have seen a steady diminishment of American power. Can the American Empire give up its quest for dominance and affirm the emerging multipolarity?

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The war that changed everything

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Ted Grimsrud—October 31, 2025

The American embrace of World War II as the “Good War” played a major role in the shaping of my embedded theology and its uncritical nationalism. This embrace hid from me the realities of that war and its impact. Due to World War II, the American Empire embraced a vocation of world dominance. The US government established three pillars of domination during the war—the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons regime. These pillars played a central role in the transformation of America into a national security state—with disastrous consequences.

Early in the 20th century, the US moved to the brink of being a world power. However, the final step proved to be difficult. It would take some major world-shattering events before the country crossed that brink. In World War I, the Americans played a secondary role. They remained reluctant to get “entangled” in global affairs after the war ended. They refrained from joining the League of Nations. American momentum toward colonial expansion at the end of the 19th century slowed a great deal.

When global tensions intensified in the 1930s, the US remained mostly on the sidelines. The tensions did finally reach a breaking point. Japan’s violence towards China led to a full-on war. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by declaration of war by Great Britain and France. President Franklin Roosevelt made clear that the US sided with Britain and China but still insisted that the US would not participate beyond providing military and economic support. Finally, the US did join the war full-on—and that war changed everything.

Preparing for engagement

The Americans greatly accelerated their arms production and in other ways readied to go to war during the two years after the European war’s start. During that time, Roosevelt sought to persuade the country to move toward full engagement. As part of that effort, he articulated what were, in effect, purpose statements for America’s entry into the war. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech in January 1941 was followed by the Atlantic Charter a few months later.

In Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address, he spoke of plans to ask Congress to approve weapons for Britain. He introduced the “the four essential human freedoms” he sought to further: freedom of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear. These ideals, widely expressed, soon became a shorthand for America’s war aims and remained central in pro-war propaganda. As Roosevelt discussed each “freedom,” he claimed to seek their realization everywhere in the world. This idealistic aspiration mobilized popular support for the nation’s engagement in the wars against Germany and Japan. It then animated calls US leaders made for continued military preparations and interventions in the years after World War II.

In August, Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill created the Atlantic Charter that outlined the Allies’ war aims. It shaped what the Allies said about their purposes for fighting and shaped the postwar world. The Charter’s key points included to eschew territorial aggrandizement and to affirm “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and equal terms of trade to all nations. Together, the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter state the ideals that American leaders would claim to seek to fulfill.

Entering the war

As Japan became more aggressive in China in the early 1930s, the US increased its support for the Chinese military. A couple of key moments closer to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 pushed the tensions to a breaking point. The US imposed an economic embargo on Japan that led Japanese leaders to panic regarding their access to vital materials. Roosevelt also ordered the American Pacific Fleet greatly to expand its presence in the Pearl Harbor base located in the American colony of Hawaii—an expansion perceived by the Japanese as highly provocative.

Though looking for opportunities to escalate the conflict, Roosevelt likely did not anticipate that the American fleet would be devastated by a sudden attack on December 7. Japan’s aggression led to a transformation of American opinion. Congress approved Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war on Japan on December 8. For a brief moment, uncertainty remained about war with Germany. Adolf Hitler, though, ended the question whether Congress would declare war on Germany when he declared war on the US on December 11.

With the Pearl Harbor setback, the US only slowly responded militarily. In time, given their significant advantages in resources and their resolve to retaliate, American forces inexorably moved toward Japan. By the summer of 1945, the Americans had all but won their victory as Japan’s military was in shambles and its air defenses non-existent.

Hitler’s declaration of war had surprised American leaders. They were not prepared for an immediate military response. In fact, not until June 1944 did US troops land on European shores at Normandy despite Joseph Stalin’s pleas for a sooner engagement. In the meantime, the main theaters for the European wars were on the eastern front following Germany’s surprise attack on Russia in June 1941. Eventually, though, the Soviets managed to slow and then repel the attack. By the time of Normandy, it had become clear that the Allies would defeat Germany.

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The tragic American Empire story in light of the gospel

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Ted Grimsrud—October 24, 2025

I recognize my upbringing as a proud citizen in the world’s most powerful empire to be part of my identity. As I described previously, I experienced an eventful meeting between two world-defining stories—the American Empire met Jesus’s gospel of peace. American Christians tend to see faith and nation as fully compatible, even mutually reinforcing. In contrast, for me their meeting was a collision that forced me to make a choice. It had to be one story or the other.

I chose the Jesus story to be my defining story—and chose against the American Empire. That choice led me to affirm Christian pacifism and turn from the uncritical nationalism central the Empire story. I started to interpret the story of the American Empire without blinders. At the same time, I found the Bible to be a key source for a peace-oriented, anti-empire defining story. My fundamentalist Christian teachers had asserted a high view of the Bible as direct revelation from God. However, such an assertion had not protected them from uncritical nationalism. Rather than rejecting the Bible when I rejected fundamentalism, I started reading the Bible in a different way. I no longer ignored Jesus’s peace teaching as I had been taught; I made it central.

The basis for stepping away from uncritical nationalism

When I began to read the Bible for peace, I noticed its critique of uncritical nationalism. I noticed the Bible did not teach the submit-to-the-government message as Americans assumed. If the Bible be central, I would choose Jesus’s gospel of peace instead of uncritical nationalism. The Old Testament provides a template, in Torah, that critiques all human territorial kingdoms. Torah pointed to a new kind of kingdom committed to justice and the wellbeing of all its people. The Old Testament kingdom, though, in practice evolved ever more toward injustice, militarism, economic stratification, and corruption. The brokenness grew to a point where the prophets saw the kingdom’s leaders not as agents of God but as enemies of the original vision of a just society.

Eventually, those who retained a commitment to Torah made sustaining those convictions more important than remaining loyal to any kind of territorial kingdom. The story continues with Jesus’s ministry. He announced the presence of God’s kingdom as a non-territorial communal expression of the ways of Torah. Echoing Genesis 12, Jesus’s kingdom message meant to bless all the families of the earth. This blessing would not come through a close connection with territorial kingdoms (or nation-states). Rather, the blessing would come through the witness of countercultural communities that put convictions about the ways of Torah at the center.

Does this story have relevance for our contemporary world? Let me identify four biblical themes that speak to life amidst the world’s empires. (1) The practice of justice should define the aspirations of societies that seek to be healthy. This justice will center on care for the vulnerable of the community since a society cannot be healthy without the good health of those most easily exploited and discarded. (2) People in power should always be treated with skepticism. Power tends to corrupt. People in power tend to be deluded by their commitments to sustain that power at all costs. Such people should be pushed to guide the society toward justice with an expectation that they will likely tend toward serving their own interests and not those of the vulnerable in society. (3) The “horses and chariots” problem tends to define territorial kingdoms and leads to the proclivity to prepare for and engage in warfare (warism). The accumulation of weapons of war favors society’s wealthy and powerful and leads to devastating conflicts. (4) Throughout human history (and in the Bible’s stories), territorial kingdoms and nation-states have provided some of the central rivals to God as the objects of human trust. This type of idolatry, as Israel’s prophets show, leads directly to injustice.

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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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