The weakness of the liberal position
by Alan Jones

I read with interest the statement in the December issue of "The Witness" concerning the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11^th. I was surprised and dismayed by my reaction to the request to respond to the statement. Would it be like walking through a minefield of political correctness and code words? I didn’t like my reaction and felt ashamed that my mind went the route of suspicion rather than straight to the issues.

In THIS world working for peace is messy and arduous and we need to do some hard thinking about different kinds of violence. What would the writers of this statement have done with Hitler?

It may be because there are so many of us out there grinding our particular axe? So here goes. The Witness’ statement starts off well, but my warning lights went on when we got to the morality of the bombing of Afghanistan. I thought that was sadly exactly the right thing to do. It seems to me that The Witness confuses personal witness with government policy. I admire those who make a pacifist stand. I think they are wrong but I admire them. In THIS world working for peace is messy and arduous and we need to do some hard thinking about different kinds of violence. What would the writers of this statement have done with Hitler?

Martin Luther King’s words are inspiring but not relevant in this case, and Gandhi, as powerful as he was as a champion of nonviolence, was a failure given the violent partition of India and Pakistan. King and Gandhi are great souls but they would have made lousy political leaders.

I was born in 1940 and my earliest memories are of bombs exploding and of the grown-ups worrying about the Nazis. I talked with a Quaker friend a few days ago and she was torn between wanting to condemn the bombing and applaud the liberation of young women in Kabul. Sometimes in THIS world (it might be different in another world) resisting violence with force of arms is called for. We have to choose between the lesser of two evils and, if you’re a Christian, you repent. It’s not a matter of hating. It’s a matter of mitigating a greater evil.

The United States has much about which it needs to repent — the greed, the trashy culture, the arrogant policies of supporting dubious regimes. But that is a far cry from blaming the US for the present situation.

The United States has much about which it needs to repent — the greed, the trashy culture, the arrogant policies of supporting dubious regimes. But that is a far cry from blaming the US for the present situation. I have traveled all over the world and I am always glad to return home. In spite of our faults, Americans enjoy freedoms rarely experienced by most of our fellow human beings. This freedom is expensive in that it requires our tolerating people abusing it. We need an open and critical patriotism and the weakness of the liberal position is that it rarely has anything to say about what it would actually do in any given situation. All it can do is criticize those who have to make hard decisions.

Make no mistake, we need to take seriously fundamentalism in all its forms. It is not benign and when militant and backed by wealth it becomes a great evil. Let’s work for peace and justice but be thorough-going and even-handed about it. The world is a mess and history is untidy. And in THIS world there is no pure justice (it’s always someone’s particular justice) and the pursuit of ideology/fundamentalism is a trap which leads to more injustice and violence. My comments are a disappointment to me but it’s the best I can do. Our government needs the clarity of repentance too.

Alan Jones is dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, California. He can be reached by email at alanj@gracecathedral.org

Related Links:
Read an interview with Alan Jones, "Faith is a Work of Imagination," from the July/August 2001 issue of The Witness, Reimagining Faith and Action.