CHRISTIAN ACTIVISTS FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE and justice try to join prayer and politics, evangelism and economics, prophesy and peacemaking. Our rootage in scripture, the church's social teachings, and the guidance of Christ and the Spirit give us both perspective on the world's ills and inspiration in our struggle.
As we act in the public arena, however, we inevitably draw upon not only our faith, but also political and economic concepts that help us make sense of our immensely complicated world. Sometimes a particular school of thought seems to have such illuminative power that we adopt large chunks of it to help us understand society, critique inequities, and work for social transformation. This worldview, combined with our faith perspective, gives us a particular political identity.
Leftist ideology is not the only kind of analysis that has influenced Christian peace and justice activists. Clearly, though, it has had a strong impact, including upon readers of this magazine. (Were I writing for another journal, I might be exploring the influence of conservative or rightist ideology on Christian political identity.)
I know of no one in the peace and justice movement who would say that they have been totally uninfluenced by the powerful stream of Marxist and non-Marxist socialist philosophy represented by such seminal figures as Owen, Moore, Fourier, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Debs, Thomas, Marcuse, Harrington, and others too numerous to mention. Even activists not particularly familiar with the classics of leftist thought have been influenced by the forceful ideas of the socialist corpus.
Liberation theology, perhaps, has done more than anything else to introduce Christians to socialist analysis. While not as Marxist as their detractors make them out to be, most liberation theologians acknowledge their conscious debt to Marxism and other modes of socialist thought. Many of us see our own view of the world as decisively shaped by liberation theology.
The appeal of a leftist perspective is almost self-evident for the activist who takes biblical faith seriously. The ideas and values expounded by the political Left--social and racial justice, equality, concern for the poor, defense of working people, suspicion of great wealth, economic democracy, cooperation--are far more consonant with biblical faith than the profit-seeking, competition, selfish individualism, consumerism, "trickle-down" economics, and defense of wealth that so often characterizes the political Right. Socialist thought also provides potent tools for analyzing political and economic systems.
HOWEVER, enormous changes are sweeping the world. All the states built self-consciously on Marxist socialism have either collapsed or been deeply shaken. The Soviet Union is gone. State socialism has been delegitimized. Leftist movements such as the FSLN in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador are undergoing intense re-evaluations of their worldviews, goals, programs, and strategies. Only repressive hard-liners, such as Chinese ideologues or Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, still cling to the old thought-forms.
What can Christian radicals learn from these tumultuous events? Have we at points been too attached to a particular view of politics and economics? Is this era challenging us to develop a new and more independent Christian political identity?
Undoubtedly, we always will need to draw upon political and economic theories in order to understand our world and work for its transformation. Because of the consonance between biblical faith and progressive thought, we may, more often than not, find ourselves drawing upon leftist ideas and theories and working along with progressives for social change.
But looking at life through a leftist lens--indeed, through any ideological lens--can also distort our view of reality, loosen our grasp on the gospel, and even harden our hearts.
People and movements operating from a leftist orientation tend to respond compassionately to the suffering of people oppressed by right-wing governments, but often have trouble empathizing with those mistreated by governments of the Left. Leftists organize almost exclusively to challenge oppression and injustice on the Right. By and large, they worked for and celebrated the downfall of Marcos and Pinochet, but not of Honecker and Ceausescu.
As the Good Samaritan story teaches, however, we are to respond with loving helpfulness to the robbed and beaten victim by the side of the road, regardless of who did the victimizing. God calls us to have hearts of compassion for all those who suffer. We fail the gospel if we are moved by the anguish of the oppressed in El Salvador and South Africa, but not by those suffering from government policies in Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, or Tibet. The God of the prophets calls us to resist all oppression.
For example, leftists rightly applaud the social, medical, and educational accomplishments of the Castro regime in Cuba. Yet many turn a blind eye to its religious and political prisoners, human rights violations, and dictatorial form of government. But why should the suffering caused by Castro's dictatorship be any less a matter of concern than the suffering of Chileans under Pinochet or Filipinos under Marcos?
A STRICTLY LEFT-WING perspective can also distort our view of our own country. American leftists have a withering critique of the United States as the leading capitalist nation. Christians certainly may have other reasons than leftism to raise a prophetic challenge to American culture. A leftist critique, however, can help to blind us to good things about the United States, things that have contributed to human liberation in many parts of the world. It can encourage in us a single-minded stance of resistance, of bringing the nation under judgment, of calling people to repentance, without acknowledging anything worthwhile in the United States, however partially upheld and embodied.
Leftist theory aims its biggest guns at the capitalist system. But Christians who rely too heavily on a leftist analysis of capitalism may find themselves without the tools either to examine the inadequacies of socialist economies or to explore whether any form of modern capitalism might offer something worthwhile to humanity. Christian radicals may so focus on the socialist ideal of the equitable distribution of wealth that they neglect how an economy must be organized to create wealth. They may find it hard to envision a system that maintains the market's special genius for stimulating initiative and productivity but intervenes politically to meet the many needs that escape the market's logic.
Is a more independent, less ideological approach emerging? We can see glimpses of it in our own movement's history. Such an approach was present in the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, which honored the American Dream, however flawed, rather than portraying the United States as the root of all evil. We saw it in the post-Vietnam War statement signed by many leaders of the peace movement, appealing to the victorious communist government to end its "grievous and systematic violations of human rights." We saw it in "Peace Pentecost '85," organized by Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C., when many of us were arrested in front of the Soviet Embassy to protest the butchery in Afghanistan. We read it in Sojourners articles covering the freedom movements in Eastern Europe.
We see it in Witness for Peace's political independence, and its willingness to challenge the former Sandinista government for its human rights abuses. We see it today in groups like Amnesty International that denounce human rights violations regardless of the political character of the country perpetuating them.
We can be glad for these more politically independent actions, while honestly recognizing that, so far, they have been a minor, not major, theme in our work.
WHAT WOULD a Christian movement look like that draws upon the valid insights of the Left (and Center and Right), but is not captive to any particular ideology for its view of the world?
Would not such a movement:
- see authentic human liberation as liberation from all oppression, whether that oppression is practiced by governments of the Left or of the Right?
- recognize and support the good in any country, including the United States, as well as critiquing and resisting all that is evil, unjust, and repressive?
- have as much sympathy for—and organize as much to help—Vietnamese and Cuban boat people as for Salvadoran refugees, as much for persecuted dissidents of China as for persecuted peasants in Guatemala?
- affirm and support the values of freedom and democracy along with the values of peace and justice, acknowledging the role the United States has played in upholding these values?
- seek a new political and economic vision that goes beyond bureaucratic state socialism and voracious laissez faire capitalism?
- judge this new vision by the biblical themes of the sacred dignity of the human person, the prophets' passionate protest against exploitation and injustice, concern for the poor, working for the common good, and building institutions to serve human needs and liberate human capacities?
Such a vision could begin to overcome the alienation of economic and political activity from moral concern. It could enable Christian radicals to see political reality more clearly, to have a more encompassing love for all those who suffer, and to follow the Spirit more deeply in the struggle for authentic human liberation.
Richard K. Taylor was a Sojourners contributing editor, the parish services coordinator at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Philadelphia, and the author of A Peace Ministry in Practice (William C. Brown, 1986) when this article appeared.
Shining Path: Exposing Ideological Blinders
The Nation magazine ran an ad in its October 12, 1992 edition that exemplifies the point of Richard Taylor's article. Several nationally known secular and church-based social activists signed the ad, which condemned the killing of political prisoners in Peru and opposed U.S. military intervention there. The problem is that the ad originated with the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru (CSRP), a U.S.-based front for the murderous Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, movement in Peru.
Further, the ad was a cleverly written appeal to human rights advocates, but a discriminating read reveals at least one example of dangerous propaganda. The ad's designers object to the word "terrorist" in reference to Shining Path, insisting on the more sanitized term "revolutionaries." The difference is important.
As Sojourners insisted in an editorial last month (see "Terror on the Left"), Peruvians of all stripes do not consider Sendero Luminoso to be revolutionaries or guerrillas but a terrorist organization bent on violent takeover of that country. To sign an ad written by agents of such a group, and aimed in part at cleaning up their image abroad, strikes us as an exercise in poor judgment.
CSRP has offices in Berkeley and New York City as part of its increasingly successful effort here and in Europe to paint Shining Path in a favorable light. Last August CSRP published an attack on Amnesty International for its report on Shining Path's human rights violations. CSRP admitted that AI "is not ignorant of the basic realities of Peru [having] condemned government atrocities in Peru for some years." But, they continue, the latest Amnesty report on Peruvian Communist Party (Shining Path) violations is "not based on investigation, but on profound bias and prejudice against the ideology and strategy of the PCP."
Several signers of the CSRP ad in The Nation have proven records as pacifists and practitioners of nonviolence. Yet, perhaps unwittingly or in ignorance, they endorsed a statement that comes from the U.S. front for one of the most brutal and violent movements in the world today. In a further attempt to refute the Amnesty report on Shining Path's assassinations of community leaders in Peru's countryside, CSRP says: "The 'community leaders' and officials that the revolution [read Shining Path] targets are the people who today fight to prop up the remnants of that [Spanish feudal] system in the countryside." A foreign-born Catholic bishop in Peru told me last August about Sendero's murder of the mayor in a town within the bishop's jurisdiction. He said that the peasant population still cannot understand why their mayor was shot to death.
In its most blatant defense of terrorism, the CSRP rationalizes Shining Path's murder last February of Maria Elena Moyano, a community leader in one of Lima's shantytowns (see "'She Lives In Us,'" December 1992). Says CSRP: "She was an active defender of the government, and actively worked with the police against the revolution [again read Shining Path]." On the contrary Maria Elena herself once said: "What I think is that if Sendero does not kill me, the army will. It is awful because you are the target of two fires and you don't know how either one is going to act. One demands that you go with them or you're a revisionist; the other side demands you be with them or you are a terrorist."
These attempts to clean up the image of Shining Path have met with some success in Europe. Last summer BBC television ran a 40-minute film sympathetic to Sendero. The program showed the indisputable social divisions in Peru, then presented Shining Path as the country's salvation. It was a clever, selective presentation of facts that overlooked and even condoned Sendero's brutalization of the very people it claims to be liberating.
Richard Taylor calls for a Christian movement for justice and peace that "draws upon the valid insights of the Left (and Center and Right), but is not captive to any particular ideology for its view of the world." Faith-based activists must exercise extreme care in what we publicly endorse. Lending one's name to a terrorist front like the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru is a grave mistake.
Joe Nangle, OFM was outreach director of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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