If I Die at the Hands of Another: A Christian Case for Nonviolence

If I die at the hands of another, please do not let them say that I would have been better off killing first.  Please do not let them say that I would rethink my faith in Christ’s words, that “whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it” (Lk 17:33).  Do not let them say that it was naïve to take seriously the commandment to “Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt 26:52).  Do not let them say that this world would be any better, any safer or more decent, had I participated in the violence that occurs daily, here and across the world.  While many people do and may always disagree with me, I do not for one minute believe that a willingness, eagerness, or even preparedness to commit acts of violence makes me or you safer, and in the wake of the violence in Connecticut and the current debate over gun control, I feel compelled to explain why.

First, let me lend some personal credibility to my position.  A common response to words like the ones that I have written above, a response that I have received more than once, is that when it comes down to it and the world “goes to Hell” around me, I will change my tune.  I will be wishing that I had a gun in the holster, ready to aim and fire to protect myself and my own.  In response to this criticism, I want first to recount some of my own history in regards to gun violence.  When I graduated from college, I began teaching in an inner-city area of Birmingham, AL, which was at the time the sixth most dangerous city in the US (it is now tied for third).  Many of my students wrote in journal entries about relatives being shot and killed, and on multiple occasions I physically intervened in fights between teenage boys much bigger and stronger than myself.  Violence was very much a part of the reality that these kids lived in, and I became increasingly aware of that as I entered into their world.

One day during class, we heard helicopters flying overhead and police sirens flooding the neighborhood.  The school was put on lockdown.  I learned initially that there was a gunman on the loose in the neighborhood.  At some point, I found out that this person had called in a phony crime to report, and then opened fire on the responding officers.  At least one of those officers was killed.  As I was in the classroom with my students, responsible for their well-being, at no point did I feel that I or anyone else would be safer if I was carrying a firearm or any other weapon.  Nor did I feel afterwards that I ought to start carrying a weapon to work; that my students would benefit from guns in the classroom.  We went into lockdown, did what we could to keep the children safe, and thankfully none of our students or teachers were harmed.  (Another incident that stands out occurred last October, when I traveled to Haiti.  We were driving down a country road when a political demonstration stopped traffic.  Before we knew it, we were ducking down in our seats as heavily armed police forces fanned out and began firing live ammunition from assault weapons into the trees and bushes around us.  Again, I did not wish for a gun to clutch for safety.)

Of course, others may have had similar experiences and not felt the same way.  My point in sharing this is not to say how you or anyone should react, but merely to put to rest any notion that I am simply naïve about violence, or that my views are merely untested theories of how I would feel were my life in danger.  With that out of the way, I can address the question of where my views on violence, specifically as a means of personal protection, come from.  The answer is complex, a mix of faith, personal experience, and hard, sobering facts.  To briefly address the latter, the statistical evidence is clear about the dangers of gun ownership.  States with high levels of gun ownership have higher homicide rates (Harvard Injury Control Research Center); gun owners are 50% more likely to be shot dead by their own hand than by another person (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and states with stricter gun-control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence (the Atlantic Magazine).   In terms of self-defense, in addition to the above-mentioned statistic about gun owners posing greater risk to themselves than a supposed attacker, a study by University of Pennsylvania found that people carrying guns were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during muggings than those without.

From the perspective of the Christian faith (a faith that I hold deeply), we should not be at all surprised that guns make us less safe, not more.  More broadly, we should know that meeting violence with violence is not the path set out by God: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Mt. 5:38-39).  It is not that Jesus welcomed death.  He had a mission to advance love, to advance justice, to promote peace and nonviolence, to foster solidarity among all people.  At times, death seemed near, but Jesus actively avoided it, escaping from the grasp of his would-be captors (Jn 10:39).  But sometimes following the call to love requires us to make that final choice between saving our own lives and following the conviction that violence and bloodshed are not the way of God, and having the faith to believe that God protects us even in death.  Jesus faced this choice.  He had told his disciples to turn the other cheek, but when the Romans came for him, one of those disciples pulled his sword to protect Christ himself.  In that moment, Jesus commanded him to put his sword away, went on to state clearly that the sword is not a means of salvation or even protection, and accepted that his mission necessitated that he face death.

No one said that faith is easy.  The question for those of us who follow the Christian faith is whether we take Christ at his word, and, if so, whether we have the courage to follow in his footsteps and the faith to believe in the promise of new life.  Do we believe in Jesus’ vision of the Reign of God?  Certainly we have examples of others that have tried to follow in those footsteps, and in our society we honor those men and women as witnesses to a better world.  We honor and remember Martin Luther King, Jr., who died committed to nonviolence but also played a pivotal role in making the US are equal nation; Mahatma Gandhi, who, too, lived a life of peaceful resistance and died a violent death, but also blazed a path to Indian independence; Archbishop Oscar Romero, who opposed the soldiers that eventually murdered him, but also challenged the indigenous Salvadorans that were being oppressed to abandon violence as part of their resistance.  We remember and honor the other martyred women and men of Central America, who knew that their deaths were imminent, yet stood by the people that they served with love and nonviolent resistance.  We rightly recognize these people as heroes and servants of God.  We do not see them as weak, as running towards death, as refusing to take responsibility for their lives or the lives of others.  Quite the opposite: we see them as affirming life, working diligently to protect it, and sacrificing their own lives for the sake of a better world, one in which violence is not embraced as a path to peace.

The fact is not only that nonviolence is the way of Christ, but that by telling ourselves otherwise, telling ourselves that a gun in the holster will protect us and make our world safer, we are clinging to the illusion that our lives will always be in our own hands.  We are striving to reject the reality of death, refusing to accept that there may come a time when we simply are not in a position to protect ourselves.  This truth certainly frightens me, but in succumbing to that fear, in clutching a gun to gain peace of mind, I am endangering myself and the people that I love far more than any gunman, for the gun that I own is so much more likely to harm myself or them than to protect us.  Innocent men, women, and children die on the streets of our cities, die by accident in their homes and vehicles, and die in schools like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook.

The day of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, I was in a hospital room with a very ill six-week-old niece and her mother.  Standing next to her bed at Children’s Hospital, watching the events unfold on the television, learning with horror the confirmed death count and the ages of the victims, I was struck with the conviction that no child should suffer if it can be avoided.  I was in a building filled with sick children, most of which were there through nobody’s fault, and hearing of the deaths of children who died because we did not try hard enough to protect them.  Yes, one man committed this act, but we have seen this happen time and time and time again, and done virtually nothing to prevent it.  I, personally, over the last few years have been more strongly committed to nonviolence than ever before, more convinced of the dangers that guns pose to society, and yet where was I after seventeen people were shot in Tuscon?  Where was I after seventy people were shot in Aurora?

We need to build community, we need to live lives of love and compassion, and we need to care for our brothers and sisters suffering from mental illness.  But we also need to abandon the myth that violence will protect us.  We need to look at the facts of gun violence, and those of us of any faith need to examine with clear heads and honest consciences what that faith tells us about the path to life and peace.   And yes, we need to limit the number of guns in our homes and streets, eradicate the most dangerous of them, and recognize that guns are dangerous not only in the hands of the most violent of us, but of people in general.

If I die by a gun or a knife, or by some other form of violent attack, please do not let them tell you that I would have been safer with a gun, safer trying to kill or be killed, safer ignoring the hard facts, ignoring the tenets of my faith, safer in refusing to stand up for the very Christ that stood up for all of us with his life and death.  We take a stand by working to build a better, safer, more loving and responsible world, not by letting this world frighten us into endangering ourselves, our families, and our communities.  Our salvation is not to plunge into the darkness of violence, but to walk in the light of peace.