Five Rules for Faith Leaders for Peace
Remarks by Robert F. Ellsworth
Ambassador Ellsworth, formerly U.S. Ambassador to NATO and Deputy Secretary of Defense, is an active Episcopal layman. Ellsworth is co-founder of Hamilton Bio Ventures, LP, a life sciences venture capital fund in San Diego. He is currently a Vice President and was Chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was a Republican Member of Congress from Kansas in the early 1960s and a serving U.S. Navy officer at sea and ashore in World War II (Pacific Fleet) and the Korean Conflict (Atlantic Fleet).
St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral
San Diego, California
March 19, 2006
This morning I offer you five rules for faith leaders for peace. ..
First, Know where we are and how we got here. Only when you know these two things
can you guide others toward peace.
Second, Stand on your own foundations, not on the shifting sands of someone else’s point of view.
Third, Address yourself to those who can directly affect the prospects for peace or war - that is, serious political leaders. You must also address yourself to the pressures working on them. -
Fourth, Make concrete proposals for moving toward a sustainable environment of peace. This does not mean trimming your sails to what is practical for next month or next year, but it does mean keeping your proposals within the bounds of what God has given us to dream of.
Fifth, speak and act in the name of Christ – the Christ of our own day, not of some day gone by – and not in the name of some desiccated intellectualism no matter how robust its advocates may seem.
The First Rule: Know where we are and how we got here.
In my view we are the main protagonists in an historic and totally unprecedented clash of civilizations. This is the clash that Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard wrote about in the mid-1990s. In this clash, civilizations are defined largely by their religious faiths. The Iraq war has made the clash of civilizations much worse than it was.
The clash began to take shape in the 1960s when the Islamic countries of the Middle East undertook a resurgence of boundless ambition. They determined to come to terms with the modern world – the world of which the United States was the unchallenged leader. The resurgent Muslims borrowed nationalism from the West, but nationalism failed them. They borrowed the two great outgrowths of Christianity, communism and capitalism, both of which failed them. Oil revenues failed them except to build palaces and buy armaments. I know. I was there. They were failing to come to terms with the modern world, which rolled on without them. They lost Jerusalem, their third-holiest city – to that outpost of modernism, Israel. Islam means submission, but they became angry , both at us and at themselves.
Then in the 1970s Islamic fundamentalism took hold. More millions flocked to the mosque. The Haj became more popular than ever. Ramadan was observed more intensely. Jet aircraft and communications technology – globalization, if you will – enabled Islamic anger to spread and, for example, to bring Ayatollah Khomeini from
exile in France to power in Iran. He and his cohorts took over the American embassy and our diplomats in Tehran and held them hostage.
This globalization of a resurgent Islamic fundamentalism also enabled the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 (master-minded from a mosque in Newark), followed by the bombings of our embassies in East Africa, the destruction of the U.S. Air Force complex in Dhahran in 1996 (master-minded from Tehran), the murder of Wall Street journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, and of course the 9/11 2001 attacks on the two great symbols of American commercial and military power, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
You know the rest. The President and the Congress together decided to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq. The mass-psychological basis for these attacks was fear. The President, the Congress, and for that matter the general public, were shocked, and frightened by the aircraft attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. You remember that the President flew around the country in and out of various military bases for many hours, fearing further possible attacks on Washington.
These mass psychological effects were simply used by the neoconservatives to play on the political class in this country to foment the attack on Iraq. The politicians were provided by the neo-cons inside and outside the executive branch with warped “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction, links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime, promises that an invasion would be a “cakewalk” and “cheap” and “paid for by Iraqi oil revenues” and bring about a democracy that would provide a model for the rest of the Middle East.
Instead, there has been the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections in January and the gains scored in elections in Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon by Islamists. In Iraq itself, the renewed violence since the voting there has discredited the promise of democracy as an outlet for tensions, bringing religious parties – and their militias – to the fore.
In the three years since the attack the occupation has been so badly bungled that our vital national interests have been put at risk.
Perhaps the most egregious outcome has been the empowerment of Iran beyond the wildest dreams of the most imaginative ayatollah.
In the early going, many American church congregations and spokesmen joined the chorus of support for the war on Iraq. For example the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, expressed their religious enthusiasm for the war on Iraq in June 2003 when they unanimously resolved – on the basis of “Whereas” clauses citing weapons of mass destruction plus the just war doctrine – to “affirm President George W. Bush, the United States Congress, and our armed forces for their leadership in the successful execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, saw the war as an opportunity to proselytize Muslims. Jerry Falwell boasted in 2004 that “God is pro-war”.
So, you need to know where we are and how we got here.
The Second Rule: Stand on your own foundations, not on the shifting sands of someone else’s point of view.
This is a difficult rule to follow.
Who among us knew, in 2001 or 2002 or 2003 that the neo-cons’ point of view rested on such weak and shifting sands? Yet now it appears that the failure in Iraq may discredit the entire neoconservative agenda and restore the authority of American foreign policy realists.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an American foreign policy realist. For example, I wrote in The Washington Post of December 29,1999 – long before Governor Bush had entered his first presidential primary:
“The assumption that our values are universal is false because it is demonstrably untrue; immoral because of what would be necessary to make non-Western peoples adopt Western institutions and culture; and dangerous because it could lead to war.”
Politically, who among us had noticed that the 2000 presidential election was won by then-Governor Bush on the basis of his edge among church-goers? His margins of victory in key Electoral College states were provided by those who attended a religious service – in church, synagogue or mosque – at least once a week. Differences of age, race, gender, education and economic status were important, but religious practices were the decisive difference. The more times per week one attended a service, the more likely one was to have voted for Bush against Gore. If most of our own faith leaders did not know this, the Bush political team did and when it came time to exploit the fear that gripped the country after 9/11/01, they knew exactly where to turn for support for action.
So, stand on your own foundations.
The Third Rule: Address yourself to those who can directly affect the prospects for peace or war – that is, serious political leaders. You must also address yourself to the pressures working on them.
You, as a faith leader, must be sure to lead, not just preach to the choir in terms you know they will enjoy and agree with. Spend your time and energy mastering the first two rules (know where we are and how we got here, and stand on your own foundations) – then address your political leaders.
As you address these leaders, remember this: the political leaders of the United States dispose of more hard power and soft power in the world than the rest of the world put together .
Do not assume that they are venal or corrupt, but that they want to do the right thing. The pressures working on them, however, are not often in the directions in which you see the right. So it is up to you to marshal your arguments, and your like-minded collaborators inside and outside the faith community, to persuade the political class to pursue an agenda for peace.
So, address yourself to those who can directly affect the prospects for peace or war, and to the pressures that are working on them.
The Fourth Rule: Make concrete proposals for moving toward a sustainable environment for peace.
In my own view the most urgent summons for religion, in the geopolitics of the 21st century, is (1) the moderation of the clash of civilizations which are defined in part by religions; (2) the dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy, and (3) the remaking of world order on the basis of accommodation between civilizations.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, took a step on the path toward accommodation between civilizations when he hosted the inaugural meeting and formal launch of the Christian Muslim Forum in London on January 24. The forum will meet three times a year. Funding for the project has come from a mix of sources including grants from Christian and Muslim bodies, other trusts, and a start-up grant from the British government.
Dr. Williams says that two approaches to inter-religious dialogue are unhelpful. One is to claim an exclusive possession of the truth, while the other is to lose confidence in one’s faith and “slip into a world-view that assumes every religion is as good as another.”
The Archbishop’s Christian Muslim Forum had been preceded in 2004 and 2005 (under the auspices of the Anglican Observer to the United Nations) when the Rev. Eleanor Ellsworth (my wife) convened in San Diego – with 50 counterparts throughout the United States and Great Britain – a series of Anglican-Muslim dialogues focused upon the rule of law and related issues.
These modest initiatives are excellent but they require much more commitment, and leadership, and funding, than they have enjoyed so far.
In geopolitical terms an accommodation between civilizations would mean (1)
negotiating a qualified form of a Russian sphere of influence (Russia is historically Christian Orthodox), (2) defusing the threat of confrontation with China by encouraging
the reintegration of Taiwan with the Chinese Mainland, and (3) seeking a detente of strength with Iran (Shia Muslim and an aspiring nuclear weapons power).
I believe these three directions will prove inescapable within the next five years or so. I believe it is better to start now, rather than wait until some disastrous geopolitical defeat imposes a calamitous outcome on us.
So make concrete proposals for moving toward a sustainable environment for peace.
The Fifth Rule: Speak and act in the name of Christ – the Christ of our own day.
As the great church historian Professor Yaroslav Pelikan of Yale has written, Christians believe Christ has been the same, from the beginning of time to our own day.
Yet since the days of the fully human and fully divine Jesus himself the church has repeatedly had to find new ways of thinking and talking about Christ, as history has unrolled and the Holy Gospels have spread to other cultures and other languages in fulfillment of the Great Commission. Resilient and successful cultures – like the culture of Christianity – have found new ways of responding to a tumultuous world. Over the centuries, therefore, Christian doctrine has developed even on the most fundamental points. For example, the doctrines of the Trinity, of Christ, of grace, and of sin – all have been transformed.
In his own time and place, Jesus was a pacifist. Confounding the hopes of many Jews, he did not resist Roman oppression. After his crucifixion and resurrection – God’s victory over death and over Satan – Rome was still there and Caesar still commanded the state. Today Rome and Caesar are long gone, but Christ dwells in more hearts than ever before.
Christianity is a lasting success because it still promises and offers salvation to people as they are.
Those of you who have seen with your own eyes, as I have, the ruins of Hiroshima, Dresden and Berlin must realize that the military technology of our own day, in 2006, is far more lethal – and more widespread – than it was in those days of the American monopoly.
Today, in my view, a 21st century form of Jesus’ rejection of violence has acquired a compelling geopolitical morality with the advances, and the spread, of military technology. With each such advance, with each such spread, the temptation of political leaders in the West and in Islam to use their military options early rather than late seems to have become very great. Think of Iran, which seeks nuclear weapons and has a religion-based political structure. Think of Pakistan which already has nuclear weapons and a deeply unstable political structure. Think of al-Qaeda which has already wreaked havoc without nuclear weapons and is infused with hatred.
Let us therefore summon our courage and our openness to God, as we pray in the words of the Prayers of the People, Form II:
“Praise God for those in every generation in whom Christ has been honored;
Pray that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.”