Can a Government Be Pacifist?
- John Shelton
- May 17
- 2 min read
When Pennsylvania ran on Quaker principles, how did it go?
Christian pacifists such as Stanley Hauerwas are too quickly brushed aside in conversations about what a good state ought to look like. This is a missed opportunity for Christians of all stripes who are seeking to live as faithful citizens amid many political temptations and confusions.
For starters, Hauerwas has not called for a retreat from politics, but is rightly concerned that the dominant mode of political engagement will swallow Christian ethical commitments whole. As he likes to quip, much as retreat might be nice, “We’re surrounded, so there’s no place to retreat to. So Christians have to engage the world in which we find ourselves.” The question is not whether Christians should get involved in politics, but how – to which Hauerwas would invariably joke: “the same way porcupines make love: very carefully.”
Hauerwas admits that Christian success in politics might look like worldly loss. If a Christian somehow ends up president, he warns, “if they do the right thing, they won’t be re-elected.” Christians must live in the awareness that faithfulness often leads to martyrdom, not political success. After all, in Revelation the saints are identified as those who conquer by means of the apparent defeat of their Lord (“the blood of the Lamb”), as well as their own apparent defeat (“the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death”).
It is one such apparent defeat, Hauerwas once told me, that he considers the “only successful Christian experiment in government”: Quaker Pennsylvania. Even Christians who, like me, lack firm pacifist convictions can learn much from the efforts of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn.
Originally published by Plough, used with permission
