By: Diane Ford Jones
Late summer reports in two major New England newspapers brought some insight to misbegotten wars, detailing current events in Iraq and remembrance of Vietnam. Still, I hunger for more direct challenges to the current war—ones that expose its institutional supports like our cultural and religious bias in support of war and its aims.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that complicit silence and warped moral moorings combined would lead to the decline and eventual but certain demise of our nation. This weekend’s accounts show that King’s premonition still haunts us.
I serve our mainline Protestant denomination in a national capacity as an ordained minister. As a professional communicator, I also engage our members and the general public about morality, the reasons I take King’s prediction seriously.
A glance at the photojournal in the Sunday, August 7 edition of The Boston Globe halted my breath and shook me to my core. Photographer Julia Cumes captured Elaine Connors’ gaze as she mournfully drifted off into a pool of private thoughts about her husband and Vietnam veteran, Thomas. Judging by this depiction, Connors’ loss is crushing: maybe it was the way her clasped hands clutched a painstakingly folded American flag offered to her by the military as our nation’s final salute to her husband that captured the imagination.
During a week when the death toll of U.S. military personnel in Iraq soared to over 1,800, and when more than a dozen families in the heartland of Ohio learned that their loved ones lost their lives to an unapologetic apocalypse called the “war on terror,” I can’t help but wonder what any of us would do, or say, if we were presented with an American flag under such circumstances, as many others have been on behalf of their loved ones.
In a sublime and surreal turn of events, I imagined myself seated on a cold mono-chromatic chair, my feet planted on the crunching plastic green grass carpet camouflaging a mound of un-earthed soil cast aside for my only son’s grave.
A fiercely proud, stiff necked officer approaches me—respectful in demeanor, grim in performance of duty— presenting this carefully culturally cultivated symbol of liberty and freedom once draped on my son’s simple casket. Snapped together with chiropractic precision, this taut, triangular form was readied for me. Like all others who had already personally witnessed such events, I became one with them. Because of our mutual experience, they became me. We survivors were one and all.
And, that is when I heard it: the voice of our mothers, wives, husbands, sons, daughters, fathers, neighbors, employers, teachers and preachers saying, “Officer, I respect you. I thank you deeply for your thoughtfulness, sincerity and dutiful commitment of service to our nation. But because of my commitment to you, and to the nation which we love, I must respectfully decline this ‘gift.’ Currently, it is a symbol of the very failure of liberty, justice and freedom of conscious which it purports to elevate.
I will not be complicit or support, in any form or fashion, our nation’s myths that seek to equate loss of human life with heroism, misuse and contortion of faith with triumphant drum beating nationalism; nor the pursuit and squandering of global resources in support of our imperialism; nor a never-ending alignment of citizenship with the constant solicitation of (and our compliancy in) corporate and private greed at the expense of our nation. I won’t have any of it, particularly on this, the occasion of the commemoration of my loved one’s body having fallen victim to this madness.”
Such sentiments are startling, though seldom uttered publicly. What if these opinions were magnified in the mainstream press for all to hear? How might this model of national articulation transform our cultural, economic, military, policy, political, and faith practices? Could these actions become models? Begin to reset our nation’s moral compass? Since such occurrences are taking place, why not widely report them as noble?
An account written by The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert the next day focused on a young soldier’s experiences in Iraq and the strain that killing had placed on him as he examined the meaning of life and faith during a time of war.
What is striking about this man’s testimony isn’t concern for having taken life, fear for the salvation of his soul, need for forgiveness, or even his unwavering belief in Jesus—whom he felt was surely with him as he walked the proverbial valley of the shadow of death.
The most incredible thing revealed in this soldier’s account is implied, but often left unstated and unexamined: questions about our personal culpability and deeply-held, institutionally-fueled moral, communal and corporate failings.
Application of faith itself is not the problem; the young man is faithful to be sure. The propagation of false faith teachings left him, and leaves us, vulnerable and spiritually isolated. Reverence for grossly contorted faith is the very thing that we Americans condemn in others, particularly our “enemies.”
Our national defense is supported by faith claims that God blesses America, as is our notion of being “good” woven into our military strategy to prevail against the “dark forces of evil.” Our so-called Judeo-Christian nation has become what we say we abhor.
This young soldier is a professed Christian but should have been taught long ago that true Christian faith practice demands of its faithful the abiding business of waging peace.
Such is the case in the authentic faith teachings of Sunday schools, Temples and Mosques. In each of these settings, we still lack the will/fortitude to look at hard, compelling and mounting evidence of our moral failures that keep us from obtaining full and lasting peace. Peace threatens the status-quo and would turn over the table, forcing us to lose our present selves in order that that we might find our true selves as a nation.
We have lost (or perhaps never fully developed or had), our national collective will to hold our country, citizens, culture, and institutions accountable in ways that more fully allow us to live into our hopes of being at our best as a nation and participant on the world stage.
The widow and soldier each offer us an invitation to live private and corporate lives that are worthy of high moral esteem.
All of us who claim to be Christian should be reflecting on the many ways we have become complicit through our silence and inaction. We do too little, too late. Under our watch, our press is assaulted, our rights are eroded, our faith is hijacked, and our nation spirals further into spiritual decay. We each fall prey to decline.
Indeed, all people of faith have much to contemplate about the integration of faith, citizenship, nationalism, public policy and peace. As a nation, we must renew our efforts to earnestly examine what must be done in response to each of these ideals during the times in which we live.
What are we who are left to survive each passing day to do? What does it have to do with how we live in healthy relationships with one another? And why?
We are challenged to ask for the answers—not only for ourselves, but for our institutions in ways that best shape our culture, our nation and the world. We must not allow widows or soldiers to suffer from our lack of private, public or corporate moral fortitude. As a nation of self proclaimed “faithful patriots,” can we Americans do anything less?
The Rev. Diane Ford Jones serves in the national setting of the United Church of Christ as minister of communication and mission education for the Justice and Witness Ministries in Cleveland. She earned master’s degrees in divinity and in communication from Boston University where she specialized in the integrated study of media, religion and society. Rev. Ford Jones may be reached at fordjond@ucc.org
