"But Jesus Was a Pacifist!"
On the facile arguments about Christian pacifism and the larger claim that Christians are called to be pushovers
If you’re anything like me, your religious educators conveyed a lot of skepticism about red-blooded men, even the otherwise courteous ones. It was unclear if such men belonged in the Faith. “All are welcome!”—except those with top 10% levels of testosterone. The most frustrating expression is the claim that Christians can’t fight back because the Lord discourages it; he was a pacifist. Love your neighbor, wash people’s feet, and get steamrolled by violent men—this is the Faith as they would have it.
Historian (and ex-nun) Karen Armstrong captured it memorably:
Today most of us would unhesitantly condemn the Crusades as unchristian. After all, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. He was a pacifist and had more in common with Gandhi, perhaps, than with Pope Urban.
People like her have long been at work remaking the Church in their own image, hitting on a devastating way to drive spirited men out. And they’ve gotten their wish. Most modern churches are essentially, in the words of Leon Podles, “women’s clubs with a few male officers.”
All this is especially backwards because Christendom has a heroic tradition which equals or exceeds anything the world has ever seen. The Enlightenment narrative wants you to believe heroism died out around the time of Caesar and wasn’t recovered until men ditched the Faith in recent centuries. But when you learn about the Carolingians, the Reconquest of Spain, the Crusades in Outremer, the wars to defend Eastern Europe against the Ottomans, you discover something quite contrary to that narrative. (Read Raymond Ibrahim’s The Defenders of the West for the best introduction.)
I am no theologian and no apologist, so take my arguments with a grain of salt. But under just a little scrutiny, the claims of the Catholic Karens turn flimsy. Here are my answers to their most common explanations about why you are supposed to be a doormat.
Meekness
Contemporary logic runs something like this: Major premise: Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land” (Mt 5:5). Minor premise: Meekness sounds a lot like weakness, and most people use them sort of interchangeably. Conclusion: Therefore the Lord is telling us to be kind of lame.
I’ve written about this one before, so pardon the repetition—but it’s necessary to keep hammering the point. The term Jesus uses in the Gospel According to Matthew does not translate well to the current usage of the English term meek. A definitional switcheroo has been performed which leaves us in a compromised position. The primary sense of the word according to Merriam-Webster is not horrible (“enduring injury with patience and without resentment”), but the secondary meaning (“deficient in spirit and courage”) suggests that any patience or endurance is necessitated by lameness. The secondary definition by Dictionary.com is as bad: “overly submissive or compliant; tame.” Cambridge offers a telling example: “He’s slight, meek, and balding, and hardly heroic.”
In other words, the meek fellow has no choice but to be meek—because it’s not like he could do anything about injuries and insults anyways. As Churchill once said of a rival, “He’s a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about.”
So is the Lord telling us to be pushovers? Thomas Aquinas offers a definitive No! Meekness (mansuetude), he writes, “restrains the onslaught of anger” and “properly mitigates the passion of anger” so that good judgement can rule. When the Lord proclaims, “Blessed are the meek,” he isn’t telling us to be easily imposed upon, deficient in courage. He instead challenges us to have authority over our anger, the ability to direct its power rather than being directed by it. Far from making a man weak, authority over one’s temper is a prerequisite for strength and accomplishment. It’s truer to say the man without meekness is weak—weak because he cannot help but lash out at every provocation, quickly exhausting his strength in pointless squabbles.
George Patton once noted that wars are not won by winning battles; they are won by choosing battles. Meekness is crucial in helping us choose the right battles—instead of having them chosen for us by instigators and enemies.
Turn the other cheek
Another cudgel with which the pacifists attempt to beat the spiritedness out of Christians is Matthew 5:39: “If one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other.” This is a clear discouragement of self-defense, they say.
In that same sermon Jesus also mentions cutting off our hand or plucking out our eye if it causes us to sin, among other strict injunctions. But those who favor a somewhat literal interpretation of turning the other cheek rarely call for others to cut off their hands. Is this because they know he’s using hyperbole to make a point?
When Jesus was struck by the officer, he didn’t turn the other cheek but answered with pointed words. Paul similarly did not turn the other cheek in Acts 23. Are the Lord and his apostle failing to live up to the standards they demand of us? Are they hypocrites? No, because a literal interpretation of this passage is again incorrect, writes Thomas Aquinas. The point is readiness of soul to meet the aggression of our attacker without being consumed by hatred. We remain always self-controlled. We keep the sword sheathed until it can no longer remain so.
Those who delve into the context can unpack all sorts of implications about striking techniques and the consequences that follow—too many to mention here. Some say turning the other cheek would require the second blow to be executed with the assailant’s “unclean” hand, which was not proper according to the customs of the times. So the assailant would find himself in a tricky position. All that stuff is very interesting and sheds light on what the Lord is teaching.
What rarely gets mentioned is the confrontational nature of turning the other cheek. He who offers himself for another blow demonstrates self-mastery in the midst of violence and signals that the aggressor’s first one was not so bad. It’s pretty much an insult. Holding up a mirror to the assailant is in many ways more potent than unleashing immediate rage upon him.
Note also that we have only two cheeks, which suggests that we cannot keep offering fresh ones to be struck. Turning the other cheek is not an indefinitely repeatable practice. If he strikes again, after being given a chance, we are justified in a more forceful course of action.
The absolute worst is the pacifist’s implication that a strong man is obligated to turn his own cheek when others are struck, as in: ignore harm done to others. It’s one thing to suffer an attack yourself—and quite another to allow a weaker innocent to be attacked while you have the chance to stop it.
Peacemakers
The Karen-types also like to point out Jesus’ line in Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.” Peacemaker sounds close enough to pacifist, so lazy thinkers assume they are the same. But they are not. The peacemaker seeks, if possible, to avoid violent conflict, but he has his limits. Push him too far, exploit his goodwill, try to harm his loved ones—and he will go into a different mode.
They also fail to ask a few important questions: Who is actually capable of making peace? And how? Violent and wicked men do not agree to terms set by scrawny lib pacifists. The only peace acceptable to them is the kind enforced by strong men. In that case, peacemaking requires a capacity for force. Blessed are those good and strong men who make peace, for they shall be called children of God.
What about the early Church?
Sometimes you will hear that the early Church was far more pacific and the later developments around Just War Theory were somehow betrayals. This is a more interesting argument, but one which would freeze the Faith in time and allow for no developments, even as the times changed. As the Faith spread—“go therefore and make disciples of all nations”—Christian teaching had to develop beyond the assumptions that Christians will always and everywhere be a persecuted minority. Christians were forced to take political power seriously and the obligation to protect their countries.
As Jimmy Akin writes: “Prior to the Christianization of the Roman empire, many Christians were not faced with the responsibility of defending the public and ensuring public order. As a result, some authors of this period had the luxury of entertaining pacifistic ideals without having to worry about keeping people safe.”
This doesn’t mean that essential Christian teachings change—because, again, nowhere does Jesus promote pacifist teachings—but instead acknowledges that the Faith is dynamic enough to meet the changing demands of changing times. It is for all seasons.
Conclusion
A final point is that these arguments about Jesus’ supposed pacifism always blissfully ignore the more martial teachings or forceful deeds of the Lord. They attempt to reduce Jesus to a simplistic teacher who is pretty easy to comprehend. Never mind the time he drove money-changers out of the Temple with a whip. Never mind the time he told his disciples to buy a sword (Luke 22:36). Never mind the time he showed great affection for the Roman soldier and didn’t tell him to give up his profession.
I won’t try to remake Jesus Christ into a Frankish Crusader, the way others want to make him into a proto-John Lennon. But to suggest that a man like Saint Fernando III—an undefeated warrior-king and champion of the Reconquista—is somehow less of a Christian than the Karen Armstrong-types is dumb beyond reckoning.
It’s only because of hard men like Fernando that the Faith wasn’t completely stamped out by Islam centuries ago.
This essay has been adapted from my new book Chivalry: An Ideal Whose Time Has Come Again. Get it here
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I’ve never quite understood pacifism from the Church, but had Christian parents tell me to try to settle things with words whenever possible, never throw the first punch, but resort to violence when needed. This was how I always felt. Thank you for your writing.
Very well-argued and presented. Thank you for methodically deconstructing the un-biblical and un-traditional canard that Christ was a pacifist. C.S. Lewis has a wonderful essay called "Why I Am Not a Pacifist". One of his arguments against the idea that "turn the other cheek" means to never use violence goes something like this: "Does anyone suppose that our Lord's hearers understood Him to mean that if a homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim?"