Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article from All-Creatures.org

Christianity and pacifism

From Jon Hochschartner, SlaughterFreeAmerica
October 2022

I continue to try to find a way into Christianity. It’s most culturally familiar for me, but also, and this might sound overly cynical, I think becoming more fluent in the dominant religious language will make me a more effective activist.

I’ve been adding a lot of meditation passages lately, so I’m going to take a break from that. I need to make sure I’m fully memorizing them and actually absorbing some of their meaning. When I next incorporate new ones, I’m thinking of adding a couple of my own choosing.

As far as I can tell, Eknath Easwaran doesn’t say you can’t choose your own passages. He talks about people writing him to ask whether such and such passage is suitable for meditation and he lays out the criteria he uses to determine that. So I think it’s OK. I’m not sure, but I’m making an executive decision that it is.

I want to add the Peaceable Kingdom lines from the Bible. I want to add a shorter selection from the Sermon on the Mount. The one Easwaran chose is intimidatingly long. I also am considering an animal welfare prayer that’s frequently misattributed to Saint Basil, but was actually written by the Social Gospel leader Walter Rauschenbusch.

I continue to try to find a way into Christianity. It’s most culturally familiar for me, but also, and this might sound overly cynical, I think becoming more fluent in the dominant religious language will make me a more effective activist.

I wonder if Leo Tolstoy could provide such an entry. He was a vegetarian and I don’t think he believed Jesus was divine. Tolstoy’s absolutist pacifism could be a bit of a stumbling block, though Eknath Easwaran has a similar commitment to Gandhian non-violence. That’s probably been the hardest part of the latter man’s teachings to get my head around.

I have a great deal of respect for the position, but it’s difficult for me to stick to when taken to its logical extreme. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi's advice to British citizens in the event they were invaded by Nazi Germany isn’t something I could advocate for others or hold to myself. Maybe a more spiritually evolved version of me could, but certainly not now, if I’m honest.

“You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions,” Gandhi said. “You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

I think absolute pacifists are far more right than they are wrong — perhaps they’re correct 9 out of 10 times — but it’s difficult for me to say there is never an instance when violence is necessary. My understanding is Gandhi conceded the need for an armed police force. I don’t quite understand the distinction between this and conceding the need for a military force. Isn’t the rationale fundamentally the same?

Of course, I can just ignore the absolute pacifism. People have been ignoring their spiritual teachers on such matters since time immemorial. On the whole, it’s unfortunate, but I think admitting the need for unpleasant actions in some situations is an understandable concession to the flawed world we live in.

Anyway, if I really want to find a way into Christianity, actually reading the Bible would be a good first step. I don’t think I’ve ever read more than bits and pieces of it.

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