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"I'm a pacifist because I'm a violent son of a bitch." A profile of Stanley Hauerwas
Progressive, The, April, 2003 by Colman McCarthy
As a theological ethicist, Duke University Divinity School professor, and as a writer cruising through his forties and fifties, Stanley Hauerwas enjoyed the twin blessings of personal achievement and professional obscurity. Then, in 2001, the assessors of talent at Time magazine declared him "America's best theologian." Oprah Winfrey gave him air time. Invitations to talk, exhort, and entertain poured in.
Hauerwas, a Texan who speaks in the twangy cadences of Jim Hightower and is as adept with the barbs and jibes, guffaws when recalling the praise from Time: "Best is not a theological category! Faithful or unfaithful are the right categories. The last thing in the world I'd want to be is the best."
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By the measure of fidelity to his Christ-centered beliefs, Hauerwas is steadfast, whether as an intellectual trading in the nuanced language of theology, or as a member of his local Durham, North Carolina, parish that comes together for the succor of liturgy, community, and prayer.
"I am a Christian pacifist," he says. "Being Christian and being a pacifist are not two things for me. I would not be a pacifist if I were not a Christian, and I find it hard to understand how one can be a Christian without being a pacifist."
That puts Hauerwas in a distinct minority. When countless Christian leaders--from popes, cardinals, and Jesuits to assorted divines stretching from Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to Jesse Jackson--say that wars can be just, if not just dandy, and when pacifists are denounced as cowards and misfits on the nation's airwaves and op-eds, Hauerwas's voice seems to come out of an increasingly vast wilderness.
It doesn't bother him, as it never bothered Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, Emily Balch, the Berrigans, David Dellinger, Arthur Laffin, and a long list of others for whom pacifism--active pacifism, which has nothing to do with passivity or appeasement--was both a spiritual creed and a political philosophy.
"I say I'm a pacifist because I'm a violent son of a bitch. I'm a Texan. I can feel it in every bone I've got. And I hate the language of pacifism because it's too passive. But by avowing it, I create expectations in others that hopefully will help me live faithfully to what I know is true but that I have no confidence in my own ability to live it at all. That's part of what nonviolence is--the attempt to make our lives vulnerable to others in a way that we need one another. To be against war--which is clearly violent--is a good place to start. But you never know where the violence is in your own life. To say you're nonviolent is not some position of self-righteousness--you kill and I don't. It's rather to make your life available to others in a way that they can help you discover ways you're implicated in violence that you hadn't even noticed."
Hauerwas, sixty-two, is a hand under six feet and the owner of a pair of knees half blown out from too many years of running.
After studying at Yale Divinity School and earning a doctorate from the same university, Hauerwas, the son of a Texas bricklayer, has articulated the case for Christian pacifism for more than three decades now. He taught at Notre Dame from 1970 to 1984, and he's been at Duke ever since. He speaks at public forums ranging from the Air Force Academy to a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Silk Hope, North Carolina.
He is part of the minority Christian community operating under the consistent life ethic that calls for alternatives to the violence of war and militarism, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. These, and other issues involving public morality and personal ethics, have been at the core of Hauerwas's writing and teaching. Much of his prose has been in low-circulation theological journals and books from small publishers. In 2001, Duke University Press published The Hauerwas Reader, a 729-page volume of literate and often feisty arguments drawn from such books as The Peaceable Kingdom (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), Truthfulness and Tragedy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), Character and the Christian Life (Trinity University Press, 1975) and Resident Aliens (Abingdon, 1989).
In mid-February, Hauerwas spent the day in dialogue with an audience of 200 at the Servant Leadership School in Washington, a group that has ties to the Church of the Savior. It is a longstanding ecumenical congregation located about a mile from the White House that practices works of mercy and rescue in programs ranging from low-income housing to literacy tutoring. Few parishes in Washington take the Christian gospel as seriously.
An hour before his morning talk, I had some time with Hauerwas. He began with a wisecrack, a benign one about George W. Bush being a Methodist "who was raised an Episcopalian, which is that form of Christianity that the upper middle class uses in America not to take Jesus seriously. I say that as someone who is now going to an Episcopal church!" On Bush's frequent references to religion and faith, Hauerwas said that the President's "personal relationship with Jesus doesn't seem to have anything to do with Jesus's teaching."
