Theologian's feisty faith challenges status quo; forget labels. Stanley Hauerwas is antiwar, anti-death penalty and antiabortion - Cover Story

Patrick O'Neill

Stanley Hauerwas sat on the hand- me-down couch at the far end of the living room. His audience, a collection of Christian activists, many of whom had driven more than an hour to the talk, crammed into the kitchen, dining room, living room and two adjoining bedrooms of the Silk Hope, N.C., Catholic Worker House to spend a couple of hours in February listening to the man Time magazine calls, "America's best theologian."

Before last year, Hauerwas, a Duke Divinity School professor of theological ethics, lived in relative obscurity. While he has been revered for decades among some who study theology, Hauerwas was not a household name, not even in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., area, where he has lived and taught for 18 years. Last year, Hauerwas became the first U.S. theologian in 40 years to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at Scotland's St. Andrews University, theology's equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize.

Hauerwas lost most of his anonymity last year when a story about him appeared in the edition of Time that hit newsstands on Sept. 11. The story, headlined "Christian contrarian," seemed by divine design. As a shocked, angry and grieving nation yearned for bloody revenge, along came Hauerwas, a Christian pacifist who spoke in Time of his disdain for nationalism, and his utter disappointment with an American church that fails to instruct its adherents in basic gospel values.

Following Sept. 11, Hauerwas, a Methodist, was flooded with interview requests. He was on the Oprah show, and quoted in The New York Times. While U.S. bombs were bursting in midair, Hauerwas, known for his salty tongue, was not about to crawl in the crowded hole full of those reluctant to speak out amid a post-9/11 hysteria that left virtually no room for dissent.

Christian nonviolence--even in the face of terrorism--"is not a strategy to rid the world of war," Hauerwas said, "but rather, as faithful followers of Jesus, we cannot imagine being anything other than nonviolent in a world of war."

Hauerwas has a knack for broaching subjects others won't touch. Forget labels. Hauerwas is antiwar, anti-death penalty and antiabortion. In his reflections on Sept. 11, Hauerwas uses the term "American imperialism" matter-of-factly. He's not afraid to humanize those who flew jets into buildings on Sept. 11, and to point out what he calls "the loneliness of the American people," a loneliness he says is tied to their pursuit of happiness.

"On Sept. 11, Americans were confronted by people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments," Hauerwas said in his Silk Hope talk earlier this year. "Their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to Sept. 11 to shop."

Americans are, for the most part, good, decent and hardworking people, Hauerwas says, but "so were the people that supported the Nazis."

Hauerwas said he worries about "how goodness can become deeply corrupted by its innocence.... most of the time innocence is deeply immoral because it is such a lie not to acknowledge that we live in a very complex world that we benefit from, and we don't have to acknowledge the havoc our benefits depend upon."

While those who loathe the United States are willing to die as an expression of their hatred, Hauerwas said U.S. citizens have no comparable moral conviction on which to base their lives.

"A people who have been bred to shop then can quickly become some of the most violent people in the world," Hauerwas said, "exactly because they're dying to have something worth dying for."

Hauerwas respects those who allow for Christians to fight a "just war." However, he knows of no war that has met the rigid just-war criteria. He also rejects postwar celebrations that include rituals like the display of yellow ribbons by the victors.

"In the past when Christians killed in a just war, it was understood they should be in mourning," Hauerwas said in an interview in Duke Magazine. "They had sacrificed their unwillingness to kill. Black, not yellow, was the appropriate color. Indeed, in the past when Christian soldiers returned from a just war, they were expected to do penance for three years before being restored to the Eucharist.

"That we now find that to be unimaginable is but an indication how hard it is for us to imagine what it might mean to be Christian."

A Texas native with a doctorate from Yale, Hauerwas has braced himself for the long haul where those with prophetic views will have to endure the kinds of scorn and persecution the Bible promises. Besides, given the choice between worldly scorn and God's wrath, Hauerwas is a Christian who knows where his loyalties must lie.

"This is the first time we may have to pay some costs for being Christian pacifists because it makes people mad," he said.

Another consequence of 9/11, said Hauerwas, is evident in what he sees as a new political correctness, one that has no association with the postmodern left. There are "speech codes" in place that don't allow for any "critical edge," said the author who's best-known book is appropriately titled Resident Aliens.

Hauerwas said American Christians are "more American than ... Christian." In the Duke Magazine interview, Hauerwas said the current identification of God and country is deeply troubling.

"Let me be as clear as I can be, the God of `God and country' is not the God of Jesus Christ," he said. "Yet this is not a development that began with Sept. 11. One of the issues before American Christianity is whether the God we worship is the God of Jesus Christ.

"American Christians simply lack the disciplines necessary to discover how being Christian might make them different," he said.

While the resurrection story is one of triumph for the Christian, Hauerwas doesn't want people to forget allegiance to Jesus includes being "united with him in his death."

Hauerwas understands that true Christian pacifism may carry a heavy price.

"Christians must be ready to die, indeed have their children die, rather than betray the gospel.... Christians are not called to be heroes. We are called to be holy."

Excerpts from Hauerwas

The essential presupposition of peacemaking as an activity among Christians is our common belief that we have been made part of a community in which people no longer regard their lives as their own. We are not permitted to harbor our grievances as "ours." When we think our brother or sister has sinned against us, such an affront is not just against us but against the whole community. A community established as peaceful cannot afford to let us relish our sense of being wronged without exposing that wrong in the hopes of reconciliation. We must learn to see wrongs as "personal" because we are part of a community where the "personal" is crucial to the common good.

It is an unpleasant fact, however, that most of our lives are governed more by our hates and dislikes than by our loves. I seldom know what I really want, but I know what or whom I deeply dislike and even hate. It may be painful to be wronged, but at least such wrongs give me a history of resentments that, in fact, constitute who I am. How would I know who I am if I did not have my enemies?

One of the deep difficulties for people in the United States is what I call the Groucho Marx Principle. Groucho Marx said he wouldn't want to belong to a country club that would have him for a member. The same problem holds true in making moral choices. Would you want a moral life that you've created? Most people wouldn't, so cynicism has become the primary virtue of U.S. public life. Cynicism ensures that there's absolutely nothing worth dedicating one's life to in a way that totally encompasses it. One always wants to be able to dissociate oneself from one's engagements at any given moment.

A way to counter this cynicism is to point out some of the delusions we have about choice in our lives. For example, in a marriage course I used to teach at the University of Notre Dame, I always gave the students one absolute they could write down and put in their pockets; when times got tough they could pull it out and say, "God, it's great to have an absolute to guide my life." My absolute was that you always marry the wrong person. It's a reversible absolute, though: You also always marry the right person. The point is we don't know who we are marrying.

That absolute is meant to challenge the presumption that a person's life is fundamentally a matter of choice. It's a matter of choice, but often one doesn't know what one is choosing. That's where fidelity comes in. A couple marrying must be willing to make a promise although neither person knows exactly what kind of promise is being made.

Look what happened to Catholics in the United States. They struggled like hell to make it and finally saw John F. Kennedy elected president. Any Catholic of that generation will tell you how important it was that Kennedy became president. Catholics all over the world rejoiced, but I say it was their day of shame--particularly when Kennedy told a group of Southern Baptists in Houston that he would follow his conscience and not the Roman Catholic church. Catholics said, "See, it is possible to be American and Catholic."

But then what happened? Abortion happened. Catholics were forced to ask themselves, "What is this society that we just bought into?" It turned out to be a society that is going to kill its kids. Abortion is not some little mistake. Abortion is a reflection of who Americans are: People in the United States are supposed to concentrate on themselves and pursue happiness; thus, they ask themselves, "Why should we bother having children?"

Reprinted from The Hauerwas Reader, edited by John Berkman and Michael Cartwright. Duke University Press, 2001.

Paths to Peace

The Paths to Peace special section in the April 26 issue opened a continuing NCR discussion about peacemaking and included lists of resources. For additional copies of the Paths to Peace pullout, contact Jo Ann Schierhoff at 1-800-444-8910, extension 2239.

RELATED ARTICLE: Even critics acknowledge his pervasive influence.

Stanley Hauerwas has a knack for making friends and influencing people. Even his detractors recognize the Duke Divinity School professor's enormous influence in theological circles.

"Stanley is easily the most provocative and prolific American Christian theologian writing today," said Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout, who is one of Hauerwas' strongest critics.

By getting Christians to reflect on the virtues, Hauerwas made headway early in his career, Stout says. "It was a great idea, and it had a major impact on Christian theology," he said.

However, said Stout, Hauerwas "began to spoil this good point by adding that our society is essentially lacking in virtue because of its commitment to liberalism. Hauerwas specializes in naughty sayings. One of his favorites is that freedom and justice are bad ideas for the church. He put this slogan into the subtitle of a book of his that sold like hotcakes to pastors and study groups. Maybe he just meant to get people thinking by saying something outrageous, but the actual effect of such rhetoric has been horrible. He is tempting his followers to ignore their obligations to the poor and other victims of injustice."

Before Sept. 11, many U.S. Christians "ignored Hauerwas' pacifism while appropriating the rest of his rhetoric," Stout said, but that's not so easy to do anymore.

"Since 9/11, it's beginning to dawn on his audience that he's saying something they don't want to hear, which is one mark of prophecy, I suppose," Stout said. "Saying amen to Hauerwas now requires more courage. But this doesn't make his pacifism right. It is based on a very selective reading of the New Testament, it seems to me. Luckily, most of us can see, when we're under direct threat of terrorist murder, that justice sometimes obliges us to resort to arms to protect the innocent."

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things, a monthly journal of religion, culture and politics, recently lost Hauerwas from his editorial board after the journal ran an editorial calling the war on terrorism a just war.

Neuhaus, who became a priest in the New York archdiocese 11 years ago, following his conversion from the Lutheran church, calls Hauerwas "a dear friend," and says he tried to talk Hauerwas out of resigning from the board.

"His leaving the editorial board was entirely amicable, and I urged him not to, but understand why he did," Neuhaus said. "Our essential disagreement is that for my friend Stan, pacifism is ... the doctrine by which the church stands or falls, and I think that's not only not true, I think it is dangerously schismatic, and about that we have been arguing in a friendly manner I suppose going on 30 years."

Still, Neuhaus says Hauerwas is "provocative, energetic and a very, very useful person to have on the theological scene."

Duke Divinity School dean Gregory L. Jones, a former Hauerwas student, says Hauerwas is "an extraordinary hard worker who cares deeply for his students, for the craft of teaching and for the life of a community. His work and vision over the years has had a transformative impact on the field of Christian theology and ethics, especially in reclaiming the significance of character and the virtues, of Christian community and a Christian perspective on medicine."

Known for speaking his mind, Hauerwas can ruffle some feathers. Jones says Hauerwas' style "is to be provocative and clever, and that does sometimes go over the line, but he's also someone who is remarkably welcoming of criticism and chastening. He recognizes when he makes mistakes and he's willing to engage people who object to him in either substance or style."

Another former Hauerwas student, Fr. Michael Baxter, a Notre Dame assistant professor of theology, said Hauerwas' influence is best measured by the large numbers of his former students who have gone on to do important work of their own.

"A lot of us influenced by Hauerwas have then gone back and plumbed Catholic tradition and found things that were being ignored," Baxter said. "What Hauerwas has done for a lot of Catholics is help us see those elements in our own tradition which brings out the theological features of the moral life.

"His influence is harder and harder to track, but that's usually because his influence has become so pervasive."

Patrick O'Neill is a freelance writer who lives in Raleigh, N.C.

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