Growing up, one of the first things I learned from the Bible was the commandment Thou shalt not kill. This makes sense considering that the religious community I belong to—the Bruderhof—is rooted in Anabaptism, a Christian tradition that, with occasional exceptions, has been pacifist since 1525. (The Anabaptist movement, which also includes the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites, celebrates its quincentenary this year.) Over the sixteenth century, thousands of Anabaptists were executed as traitors to Christendom by Catholic and Protestant rulers. No doubt that’s why their signature virtue was Gelassenheit—“self-abandonment,” “submission,” “readiness to suffer.” It’s an ethic Nietzsche would have hated.
For a long time, I didn’t like it either, even after taking lifelong vows to become a Bruderhof member as an adult. Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. One of these is that humans are wired for violence. Another is that a world without bloodshed is an impossible ideal that dreamers may yearn for but can never realize in history. The story I am about to tell is partly a story about how I came to agree with Christian pacifism that both of these assumptions are wrong.
The case for pacifism that Anabaptists make, however, is not based on these philosophical postulates. It starts, rather, with the creedal affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth is “very God of very God.” During his earthly life, what did this incarnate God tell his followers about using force? According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus taught: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” “Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword.”
The word “pacifism” is notoriously slippery; I’m using it here as shorthand for a commitment to nonviolent peacemaking, including a refusal to kill. By that definition, the New Testament depicts Jesus as a pacifist. As a historical matter, scholars broadly agree that Jesus stood out from a host of other messianic leaders in first-century Judaea by rejecting armed resistance to Roman rule. This is also how his first followers understood him: church writers of the first three centuries repeatedly counseled Christians not to participate in any form of killing. As the theologian Lactantius summarized around 310 CE, “Killing a human being, whom God willed to be a sacred creature, is always wrong.”
Beyond such ethical precepts, at the heart of Christian pacifism is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To fulfill his mission, the New Testament suggests, Jesus chose a defenseless path that took him unresistingly to torture and execution; likewise, his disciples are to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Jesus’s words from the three synoptic Gospels). Those who claim to follow Jesus, says the First Letter of John, “ought to walk in the same way he walked.” We’re to imitate a God who, despite his omnipotence, chose to overcome evil not through force but through a radically vulnerable form of love. As the theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, the reason that Christians are “to live without resort to violence is that by doing so we live as God lives.”
The Christian case against pacifism is more convoluted, given the tension with the New Testament and early tradition. Yet in essence, it’s an appeal to common sense. While Jesus’s teachings may guide private life, this view holds, to apply them to public life is grossly irresponsible, since that would prevent Christians from defending the innocent or serving the state. After its legalization by Constantine in 313 CE, Christianity accepted a role in maintaining social order in the Roman Empire. Accordingly, bishops such as Ambrose and Augustine allowed Christians to participate in just wars and capital punishment. (They maintained the church’s ban on gladiatorial games, abortion and infanticide.) These churchmen didn’t deny Jesus’s teachings—they just made room for exceptions. To this end, they drew creatively on the Old Testament and philosophers like Cicero, or expanded on the apostle Paul’s dictum that government is ordained by God. Augustine, for example, reasoned that a soldier who slays on his superior’s orders doesn’t violate the prohibition on killing because he “does not himself ‘kill’—he is an instrument, a sword in its user’s hand.” Augustine thus offered Christians the kind of work-around that would enable them to punish and wage war with a good conscience.
Whether or not Augustine’s permissiveness can be made to harmonize with the Jesus of the Gospels, it reflects the intuition that not all killing is the same. Without making some accommodation with violence, Christian pacifism seems preening and cranky, obsessed with keeping clean hands in a dirty world. It invites the charge of free riding (since it leaves the political community’s defense to others) and carries the whiff of cowardice. There are counterexamples, of course: Desmond Doss, an American medic who refused to carry weapons for religious reasons, received the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Battle of Okinawa, as portrayed in the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge. But their rarity seems to prove the point.
If pacifism is allowed to make claims on everyone, Augustine feared, it will serve to empower aggressors. During World War II, George Orwell would level a similar charge when he called pacificism “objectively pro-Fascist.” If pacifists think they can “‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back,” Orwell wrote, “let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.” This was an early formulation of a question I’ve been asked dozens of times: If everyone were pacifist, who would have stopped Hitler?
●
Both my grandfathers would have infuriated Orwell. My German grandfather, J. Heinrich Arnold, a Bruderhof member, embraced the Anabaptist peace tradition, so when the Nazis came to power, he rejected their ideology and militarism out of hand. In 1935, Hitler abrogated the Versailles Treaty and announced general conscription; local officials warned the Bruderhof that refusal would be punished as treason (the community had already been the target of a Gestapo raid). Heinrich, aged 21, sought safety in Liechtenstein, and then a year later used his honeymoon with my grandmother, Annemarie, as an excuse to renew his passport and flee to England. When Germany threatened to invade Britain in 1940, the Arnolds became liable to internment as enemy aliens; they and other Bruderhof refugees migrated again, settling in Paraguay, where they constructed homes in the jungle, established a farm, built a hospital and lost many children, including my mother’s sister. After fifteen years, my grandparents moved to the United States, helping start the Bruderhof in the Hudson Valley, where I’d later grow up.
My American grandfather’s reasons for becoming a pacifist were, by contrast, philosophically hazy. Richard Mommsen had grown up on a Wisconsin farm as the son of a passionate bowhunter and agrarian socialist. When he was drafted in 1942, his older brother Durward had already enlisted in the Navy. But Richard simply knew he couldn’t kill. “I do not believe in killing under any circumstances,” he wrote as a college sophomore. On hearing about Richard’s pacifism, Durward was horrified and drove to St. Paul, Minnesota, to make him change his mind. But Richard felt he could not budge. “I believe that there are some things beyond the state’s jurisdiction,” he wrote in his application for alternative service, “and that one of these things is the power to command any man to kill another.” Richard spent over three years in Civilian Public Service camps in Michigan, North Dakota and California, doing forestry and infrastructure projects. In the camp barracks, he co-founded a School of Cooperative Living for other would-be communitarians, making the lifelong friends who, in 1958, would bring him and his family to the Bruderhof.
My grandfathers’ stories weren’t unusual in the Bruderhof of my childhood; most of the men I looked up to had been conscientious objectors, and the veterans tended to be even more anti-militarist. Many community elders had known the great figures of the twentieth-century peace movement—Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Pete Seeger. And in my Bruderhof-run school, one of my eighth-grade projects was to create a “conscientious-objector file” documenting my pacifism in case the draft were ever reinstated. It contained letters I’d written to Reagan and Gorbachev advocating nuclear disarmament and an anti-war statement I’d read out to a kindly Army chaplain when our class visited the Pentagon.
But when I started ninth grade at Kingston High School in September 1990, I was plunged into a new and very different culture. The school year began one month after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and my certainties crumbled while watching CNN’s live coverage of the Gulf War in the school cafeteria. That January, with the launch of Operation Desert Storm, yellow ribbons seemed to be everywhere, festooning the high school fieldhouse and the jackets of students and staff. In home room, cute cheerleaders gave patriotic messages before the Pledge of Allegiance. The foldable sheets issued for covering our textbooks were glossy Air Force ads showing sleek F-16s and pilots who looked like they’d stepped out of Top Gun.
With the cafeteria CNN crowd, I cheered along as American smart bombs obliterated buildings in Baghdad. To join the great red-white-and-blue community, so different from my own, felt transgressive and exhilarating.
I still revered both my grandfathers and felt a certain loyalty to their ideals. Heinrich had died, but Richard was busy writing to U.S. senators to protest the war, and his dinner conversation often returned to the horror of “what our country is doing.” I wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with him. On the other hand, to me my community’s pacifism now felt legalistic and sectarian.
Four years later, I moved into a freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, my loyalties still divided. The professor I remember best wasn’t one I took classes with. Cornel West—who ran for president as a third-party candidate in 2024—was already then a celebrity public intellectual. Somehow, he noticed a lost-looking Bruderhof kid and generously invited me to his office for an informal biweekly tutorial. He explained that he, too, had grown up in a close-knit church before coming to Harvard, and he wanted to help me navigate its broader intellectual world.
West first had me read through W. E. B. Du Bois, then assigned me Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-century American theologian whom Barack Obama would later call one of his favorite philosophers. Niebuhr’s 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society takes direct aim at Christian pacifism.
Niebuhr grants that Jesus and the early church taught nonviolence. After all, he writes, “it was a natural and inevitable hope in the early Christian community that the spirit of love, which pervaded the life of its own group, would eventually inform the moral life of the whole human race.” But he warns that attempts to realize that hope outside intimate settings are doomed by humanity’s moral limitations. In large-scale collectives such as a nation, group egoism inevitably overwhelms the “spirit of love.” Force is thus indispensable for upholding order and some degree of justice, a fact that reveals pacifism as a dangerous delusion: “The demand of religious moralists that nations subject themselves to ‘the law of Christ’ is an unrealistic demand, and the hope that they will do so is a sentimental one.”
Even as I’d been drifting away from it, Niebuhr’s dismissal of Christian pacifism irritated me. The adjectives “unrealistic” and “sentimental” didn’t match the conscientious objectors I knew. Still, in my conversations with West, I didn’t attempt to rebut Niebuhr, because I half agreed with him.
●
After college, feeling directionless, I spent the summer at a Catholic monastery in Arkansas. Its fundraising guy, a military retiree, hired me part-time. Colonel J. Ross Franklin had been wounded in Korea and served three tours in Vietnam with the Airborne Rangers and the 82nd Airborne Division. The recipient of thirteen valor awards, including the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart, he was the most decorated member of the West Point class of 1950.
Ross soon became not just my boss but a close friend. He had me drive him on the sweltering backroads of Arkansas, playing cassettes of Ranger cadences that we’d yell out through the open window. Between odd jobs, he gave me his memoirs to type up. And he determined that I should become an officer.
The stories of combat in Ross’s manuscript gave a firsthand glimpse of war’s glory. But Ross had also served on the Peers Commission that investigated the 1968 My Lai massacre. That atrocity still haunted him decades later, adding an ambiguous asterisk to his tales of martial exploits. This may have explained why he had become a Third Order Franciscan. Francis of Assisi, the order’s founder, had forbidden its members to bear arms, and during the Fifth Crusade had crossed enemy lines to try to negotiate a truce.
Still, Ross’s officer idea caught my imagination—it seemed like a plan that might fill the gaping absence I’d felt since leaving home, of no longer belonging to a community united by a higher purpose. Ross urged me to read Catholic just-war theology to banish my Anabaptist scruples. All the great intellectuals eventually came home to Rome, he told me.
But since I was then in the habit of postponing decisions, that fall I traveled to Nicaragua to work on an organic farm. Half a year later, while I was hoeing weeds amid the gorgeous landscape of the Isla de Ometepe, a moment of awful clarity overcame me that drove me to pray. In retrospect I think of it as my conversion to Christianity. Half a year after that, I was back at the Bruderhof requesting to take the community’s lifelong vows of membership. Ross’s military plans for me hadn’t worked out. Yet I still had reservations about the pacifism of the community I was joining.
●
Today, after more than two decades attempting to live into the Christian faith, those reservations are gone. I now believe that pacifism (for lack of a handier term) is central to following Christ, just as Anabaptism has long taught. This isn’t a majority view among Christians past or present, as evidenced by centuries of Christian holy wars, inquisitions and imperialist projects. The reason for that gap, in my view, is that my non-pacifist fellow Christians aren’t taking seriously enough what our faith teaches about who human beings are and how history ends.
Are human beings natural-born killers? The assumption that violence is our default mode goes back at least to the Enlightenment. Hobbes, for instance, claimed that humanity’s state of nature is one of unremitting warfare and antagonism, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Darwin, quoting Tennyson, theorized that nature, presumably including human nature, is “red in tooth and claw.” William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has taught generations of students that even children become killers when left to their own devices. Popular evolutionary psychology presents humans, especially males, as wired for dominance and physical aggression.
Undeniably, humans do have a long history of killing each other. In 2015, paleontologists announced that a 430,000-year-old hominin skull found in northern Spain showed signs of lethal trauma caused by two independent blows. Forensic researchers concluded that the location and angle of these injuries reflected “a clear intention to kill.” (This early homicide appears to have been committed by a right-handed perpetrator.)
Given all this, what’s surprising is how maladapted most humans are to the act of killing. Except for psychopaths and those who, like the heroes of the Iliad, are habituated by repeated practice, killing seems to go against our nature, inspiring a peculiar revulsion. In the twentieth century, this quirk of human psychology posed a major threat to military effectiveness.
After World War II, American military researchers estimated that 75 percent of servicemen who saw combat had failed to fire at the enemy. The U.S. Army’s chief combat historian S. L. A. Marshall, after interviewing thousands of infantrymen, concluded that in any given encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 percent of men “would take any part with their weapons.” Similarly, the majority of fighter pilots never attempted a shot at enemy aircraft, with less than one percent of pilots accounting for 30 to 40 percent of the kills. As Marshall explained in his 1947 book Men Against Fire, “the average and normally healthy individual … has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility … at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.”
The accuracy of Marshall’s statistics has been debated, but U.S. military brass accepted his main findings. They responded by radically reforming combat training. Recognizing that most soldiers exhibit a phobia-like aversion to killing, they turned to techniques used to treat other phobias: desensitization and conditioning.
One of Marshall’s successors is Dave Grossman, a former Airborne Ranger who taught psychology at West Point (he’s now a consultant). Grossman’s book On Killing explores “killology,” the study of how to increase soldiers’ lethality by overcoming psychological resistance. This involves, for example, providing fighters with what Grossman calls “prepackaged denial defense mechanisms”: “The soldier has rehearsed the process so many times that when he does kill in combat he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being.” This technique approximates the plot of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, in which the main character’s military commanders dupe him into thinking he’s playing a video game when in reality he is choreographing a space battle that wipes out an extraterrestrial civilization.
Killology research, Grossman writes, does suggest one hopeful finding: “Despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.” Only a small minority of fighters—he estimates around 2 percent—are “natural soldiers” who can kill with equanimity. By contrast, “the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be ‘conscientious objectors.’”
In 1942, my grandfather Richard’s refusal to kill seemed to make him an outlier among his Greatest Generation peers. He may have belonged to a hidden pacifist majority.
●
The assessment that “man is not by nature a killer” contradicts Hobbes and Darwin as popularly received. So does recent research concluding that pre-agricultural humans shared an aversion to killing resembling that described by Grossman (revising earlier estimates of prehistoric violence, for example in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature). Such findings, however intriguing, don’t ultimately determine the validity of Christian pacifism. Still, they suggest that nonviolence may come naturally to our species after all.
That’s the same claim made by the Book of Genesis, though in a very different register. According to its poetic opening, humankind is primordially pacifist: the first humans in Eden don’t even kill animals. Genesis portrays the first homicide, by Cain of his brother Abel, as a fateful desecration of that first innocence, from which the history of bloodshed follows.
But that’s not the Hebrew Bible’s last word on the subject. Eden’s peace will one day be restored, according to the prophet Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. … They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” This, according to Christianity, is how history ends.
Early Christians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian loved to invoke Isaiah’s prophecy when describing their new faith. They believed it pointed toward the church as the eschatological Mount Zion, in which all nations would be gathered in peace. The reason Christians must not kill, they thought, is so that they can partake already now in the peaceable kingdom to come.
In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr is respectful of this Isaianic dream. But he can’t believe it will happen:
It is safe to hazard the prophecy that the dream of perpetual peace and brotherhood for human society is one which will never be fully realized. It is a vision prompted by the conscience and insight of individual man, but incapable of fulfillment by collective man. It is like all true religious visions, possible of approximation but not of realisation in actual history.
Here Niebuhr, though writing as a theologian, denies Christianity’s key claim about the future: that the peaceable kingdom will one day come “on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer says. Niebuhr doesn’t buy it.
He’s right, though, that Christian pacifism hangs on whether that claim holds. Here it parts ways with other varieties of pacifism, according to Eberhard Arnold, the German theologian who founded the Bruderhof (he was my great-grandfather, Heinrich’s father). Arnold, a conservative academic, had become a pacifist and religious socialist through World War I. That mass slaughter prompted him to reread the Gospels and recover early Christian and Anabaptist traditions of nonviolence. He concluded that “in the name of Jesus Christ we can die, but not kill.”
Because Christian pacifism is eschatological, it doesn’t offer a universal ethic. Rather, it’s a way of life for those who desire to belong to the story that begins in Eden and culminates with the peaceable kingdom. It’s only within this story that Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence make sense; wrested from context, they “degenerate into some new theoretical orthodoxy.” (Arnold thought that Tolstoy, for one, fell into this legalist trap.) But for those who place their lives within this overarching plotline, Jesus’s words become good news: they are his invitation to live as “citizens” and “ambassadors” of the peaceable kingdom to come (here Arnold borrows Pauline language). Christians are to be God’s embassy of peace in a world at war. Pacifism becomes our eschatological Pledge of Allegiance.
What Christian pacifism doesn’t claim is that it’s necessarily an effective strategy. To be sure, the New Testament teaches that peaceful means can, and often do, lead to more peaceful ends (an assertion borne out by the history of nonviolent movements). As Arnold acknowledged, campaigns such as Gandhi’s can succeed as “a form of power politics.” But in other situations, pacifism will lose: “Nowhere does Jesus say a single word to support pacifism for the sake of its usefulness or benefits.” It may even result in the death of innocents. (One example in living memory is the 1997 Acteal massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, when 45 members of Las Abejas, a pacifist indigenous Catholic community, were gunned down by right-wing paramilitaries, many while praying in their church.)
As an expression of future-oriented faith that requires willingness to die, Christian pacifism can’t be enforced on society at large—what Eric Voegelin would call “immanentizing the eschaton.” Like Augustine, Arnold affirmed that in today’s violent world, governments must still exist (for now), and wars will still be fought (for now). Indeed, the New Testament offers standards by which to judge whether a particular regime or war is relatively just or not, which is one reason Arnold opposed Nazism.
But relative justice is all that governments and wars can hope to attain in the present age. By contrast, Arnold believed, Christians owe their loyalty to the “absolute justice” of the future age. This absolute justice is spelled out by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as a life of unconditional love, including love of enemies—according to Arnold, even of Hitler himself. That’s why Arnold argues, contra Augustine, that government and warfare are not vocations proper to a believer: “Do you really think you can go a different way from Jesus on such decisive points as property and violence and yet claim to be his disciple?”
●
All this may sound like a strange story to believe. But it’s only as strange as Christianity itself. As Paul wrote, “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles.” This is a faith that instructs believers to “lose their life,” “take up their cross” and “die with Christ.” The willingness to die that is at the heart of Christianity, Arnold pointed out, helps explain why early church teachers, even as they prohibited killing, so often used the language of soldiering and martial virtue to describe their faith. It’s also why early Christians came to call nonbelievers pagani, “civilians.”
For most Christians, losing one’s life is figurative. For history’s first recorded conscientious objector, as for many after him, it was literal. On March 12, 295 CE, a 21-year-old recruit named Maximilian appeared before the proconsul Dion in Tebessa in what’s now northeastern Algeria. Dion was touring the area to drum up new soldiers for the Third Augustan Legion, which was then fending off threats from Berber tribes pressing on Rome’s North African breadbasket. The proconsul was impressed by the young man, who came with his father, Victor, a tax official. “What is your name?” Dion began.
“But why do you wish to know my name?” Maximilian answered. “I cannot serve because I am a Christian.”
As the interview continued, the recruiting staff was busy taking Maximilian’s measurements. He was five-foot-ten, according to the Acts of Maximilian, an anonymous hagiography that offers a verbatim report.
Meanwhile Maximilian protested, “I will not do it! I cannot serve!”
“Serve, or you will die,” Dion warned. He appealed to Victor to sway his son, but the father was cagey: “He is aware and can take his own counsel on what is best for him.”
Dion reminded Maximilian of the stakes. “Have regard for your youth: serve. This is what a young man should do.” He pointed out that there were Christian soldiers in the elite imperial guard. Was he better than them?
“They know what is best for them,” Maximilian replied. “But I am a Christian and I cannot do wrong.”
Dion persisted some time in trying to persuade the “excellent recruit” before losing patience. When he sentenced Maximilian to death, the young man replied, “Thanks be to God!” According to his hagiographer, on reaching the execution spot “with a joyous countenance he turned and said to his father: ‘Give this executioner my new clothes which you prepared for my military service.’” In what may have been a flash of humor, Maximilian added that he was about to be made a centurion, and assured his timid father that he’d be waiting to welcome him. “Soon afterwards he died.”
Is this an account of heroic valor, or of the tragic waste of a young life? That depends on whether the Christian story is true. I believe Maximilian was right to wager on it.
Art credit: Pedro Reyes, Detente, 2023. Marble, 55 × 114 × 43 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
Growing up, one of the first things I learned from the Bible was the commandment Thou shalt not kill. This makes sense considering that the religious community I belong to—the Bruderhof—is rooted in Anabaptism, a Christian tradition that, with occasional exceptions, has been pacifist since 1525. (The Anabaptist movement, which also includes the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites, celebrates its quincentenary this year.) Over the sixteenth century, thousands of Anabaptists were executed as traitors to Christendom by Catholic and Protestant rulers. No doubt that’s why their signature virtue was Gelassenheit—“self-abandonment,” “submission,” “readiness to suffer.” It’s an ethic Nietzsche would have hated.
For a long time, I didn’t like it either, even after taking lifelong vows to become a Bruderhof member as an adult. Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by. One of these is that humans are wired for violence. Another is that a world without bloodshed is an impossible ideal that dreamers may yearn for but can never realize in history. The story I am about to tell is partly a story about how I came to agree with Christian pacifism that both of these assumptions are wrong.
The case for pacifism that Anabaptists make, however, is not based on these philosophical postulates. It starts, rather, with the creedal affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth is “very God of very God.” During his earthly life, what did this incarnate God tell his followers about using force? According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus taught: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” “Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword.”
The word “pacifism” is notoriously slippery; I’m using it here as shorthand for a commitment to nonviolent peacemaking, including a refusal to kill. By that definition, the New Testament depicts Jesus as a pacifist. As a historical matter, scholars broadly agree that Jesus stood out from a host of other messianic leaders in first-century Judaea by rejecting armed resistance to Roman rule. This is also how his first followers understood him: church writers of the first three centuries repeatedly counseled Christians not to participate in any form of killing. As the theologian Lactantius summarized around 310 CE, “Killing a human being, whom God willed to be a sacred creature, is always wrong.”
Beyond such ethical precepts, at the heart of Christian pacifism is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To fulfill his mission, the New Testament suggests, Jesus chose a defenseless path that took him unresistingly to torture and execution; likewise, his disciples are to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Jesus’s words from the three synoptic Gospels). Those who claim to follow Jesus, says the First Letter of John, “ought to walk in the same way he walked.” We’re to imitate a God who, despite his omnipotence, chose to overcome evil not through force but through a radically vulnerable form of love. As the theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, the reason that Christians are “to live without resort to violence is that by doing so we live as God lives.”
The Christian case against pacifism is more convoluted, given the tension with the New Testament and early tradition. Yet in essence, it’s an appeal to common sense. While Jesus’s teachings may guide private life, this view holds, to apply them to public life is grossly irresponsible, since that would prevent Christians from defending the innocent or serving the state. After its legalization by Constantine in 313 CE, Christianity accepted a role in maintaining social order in the Roman Empire. Accordingly, bishops such as Ambrose and Augustine allowed Christians to participate in just wars and capital punishment. (They maintained the church’s ban on gladiatorial games, abortion and infanticide.) These churchmen didn’t deny Jesus’s teachings—they just made room for exceptions. To this end, they drew creatively on the Old Testament and philosophers like Cicero, or expanded on the apostle Paul’s dictum that government is ordained by God. Augustine, for example, reasoned that a soldier who slays on his superior’s orders doesn’t violate the prohibition on killing because he “does not himself ‘kill’—he is an instrument, a sword in its user’s hand.” Augustine thus offered Christians the kind of work-around that would enable them to punish and wage war with a good conscience.
Whether or not Augustine’s permissiveness can be made to harmonize with the Jesus of the Gospels, it reflects the intuition that not all killing is the same. Without making some accommodation with violence, Christian pacifism seems preening and cranky, obsessed with keeping clean hands in a dirty world. It invites the charge of free riding (since it leaves the political community’s defense to others) and carries the whiff of cowardice. There are counterexamples, of course: Desmond Doss, an American medic who refused to carry weapons for religious reasons, received the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Battle of Okinawa, as portrayed in the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge. But their rarity seems to prove the point.
If pacifism is allowed to make claims on everyone, Augustine feared, it will serve to empower aggressors. During World War II, George Orwell would level a similar charge when he called pacificism “objectively pro-Fascist.” If pacifists think they can “‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back,” Orwell wrote, “let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.” This was an early formulation of a question I’ve been asked dozens of times: If everyone were pacifist, who would have stopped Hitler?
●
Both my grandfathers would have infuriated Orwell. My German grandfather, J. Heinrich Arnold, a Bruderhof member, embraced the Anabaptist peace tradition, so when the Nazis came to power, he rejected their ideology and militarism out of hand. In 1935, Hitler abrogated the Versailles Treaty and announced general conscription; local officials warned the Bruderhof that refusal would be punished as treason (the community had already been the target of a Gestapo raid). Heinrich, aged 21, sought safety in Liechtenstein, and then a year later used his honeymoon with my grandmother, Annemarie, as an excuse to renew his passport and flee to England. When Germany threatened to invade Britain in 1940, the Arnolds became liable to internment as enemy aliens; they and other Bruderhof refugees migrated again, settling in Paraguay, where they constructed homes in the jungle, established a farm, built a hospital and lost many children, including my mother’s sister. After fifteen years, my grandparents moved to the United States, helping start the Bruderhof in the Hudson Valley, where I’d later grow up.
My American grandfather’s reasons for becoming a pacifist were, by contrast, philosophically hazy. Richard Mommsen had grown up on a Wisconsin farm as the son of a passionate bowhunter and agrarian socialist. When he was drafted in 1942, his older brother Durward had already enlisted in the Navy. But Richard simply knew he couldn’t kill. “I do not believe in killing under any circumstances,” he wrote as a college sophomore. On hearing about Richard’s pacifism, Durward was horrified and drove to St. Paul, Minnesota, to make him change his mind. But Richard felt he could not budge. “I believe that there are some things beyond the state’s jurisdiction,” he wrote in his application for alternative service, “and that one of these things is the power to command any man to kill another.” Richard spent over three years in Civilian Public Service camps in Michigan, North Dakota and California, doing forestry and infrastructure projects. In the camp barracks, he co-founded a School of Cooperative Living for other would-be communitarians, making the lifelong friends who, in 1958, would bring him and his family to the Bruderhof.
My grandfathers’ stories weren’t unusual in the Bruderhof of my childhood; most of the men I looked up to had been conscientious objectors, and the veterans tended to be even more anti-militarist. Many community elders had known the great figures of the twentieth-century peace movement—Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Pete Seeger. And in my Bruderhof-run school, one of my eighth-grade projects was to create a “conscientious-objector file” documenting my pacifism in case the draft were ever reinstated. It contained letters I’d written to Reagan and Gorbachev advocating nuclear disarmament and an anti-war statement I’d read out to a kindly Army chaplain when our class visited the Pentagon.
But when I started ninth grade at Kingston High School in September 1990, I was plunged into a new and very different culture. The school year began one month after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and my certainties crumbled while watching CNN’s live coverage of the Gulf War in the school cafeteria. That January, with the launch of Operation Desert Storm, yellow ribbons seemed to be everywhere, festooning the high school fieldhouse and the jackets of students and staff. In home room, cute cheerleaders gave patriotic messages before the Pledge of Allegiance. The foldable sheets issued for covering our textbooks were glossy Air Force ads showing sleek F-16s and pilots who looked like they’d stepped out of Top Gun.
With the cafeteria CNN crowd, I cheered along as American smart bombs obliterated buildings in Baghdad. To join the great red-white-and-blue community, so different from my own, felt transgressive and exhilarating.
I still revered both my grandfathers and felt a certain loyalty to their ideals. Heinrich had died, but Richard was busy writing to U.S. senators to protest the war, and his dinner conversation often returned to the horror of “what our country is doing.” I wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with him. On the other hand, to me my community’s pacifism now felt legalistic and sectarian.
Four years later, I moved into a freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, my loyalties still divided. The professor I remember best wasn’t one I took classes with. Cornel West—who ran for president as a third-party candidate in 2024—was already then a celebrity public intellectual. Somehow, he noticed a lost-looking Bruderhof kid and generously invited me to his office for an informal biweekly tutorial. He explained that he, too, had grown up in a close-knit church before coming to Harvard, and he wanted to help me navigate its broader intellectual world.
West first had me read through W. E. B. Du Bois, then assigned me Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-century American theologian whom Barack Obama would later call one of his favorite philosophers. Niebuhr’s 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society takes direct aim at Christian pacifism.
Niebuhr grants that Jesus and the early church taught nonviolence. After all, he writes, “it was a natural and inevitable hope in the early Christian community that the spirit of love, which pervaded the life of its own group, would eventually inform the moral life of the whole human race.” But he warns that attempts to realize that hope outside intimate settings are doomed by humanity’s moral limitations. In large-scale collectives such as a nation, group egoism inevitably overwhelms the “spirit of love.” Force is thus indispensable for upholding order and some degree of justice, a fact that reveals pacifism as a dangerous delusion: “The demand of religious moralists that nations subject themselves to ‘the law of Christ’ is an unrealistic demand, and the hope that they will do so is a sentimental one.”
Even as I’d been drifting away from it, Niebuhr’s dismissal of Christian pacifism irritated me. The adjectives “unrealistic” and “sentimental” didn’t match the conscientious objectors I knew. Still, in my conversations with West, I didn’t attempt to rebut Niebuhr, because I half agreed with him.
●
After college, feeling directionless, I spent the summer at a Catholic monastery in Arkansas. Its fundraising guy, a military retiree, hired me part-time. Colonel J. Ross Franklin had been wounded in Korea and served three tours in Vietnam with the Airborne Rangers and the 82nd Airborne Division. The recipient of thirteen valor awards, including the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart, he was the most decorated member of the West Point class of 1950.
Ross soon became not just my boss but a close friend. He had me drive him on the sweltering backroads of Arkansas, playing cassettes of Ranger cadences that we’d yell out through the open window. Between odd jobs, he gave me his memoirs to type up. And he determined that I should become an officer.
The stories of combat in Ross’s manuscript gave a firsthand glimpse of war’s glory. But Ross had also served on the Peers Commission that investigated the 1968 My Lai massacre. That atrocity still haunted him decades later, adding an ambiguous asterisk to his tales of martial exploits. This may have explained why he had become a Third Order Franciscan. Francis of Assisi, the order’s founder, had forbidden its members to bear arms, and during the Fifth Crusade had crossed enemy lines to try to negotiate a truce.
Still, Ross’s officer idea caught my imagination—it seemed like a plan that might fill the gaping absence I’d felt since leaving home, of no longer belonging to a community united by a higher purpose. Ross urged me to read Catholic just-war theology to banish my Anabaptist scruples. All the great intellectuals eventually came home to Rome, he told me.
But since I was then in the habit of postponing decisions, that fall I traveled to Nicaragua to work on an organic farm. Half a year later, while I was hoeing weeds amid the gorgeous landscape of the Isla de Ometepe, a moment of awful clarity overcame me that drove me to pray. In retrospect I think of it as my conversion to Christianity. Half a year after that, I was back at the Bruderhof requesting to take the community’s lifelong vows of membership. Ross’s military plans for me hadn’t worked out. Yet I still had reservations about the pacifism of the community I was joining.
●
Today, after more than two decades attempting to live into the Christian faith, those reservations are gone. I now believe that pacifism (for lack of a handier term) is central to following Christ, just as Anabaptism has long taught. This isn’t a majority view among Christians past or present, as evidenced by centuries of Christian holy wars, inquisitions and imperialist projects. The reason for that gap, in my view, is that my non-pacifist fellow Christians aren’t taking seriously enough what our faith teaches about who human beings are and how history ends.
Are human beings natural-born killers? The assumption that violence is our default mode goes back at least to the Enlightenment. Hobbes, for instance, claimed that humanity’s state of nature is one of unremitting warfare and antagonism, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Darwin, quoting Tennyson, theorized that nature, presumably including human nature, is “red in tooth and claw.” William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has taught generations of students that even children become killers when left to their own devices. Popular evolutionary psychology presents humans, especially males, as wired for dominance and physical aggression.
Undeniably, humans do have a long history of killing each other. In 2015, paleontologists announced that a 430,000-year-old hominin skull found in northern Spain showed signs of lethal trauma caused by two independent blows. Forensic researchers concluded that the location and angle of these injuries reflected “a clear intention to kill.” (This early homicide appears to have been committed by a right-handed perpetrator.)
Given all this, what’s surprising is how maladapted most humans are to the act of killing. Except for psychopaths and those who, like the heroes of the Iliad, are habituated by repeated practice, killing seems to go against our nature, inspiring a peculiar revulsion. In the twentieth century, this quirk of human psychology posed a major threat to military effectiveness.
After World War II, American military researchers estimated that 75 percent of servicemen who saw combat had failed to fire at the enemy. The U.S. Army’s chief combat historian S. L. A. Marshall, after interviewing thousands of infantrymen, concluded that in any given encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 percent of men “would take any part with their weapons.” Similarly, the majority of fighter pilots never attempted a shot at enemy aircraft, with less than one percent of pilots accounting for 30 to 40 percent of the kills. As Marshall explained in his 1947 book Men Against Fire, “the average and normally healthy individual … has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility … at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.”
The accuracy of Marshall’s statistics has been debated, but U.S. military brass accepted his main findings. They responded by radically reforming combat training. Recognizing that most soldiers exhibit a phobia-like aversion to killing, they turned to techniques used to treat other phobias: desensitization and conditioning.
One of Marshall’s successors is Dave Grossman, a former Airborne Ranger who taught psychology at West Point (he’s now a consultant). Grossman’s book On Killing explores “killology,” the study of how to increase soldiers’ lethality by overcoming psychological resistance. This involves, for example, providing fighters with what Grossman calls “prepackaged denial defense mechanisms”: “The soldier has rehearsed the process so many times that when he does kill in combat he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being.” This technique approximates the plot of Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, in which the main character’s military commanders dupe him into thinking he’s playing a video game when in reality he is choreographing a space battle that wipes out an extraterrestrial civilization.
Killology research, Grossman writes, does suggest one hopeful finding: “Despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.” Only a small minority of fighters—he estimates around 2 percent—are “natural soldiers” who can kill with equanimity. By contrast, “the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be ‘conscientious objectors.’”
In 1942, my grandfather Richard’s refusal to kill seemed to make him an outlier among his Greatest Generation peers. He may have belonged to a hidden pacifist majority.
●
The assessment that “man is not by nature a killer” contradicts Hobbes and Darwin as popularly received. So does recent research concluding that pre-agricultural humans shared an aversion to killing resembling that described by Grossman (revising earlier estimates of prehistoric violence, for example in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature). Such findings, however intriguing, don’t ultimately determine the validity of Christian pacifism. Still, they suggest that nonviolence may come naturally to our species after all.
That’s the same claim made by the Book of Genesis, though in a very different register. According to its poetic opening, humankind is primordially pacifist: the first humans in Eden don’t even kill animals. Genesis portrays the first homicide, by Cain of his brother Abel, as a fateful desecration of that first innocence, from which the history of bloodshed follows.
But that’s not the Hebrew Bible’s last word on the subject. Eden’s peace will one day be restored, according to the prophet Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. … They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” This, according to Christianity, is how history ends.
Early Christians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian loved to invoke Isaiah’s prophecy when describing their new faith. They believed it pointed toward the church as the eschatological Mount Zion, in which all nations would be gathered in peace. The reason Christians must not kill, they thought, is so that they can partake already now in the peaceable kingdom to come.
In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr is respectful of this Isaianic dream. But he can’t believe it will happen:
It is safe to hazard the prophecy that the dream of perpetual peace and brotherhood for human society is one which will never be fully realized. It is a vision prompted by the conscience and insight of individual man, but incapable of fulfillment by collective man. It is like all true religious visions, possible of approximation but not of realisation in actual history.
Here Niebuhr, though writing as a theologian, denies Christianity’s key claim about the future: that the peaceable kingdom will one day come “on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer says. Niebuhr doesn’t buy it.
He’s right, though, that Christian pacifism hangs on whether that claim holds. Here it parts ways with other varieties of pacifism, according to Eberhard Arnold, the German theologian who founded the Bruderhof (he was my great-grandfather, Heinrich’s father). Arnold, a conservative academic, had become a pacifist and religious socialist through World War I. That mass slaughter prompted him to reread the Gospels and recover early Christian and Anabaptist traditions of nonviolence. He concluded that “in the name of Jesus Christ we can die, but not kill.”
Because Christian pacifism is eschatological, it doesn’t offer a universal ethic. Rather, it’s a way of life for those who desire to belong to the story that begins in Eden and culminates with the peaceable kingdom. It’s only within this story that Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence make sense; wrested from context, they “degenerate into some new theoretical orthodoxy.” (Arnold thought that Tolstoy, for one, fell into this legalist trap.) But for those who place their lives within this overarching plotline, Jesus’s words become good news: they are his invitation to live as “citizens” and “ambassadors” of the peaceable kingdom to come (here Arnold borrows Pauline language). Christians are to be God’s embassy of peace in a world at war. Pacifism becomes our eschatological Pledge of Allegiance.
What Christian pacifism doesn’t claim is that it’s necessarily an effective strategy. To be sure, the New Testament teaches that peaceful means can, and often do, lead to more peaceful ends (an assertion borne out by the history of nonviolent movements). As Arnold acknowledged, campaigns such as Gandhi’s can succeed as “a form of power politics.” But in other situations, pacifism will lose: “Nowhere does Jesus say a single word to support pacifism for the sake of its usefulness or benefits.” It may even result in the death of innocents. (One example in living memory is the 1997 Acteal massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, when 45 members of Las Abejas, a pacifist indigenous Catholic community, were gunned down by right-wing paramilitaries, many while praying in their church.)
As an expression of future-oriented faith that requires willingness to die, Christian pacifism can’t be enforced on society at large—what Eric Voegelin would call “immanentizing the eschaton.” Like Augustine, Arnold affirmed that in today’s violent world, governments must still exist (for now), and wars will still be fought (for now). Indeed, the New Testament offers standards by which to judge whether a particular regime or war is relatively just or not, which is one reason Arnold opposed Nazism.
But relative justice is all that governments and wars can hope to attain in the present age. By contrast, Arnold believed, Christians owe their loyalty to the “absolute justice” of the future age. This absolute justice is spelled out by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as a life of unconditional love, including love of enemies—according to Arnold, even of Hitler himself. That’s why Arnold argues, contra Augustine, that government and warfare are not vocations proper to a believer: “Do you really think you can go a different way from Jesus on such decisive points as property and violence and yet claim to be his disciple?”
●
All this may sound like a strange story to believe. But it’s only as strange as Christianity itself. As Paul wrote, “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles.” This is a faith that instructs believers to “lose their life,” “take up their cross” and “die with Christ.” The willingness to die that is at the heart of Christianity, Arnold pointed out, helps explain why early church teachers, even as they prohibited killing, so often used the language of soldiering and martial virtue to describe their faith. It’s also why early Christians came to call nonbelievers pagani, “civilians.”
For most Christians, losing one’s life is figurative. For history’s first recorded conscientious objector, as for many after him, it was literal. On March 12, 295 CE, a 21-year-old recruit named Maximilian appeared before the proconsul Dion in Tebessa in what’s now northeastern Algeria. Dion was touring the area to drum up new soldiers for the Third Augustan Legion, which was then fending off threats from Berber tribes pressing on Rome’s North African breadbasket. The proconsul was impressed by the young man, who came with his father, Victor, a tax official. “What is your name?” Dion began.
“But why do you wish to know my name?” Maximilian answered. “I cannot serve because I am a Christian.”
As the interview continued, the recruiting staff was busy taking Maximilian’s measurements. He was five-foot-ten, according to the Acts of Maximilian, an anonymous hagiography that offers a verbatim report.
Meanwhile Maximilian protested, “I will not do it! I cannot serve!”
“Serve, or you will die,” Dion warned. He appealed to Victor to sway his son, but the father was cagey: “He is aware and can take his own counsel on what is best for him.”
Dion reminded Maximilian of the stakes. “Have regard for your youth: serve. This is what a young man should do.” He pointed out that there were Christian soldiers in the elite imperial guard. Was he better than them?
“They know what is best for them,” Maximilian replied. “But I am a Christian and I cannot do wrong.”
Dion persisted some time in trying to persuade the “excellent recruit” before losing patience. When he sentenced Maximilian to death, the young man replied, “Thanks be to God!” According to his hagiographer, on reaching the execution spot “with a joyous countenance he turned and said to his father: ‘Give this executioner my new clothes which you prepared for my military service.’” In what may have been a flash of humor, Maximilian added that he was about to be made a centurion, and assured his timid father that he’d be waiting to welcome him. “Soon afterwards he died.”
Is this an account of heroic valor, or of the tragic waste of a young life? That depends on whether the Christian story is true. I believe Maximilian was right to wager on it.
Art credit: Pedro Reyes, Detente, 2023. Marble, 55 × 114 × 43 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.