Tag: American Empire

The tragic American Empire story in light of the gospel

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 5 Comments

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 to do; 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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Blank check nationalism?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 5 Comments

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?

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 2 Comments

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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Peace in Ukraine? [American Politics #17]

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Ted Grimsrud—August 20, 2025

I found what seems to me to be to be a good, short analysis of the current status of the war in Ukraine, an article “The Peace Delusion,” by a political analyst named Thomas Fazi, who writes regularly for the web-based magazine UnHerd. In a nutshell, Fazi suggests that the core issue in the struggle is the question of whether the United States will remain the single global hegemon or if we will transition to what many are calling a multipolar world order, where there will be several great powers that can manage to co-exist in relative peace.

Peace in Ukraine will require Ukraine and its US/NATO backers to acquiesce to Russia’s demands. It’s not simply recognizing Russia’s control over the various parts of eastern Ukraine that they have or will soon have taken over. “It’s about addressing the ‘primary roots of the conflict,’ as Putin repeated in Anchorage: that Ukraine will never join NATO, that the West will not transform it into a de facto military outpost on Russia’s border, and that a broader ‘balance of security in Europe’ be restored.”

Were those demands to be met, Fazi argues, the result would be “a wholesale reconfiguration of the global security order—one that would reduce NATO’s role, end US supremacy, and acknowledge a multipolar world in which other powers can rise without Western interference.” These demands have been stated clearly and consistently by the Russians since before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The reason why peace remains impossible in Ukraine is that such demands (and the resultant “reconfiguration of the global security order”) is simply something that “Trump—and more fundamentally the US imperial establishment, which operates largely independent of whoever occupies the White House—cannot concede to.”

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It is hard to imagine the United States finding healing

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 8 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—April 28, 2025

In the fifty plus years that I have been paying attention, I have felt that most Americans have been shielded from much of the brokenness of our society. Domestically, the people who suffer the most have generally been separated from the general population and shunted to unnoticed pockets of poverty and imprisonment. And throughout my lifetime, few Americans have been much aware of the brokenness we have visited on foreign lands through our wars and other interventions.

Now it seems that our political system has been degraded enough that the nation has put into power an administration that does not actually care that much to keep the brokenness hidden. And the future looks troubling for as far ahead as one can imagine. One could say that in light of our long history of causing harm around the world, we have a kind of grim justice being visited upon an ever-wider swath of Americans. However, you can be sure that the people at the top of our social pyramid (the ones most responsible for the suffering of the vulnerable at home and abroad) will themselves manage okay until the entire system collapses.

American delusions of goodness

I read something the other day that underscored my perception of the trouble we are in. David Brooks is a well-known columnist for the New York Times and author of numerous bestselling books on politics and social trends. He wrote an article in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic called “I should have seen it coming” that various of my Facebook friends have linked to. Brooks is a kind of never-Trump Republican, so it is not surprising that his article focuses on how disastrous the second Trump presidency is for the US. He makes some good points, in criticizing Trump, but it was a different aspect of the article that troubled me more (not that I am not also troubled about Trump).

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Theater of the absurd [American Politics #15]

~ Ted Grimsrud ~ 2 Comments

Ted Grimsrud—March 3, 2025

As I try to pay attention to the wider world spinning out of control and heading toward who knows what kind of fresh hell, I keep trying to reflect on my peace-oriented core convictions and to learn more about history. My core convictions remind me that the US seems bent on world domination and thus, by definition as long as this is the case, seems unable actually to contribute to world peace. Americans who do care about peace need to question the idea that there is some way in our current world for the US to play a constructive role in peacemaking. It has rarely happened in the past eighty years, and it doesn’t seem likely to be happening any time in the foreseeable future.

Two fantasies

From the questionable idea of the US role as an agent for peace comes the fantasy that the Biden/US/NATO policies in Ukraine were about something other than trying to take down Russia and seeking to further enrich US-based war profiteers through the proxy war. Many liberal pundits and corporate media reporters continue to push the idea that the war is a stalemate that can be turned in Ukraine’s favor rather than recognizing that Russia pretty much controls the situation and will heretofore call the shots with Ukraine on the brink of collapse.

Or, we have the fantasy that Trump is a genuine peacemaker who has a plan in mind that will lead to an end to the war. This second fantasy attractively serves as an alternative to the first. I am not as confident in my critique of it. However, because Trump also seeks US world domination and because he also seems to want to somehow squash China (hence, the motive to leave the Ukraine war to the Europeans and focus US energy on China), I actually see little hope that he genuinely seeks peace. We should also note that at the same time that Trump lectures Zelensky about peace he also approves an “emergency” allotment of $3 billion of weaponry to Israel in apparent support for the Israeli refusal to negotiate in the second phase of the agreed-upon ceasefire with Hamas and instead to plan for more violence.

The amazing dustup between Trump (with his faithful sidekick J.D. Vance) and Ukrainian president Zelensky on Friday was shocking theater. As never before we saw a US president being intensely argued with in public—and arguing back. I have no idea what was and is going on in the background and what the fallout will be from this angry display. Reactions I have read seem to show more about the various observers’ predispositions concerning these people than any particular insights about what was actually going on.

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Despairing political confusion [American politics #14]

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Ted Grimsrud—February 24, 2025

I have believed for a long time that the world will be better off when the American Empire falls from its stature as the most powerful superpower. For a long time, I hoped against hope that this fall would be voluntary, that somehow the US would choose to let go of its drive to dominate the world as the top dog and find ways to be collaborative in a multipolar world.

Is the American Empire falling our only hope for peace?

I now simply cannot imagine that a voluntary giving up of domination will happen. It seems likely that only the American Empire falling apart and involuntarily losing its hold of the world’s reins of power will save the world. And it seems like we are headed toward that outcome perhaps more rapidly than ever. This may be good for the world—though not if the US fights so hard against its demise that it takes the rest of the world down with it.

I don’t understand very well the details of what is going on right now. Obviously, we see a shocking assault on the federal government by the newly installed Trump administration, an assault that seems ill-considered, ill-planned, vicious and destructive for viciousness’s and destructiveness’s sake. At the same time, I do not trust or respect most of the critiques of Trump, et al, that come from Democrats and the mainstream corporate media.

It seems like an extremely important sensibility for me—though I see little evidence of this in most of the discourse on our current situation—to see that both sides in our current political alignment in this country can be, in fundamental ways, wrong. Trump’s (and his acolytes’) horrifically misguided visiting what may be irreversible damage on our country does not negate the Democrats’ own misguided politics.

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