The lessons of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam are numerous. I propose to sketch a few of the areas in which my thought as a Christian citizen has matured over the past few years. The things I have learned about my faith and about contemporary discipleship are not necessarily what others of my generation may have learned, because many did not enter the era of the Vietnam War with as much ignorance and naivete as I possessed. On the other hand, I probably speak for many fellow Christians, young and old, who have undergone a great awakening. The end of the war will not signal for us a return to normalcy. Vietnam has been the catalyst for great change that will shape our lives and thoughts long after the United States’ military role in Southeast Asia is ended.
One of the highest awards of scouting is the God and Country Award. It is given to young men who work under their pastors and scoutmasters to perform service to both church and community. What Vietnam has taught the Christian is that allegiance to country often involves disobedience to God. Increasingly, the choice must be either-or, not both-and. Vietnam has highlighted the fact that the basic generating principles of citizenship in the secular society and citizenship in the Kingdom of God are mutually exclusive. There are preliminary ways in which we must serve and honor our country, rendering unto Caesar the limited things we owe to Caesar for the preservation of civil authority. We are not anarchists. But our allegiance to country is temporal and conditional. There can be no Christian support for what we have done in Vietnam.
All of this is to say that I have come to the belated realization that America is not the good neighbor or the benign influence that my history books led me to believe. I should have paid greater heed to the biblical testimony that Satan is the prince of this world and that his reign, however temporary and limited, means that evil in high places is to be expected. The wolf in sheep’s clothing, my own country, is unmasked as one of the greatest perpetrators of violence and exploitation in the world today. Somehow I had not only ignored the warning of scripture, but I had ignored the facts that were screaming at me from history and from my contemporary culture—the system of slavery, the massacre of the Indian nations, the atomic bomb. I had known of these things, but I had never put two and two together. It took the agony of Vietnam to get through to me that the answer is four. Vietnam makes sense to me now not as a lapse in the national character, but as a predictable continuation of cultural purpose. Man’s inhumanity to man was the context for the birth of the nation; and it is the context for the decline of the nation. I am not saying that America is different in kind from any other country. I am saying that she is like other nations, whether communist or not, in her selfishness, her pride, her brutality, her oppression. Of course there are differences in degrees, but the point is that America is not the knight in shining armor on the world scene.
America had always existed in my mind as having a special role in history and in contemporary world affairs. She was the center of an uncommon moral goodness, beaming as a light in the darkness. I thought of the Statue of Liberty as the fitting symbol of her unblemished virtue. Now all that idealism is gone. Vietnam has given me cause to look more closely at the American record and to see my country in a much more sober perspective. Now I can no longer pledge allegiance to “one nation under God.” I am horrified at the words that I used to sing so proudly: “The bombs bursting in air … and the rockets’ red glare …” Many would look upon this process as a great loss; some would view me as a traitor. To be sure, my loyalty to my country is not what it once was in terms of enthusiasm, but it is a more solid and realistic loyalty, and this, I believe, is a great gain. I doubt if those who are quick to “rally ‘round the flag” or “stand up and cheer” are making as significant a contribution to their country as I am making. What we need most in our nation is conscience, a sense of justice, integrity, and repentance. I want my person to represent these qualities If we cannot love our country out of our national shame, then I’m not sure we can love our country in any redemptive way. As we honor America, in accordance with the mandate of Romans 13, we must also recognize her for what she is. For a few of us, this means coming to a deeper appreciation of the positive contribution that the United States has made to her own citizenry and to the world community. But for most of us, this means balancing our starry-eyed view of the goodness of America with a sobering grasp of her deeply-rooted arrogance and idolatry.
A second lesson of Vietnam concerns the Christian community. I have been subject so long to a Christian leadership that has spoken of living by faith, of the cost of discipleship, of how hard it is to follow Christ, of never being ashamed of the gospel, of taking up one’s cross. I have listened to scores of challenging preachers and teachers talk about Christ asking for all of a man’s allegiance. Now I understand that all of this talk, which I took so seriously, has amounted to nothing more than a clearing of the throat and a shuffling of papers. The church has spiritualized out of existence the demands that Jesus made so concrete and immediate. When the crisis comes, the real message of the Christian establishment emerges: Do what you have to do to get by. Keep peace with the powers and forces that rule this nation. Don’t get involved. Maintain respectability. Be conformed to this world. One of the deepest scars from this war for me is this: I will never again be able to bring to the church my child-like trust, my boyish zeal, my naive teachability. I have been stunned into silence and disbelief by the precision with which my Christian brothers and leaders have affirmed not only the authority of the state to rule (which I also accept), but the unquestionable morality of government policy.
You might say that Vietnam has caused me to look not only at the record of my country, but also at the stance of my church. In both cases I have been disillusioned by the lack of ethical consciousness. The matter of destroying a country and its people appears to be above moral scrutiny! Morality is not relevant to war! Therefore, the church, which is concerned with faith and morals, is not concerned with bombs or napalm, because these represent political-military matters. But if the church is going to be concerned for oppressed people, whether at home or abroad, then the church, from the individual Christian to the local congregation to the administrative hierarchy, must be involved with politics, because politics has created the bulk of human suffering in the world today. What I have discovered, to my dismay, is that the church is not basically motivated to love its neighbor and/or enemy. If this thrust of the great commandment is taken away, then the effectual existence of the church in the world is virtually nullified. So Christians can kill each other in Northern Ireland, or they can kill nonbelievers in Vietnam, in both cases with an equal claim on God’s blessing. From an ethical standpoint, you might say that the church has lost its witness in American life.
A third lesson for me from Vietnam is that there is no place for physical violence in the affairs of men and nations. The Christian witness must be resurrected on this point if we are to regain the credibility that has been buried in the debris of war. No matter how much we theologize about just wars, we are to love our enemies, and the essence of that love, when we are confronted with physical force, is to turn the other cheek. Some will point out that this is a requirement for the Christian, but not for the state. This is true. The state is pagan, as was pointed out above, and can’t be expected to represent the Kingdom. It is on this very point, the question of violence, that the church must separate itself from the state, and that the Christian must exercise his responsibility for civil disobedience. Those who wield the sword will perish by the sword, as Jesus pointed out. The blood that we have taken is crying out for the blood of our country, and there is no doubt that the God of history will satisfy that cry. The norm for the state is violence. But the norm for the Christian is non-violent suffering love. Non-violence is the necessary prelude to servanthood. The real question for our society is whether, in the face of all this, we can keep alive the possibility of non-violence. Now is not the time to theorize about the possible exceptions, but to be aggressive in the practice of peace. Vietnam has taught me that the pursuit of peace on a personal or national level may never make room for a policy of violence.
So these three truths, about the United States, about the church, and about violence, emerge from the rubble of Southeast Asia. They are not lessons that Vietnam created; rather, they are lessons that Vietnam has brought to center-stage. If we possessed the wisdom to know them and apply them in advance, the Vietnam experience could have been avoided, because none of the several Presidents who have carried out the war could have survived the outrage of the corporate Christian community. The issue now is to resolve to modify our lives on the basis of the realities that the war has made clear. What are some of these resolves that we can make as Christians?
First of all, I believe we should each become more aggressive in our pursuit of brotherly love. Concrete loving of our neighbors, without prior conditions or eventual limitations, is not to be a casual byproduct of our lives. Love is to be the divine certification that we are of God—that we give ourselves as he gave himself in Jesus Christ. We must become a servant people, and the marks of our servanthood must emerge as brokenness and poverty. There is no rationale for our being comfortable and secure with the status quo of our physical and spiritual lives. It is such false security that dulls our sensitivity to evil and blinds us to the operation of oppression. If we were truly engaged in a continuous healing of the wounds of the world community, we would not have the time, the energy, the stomach, or the resources for war. The people who are aloof from human suffering are the ones who plan and sanction wars. Apathy breeds the potential brutality that in turn waits for the historic opportunity to vent itself. The stockpiling of weapons is what comes from fear, from defensiveness, and from an American ideal that is impotent and not worth defending. Injustice on a world-wide scale has developed a supra-human machinery of its own, to the end that passive justice equals injustice. Passive morality is immorality. And benign neglect means cruelty. What is needed, instead, is the active outpouring of personal and corporate resources to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We cannot expect our nation to practice the agape love for man that is required both at home and abroad. But we can demand that we ourselves, as Christians, and that the church as a whole measure up to the completeness that is of God.
Along with the aggressive implementation of brotherly love, we Christians should give ourselves to the need for personal reconciliation with those whose viewpoints differ from ours.
We should nurture the spirit of repentance within ourselves and commend it to those others who have done wrong. It is a prerequisite for ultimate forgiveness and redemption. But in view of our corporate sins—we are all in this together—I think it is more fitting for us to embrace each other without first exacting a confession of mutual guilt. The father runs out to his prodigal son assuming the best—assuming a return of the spirit as well as of the flesh. We trust that our forthcoming demonstration of peace-making will win the war-makers to our side where our arguments have failed. We will not compromise on the issues that have divided us, but if there is any virtue and honor, if there is anything worthy of praise, now is the time to credit one another with these things. Non-violence can be a sterile concept, if it is a description of what we are not going to do. But it can also be a creative and redeeming concept, if it paves the way for aggressive compassion and personal reconciliation. These two complementary pursuits should be the hallmark of our Christian lives.
A third pursuit should likewise become a fresh priority for each of us—the mandate to remain pure from evil. The cynics will say that it is impossible to keep oneself unsullied by the world. There is a certain realism to their judgment. Even Gandhi speaks in his autobiography of the “beauty of compromise.” But the crucial point to remember is that Jesus as well as Gandhi represented an alternative to the status quo, a sharp judgment against the norm. There is a place for patience. Just by being born into this world Jesus had to accommodate himself to the existence of evil. He did not overturn the tables of the money-changers at every opportunity. But compromise has gone too far when we find ourselves in one of two situations: if we become actively involved in the perpetration of evil, or if, perhaps just because of our silence, we lose our vision for the alternative to evil.
We recognize that the essence of God’s Kingdom is light and the essence of this world is darkness. Ultimately, there can be no compromise between the two. Applying this pattern to our own lives, we must understand that we belong to God, not to Caesar, nor to ourselves. There is no avoiding the confrontation. So the question of compromise is relevant only insofar as it does not become substitute for confrontation. The moment must come when we are called upon to say, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” We must utter an uncompromising “No!” at some point in every moral circumstance of life. Jesus’ complete response to the status quo was made at the cross, when his hour had finally arrived. The hour arrives for all of us, many times over, and we must pray for sensitivity to its presence. We must also honestly ask ourselves if we are avoiding it by some questionable rationale.
The danger in waiting too long is that the capacity for moral indignation is gradually drained away. This situation what I alluded to earlier when I said that the church had lost its witness, its soul, over the issue of the war. I know scores of pastors and Christian laymen who have waited so long that they now have nothing to say. The hour for moral outrage has come and gone, and I question the credibility of any post-war leadership (political or religious) that has been able to retain its silent composure in the face of Vietnam. Jesus accused the Pharisees of straining out gnats while swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24). The pastor who has preached sermons on personal morality without preaching one on Vietnam is guilty of the same oversight. Once the throat has been enlarged sufficiently to swallow one camel, there is no stopping a future procession of camels. Patience and silence may be construed as legitimate compromise only as long as the pure ideal retains its viability. The tragedy of Vietnam is that it has cost us our vision of the Kingdom of God. And without that vision, the people perish.
The great proof that we have lost the vision regarding Vietnam is that all we want to do now is “get out.” The idea of a cease-fire, a return of troops and prisoners—these are the ideas that constitute our national dream. As if by washing our hands of the situation we could somehow satisfy our moral obligation! It takes much more money and commitment to rebuild a country than to destroy it. If a cessation of hostilities signals the end of the American commitment, then peace will be a hollow victory. The peace of the Kingdom of God will not be realized until every child is healed and the earth brings forth once more its produce.
So we must individually and corporately resolve never again to give ourselves, our sons, or our taxes for the purpose of destroying life. If we compromise at this point, if we are complicit in the waging of war, then we lose our commitment and credibility when we are called upon to wage peace. For some of us, the peace movement has just begun. In my life, complicity in Vietnam almost snuffed out the last flicker of morality. The Christian conscience is only now being revived. A broad exciting vision for peace, which I had nearly compromised out of existence, has begun to reassert itself. If compromise means the death of this vision, then the purity of the Kingdom ideal means its rebirth.
There is no realistic hope that the nation will embrace this ideal. But there is great motivation and opportunity now for individuals to band together to live out in community the New Testament faith: that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the end that good news is preached to the poor, the broken-hearted are healed, the prisoners are released, the blind see, and the down-trodden are freed from their oppressors. These pursuits constitute for us, as they did for Jesus, a living demonstration of the Kingdom ethic. As we give ourselves to the nurture of the Kingdom, we are drawn away from the evil aspects of participation in the world’s affairs. We must resolve to make the line between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of our national citizenship a stronger restraint against any future support of armed combat.
The Vietnam experience leads us to say no to the established leadership of our country and of our church and no to the methodology of violence. We say yes to the ethic of brotherly love and personal reconciliation, especially as that love touches the people of Vietnam and as that reconciliation relieves the bitterness that exists within our own country. And we are child-like enough to espouse the purity of the Kingdom within a world of darkness. Despite all the sophisticated and subtle ways that evil threatens to overtake us, we are called to experience the transformation of our minds and lives. The war will either burden us with a fresh weight of cynicism and despair, or else it will reveal the urgency of the radical Christian alternative.
Bill Lane was a contributing editor of the Post American when this article appeared.
