Elizabeth McAllister, Phillip Berrigan and Daniel Berrigan were among those who came to Washington D.C. on Dec. 28 to remember the Feast of the Innocents with civil disobedience at the Pentagon. The holy day was marked by a symbolic blood pouring at the two main entrance and by a number of people hand-cuffing themselves to the doors, thus blocking entrance for over an hour. The action was undertaken to warn that slaughter will be the fate of the innocents again if present U.S. military policy and the escalating nuclear arms race goes unhindered. Liz received a six-month prison sentence for the action, which is under appeal. Phil and Dan were to be sentenced in late January. This interview took place the next day at Jonah House, the resistance community in Baltimore, which has been the base of much of the recent protest against U.S. nuclear policies.
Jim: Most of us knew of the three of you first in the sixties, protesting the war and, before that, in the struggles with racism. Out of that era of the war resistance, it seems that the focus of your lives and efforts has turned to the nuclear question. Could you describe how that happened and what that meant for you?
Liz: It was really a very conscious and dramatic process. I think the beginning was Schlesinger’s announcement in 1974 of the change in policy from mutually assured destruction to the flexible and strategic targeting options. He talked about re-targeting missiles, and about developing counterforce weapons. Every commentator who wrote on that announcement pinpointed the fact that this increased the likelihood of nuclear war.
We began reading that, and then we began reading more and more about what was happening with nuclear war. We raised the question within the community about a change of priority for ourselves. We spent three or four months on that, really trying to delve into it. We sat down in a series of meetings to talk about militarism in general, continuing our focus on the Vietnam War, but bringing in the nuclear issue. All the while we were trying to research it, trying to get a handle on what was happening with nuclear weapons since we last looked at it. That effort grew into a consensus that nuclear awareness was the highest priority for us today.
Our first action in that regard was the Kissinger-Schlesinger vigil before Easter. We did three days and three nights, outside the homes of Schlesinger and Kissinger simultaneously. It was simply a vigil, and it was seen as a period of reflection to try to get some guidelines on how to act. Next we did the campaign with the two bombs, and were there at the Pentagon for three and a half or four weeks. After that grew the concept of “Disarm or dig graves,” which we’ve been working with ever since.
Phil: Dan and I had the advantage of working with the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the early sixties. They were sponsoring what they called discussions on the threefold revolution. One discussion would be on human rights, one on cybernetics, and the third on atomic weaponry. So in a sense we were forced to come to grips with the nuclear question then. And, of course, those were the days when we were fresh from the Cuban missile crisis, and we had at least a dim recollection of what peril that posed for the West, for Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. But all of this was relegated to obscurity by the Vietnam War. But I, at least, had a slow certainty that the Indochina war was just the hot war side of all of this, the arms spiral of course being the cold war side.
In a sense, I think Indochina was a secondary issue. It is less crucial when you judge the overall implications of technology and the technology of the atom, and the protection of our portfolio overseas with the weaponry we were building. But from another stand point, Indochina was a perilous adventure in its own right because of the possibility of drawing the Soviet Union and ourselves into using atomic weaponry. That was born out by our history there. We had atomic weapons on the peninsula in vast number and variety and we threatened to use them any number of times.
I think every president, with the exception of perhaps Kennedy, threatened to use atomic weapons against the old Viet Minh when we were supporting the French, or, in our own right, when we were fighting the National Liberation Front, the PRG, and the North Vietnamese. So after our ejection from Indochina, this became a predominant issue once again, because our leaders, as Liz said, immediately began to threaten with these weapons.
Jim: Could the three of you reflect on the present military situation and why Christians need to understand that so urgently? Why is it such a high priority concern at present?
Liz: It seems to me that it’s the area in which just about everything else comes together. I think, to begin with, the very basic mandate, “Thou shalt not kill,” has to include preparations for killing.
I remember as we were going through this dialogue, what they were saying to us was, “The potential destruction coming out of nuclear weapons can’t match the actual violence being done, for example, in starvation.” The world food question was at the top of everyone’s agenda. Yet the type of money and the kind of human power that’s put into the creation and storing of those weapons is all stolen from the needs of other people. There’s the actual violence that we experience in starvation, in unemployment, and in the general fear that’s abroad. Using food as a weapon is part of our whole process here.
I remember years ago Eqbal Ahmad saying to us, “The way our country is moving, we will become suppliers to the world of two items: weapons and food.” And it very much looks like we have gotten there already. We dole them out in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons.
So any Christian concerned about the biblical mandate against killing has to look closely at the killing not just of one, or a number, or at the genocide of a particular race, but at the potential here for complete destruction. And we have to see the commandment not just as something to be employed after the fact, but as something that touches our whole attitude, as it is forming. It is too late after the fact. It has to be a part of our response now.
Jim: There have been a number of technicians in the field, all along the political spectrum, who have said that the use of nuclear weapons is not even any longer a possibility. It’s an inevitability: in some way, in some place, by the end of this century--because of proliferation. Would you agree with that assessment?
Liz: Yes, I’m afraid I very, very fearfully agree with that. Yet I try to hope against it, because I think one cannot be a Christian and not have that hope. It’s hope in God and also hope in people, particularly in Christians, that some change might become possible, that some insight might come and people might change and begin to struggle against the spread of those weapons.
I think it’s that basic hope that motivates all of our actions: a hope that we might be able to touch the minds and hearts of some people to the reality of this death, and then they will begin taking steps in their own lives to make it not that inevitable thing scientists are telling us it is.
Jim: You talk about touching the hearts and minds of the people, touching the lives of people in the actions. Could you elaborate on that a bit? What are the basic kinds of things that you want to say to people who profess a biblical rootage in their lives?
Liz: One biblical passage that has been very important to me is that passage from Ezekiel: “You are to be the watchperson for the house of Israel. When you see the sword coming, sound the trumpet. Those who hear the trumpet and take shelter will be saved, and those who don’t will die. But if you see the sword and you don’t warn the people, they’ll die and I’ll hold you responsible for their deaths.”
Now that’s a very terrifying thing. I begin to see a role for myself there, trying to see and hear the danger, and trying to give some warning of it.
What we’ve got to work on, terribly conscientiously, is what sounding the trumpet is today. What form can that take; where can it be as clear as it can be and as well heard as it can be? The most important aspect of direct action is people’s freedom to respond or not to respond, and people’s willingness to hear it, take it in, and take shelter, whatever that might mean.
As I was on the West Coast about a year ago, I was talking to a group of students who said, “We are like the dinosaur: we’ve outlived our usefulness. Maybe nuclear weapons should obviate us.”
What do you do with that sort of uselessness? Here are some young people who don’t see a future for themselves or for humanity at all. In a sense they are choosing that death.
So I was forced back to reflection. And after a while I came to the conclusion that my role with a group of people such as that was to make the choice more visible: to help them become more conscious of the fact that they are indeed choosing death.
Phil: You spoke recently of inter viewing Dorothy Day, and after that I began to remember something that she wrote right after the bombing of Hiroshima. She drew parallels between the bomb and Christ: The bomb was born in a cavern under Columbia University and Christ was born in a cave. The bomb was tested in thunder and lightning in the Southwest, and he was tested in the desert by Satan. Then there was a manifestation on the Mount before Peter, James and John; the bomb was manifested at Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6.
Then she pointed to something which I think is really at the source of death, at least for Christians, and that is the displacement of Christ by the bomb. The bomb is Lord over life. It controls national life, it controls attitudes, it controls psychologies, it controls the economy, it controls our international relationships, it controls diplomacy. It’s Lord.
What we feebly attempt to do is to point to such a basis, such a wellspring of death, and ask people to take successive steps to reassert the true Lordship. To exorcise this demon, not only from national life, but from individual lives. So when Liz speaks about offering people options, she means saying, “You don’t have to work here; you don’t have to pay taxes; you don’t have to remain powerless; you don’t have to vote in rote fashion. You can vote with your feet, you can vote with your whole person, you can protest and be resistant and register an infinitely more emphatic vote.” We are trying to break this demonic, paralyzing hold over all of us.
We firmly believe that the move toward mass suicide has to be preceded by the desire for spiritual suicide. And that strikes home not only in our own country, but throughout the world, all throughout the nuclear club. It’s a human scourge that is virtually universal.
Jim: The nuclear issue came along so gradually. People of my generation have never lived without the bomb. I’ve never lived when our security wasn’t defined as a balance of terror. That’s just been assumed, normal, like television. That’s what I think may be at the root of some of the crustedness.
On one level, people hardly know nuclear weapons exist. They know intellectually that they exist, but maybe they don’t really believe it. One hasn’t been exploded since 1945, and since one would have to be a fool to ever use nuclear bombs, people are reassured that they are there, but that they are relatively harmless. Given that deceived consciousness, bought off by illusion, how do you sound the trumpet?
Liz: There are two insights that we are beginning to develop around that question. One of them comes from what Phil said about spiritual death. The physical death from the bomb may come sometime in the future, but the spiritual death is obvious all around us.
Out of that awareness, the language we have chosen to use is the language of symbols, because the death is spiritual. We hope to begin to communicate through symbols to the spirits of sisters and brothers--as well as to our own. All of us could very well fall into lassitude and thoughtlessness if we didn’t keep our sensibilities honed.
A second insight that we are be ginning to play with comes out of a conversation Ladon had with one of the military personnel at the Pentagon. During our presence there in November, the man said to him, “Presence is key. Presence is key.” I think yesterday’s action would have had far less meaning, would have communicated far less to the people there, were it not for practically a year-long presence at this building. And I think a good deal of the annoyance we felt came out of the thought that these people weren’t going away.
A good deal of the anger came from that. They could tolerate us once or twice, but having us return again and again and again, doing it in ways that were a little bit different, but giving a message substantially the same--that’s where the anger really begins to build up. I thank God for that anger; it’s so much better than nothing.
Dan: It seems to me that when the Lord asks for symbolic activity, as in the Old Testament, that he always does it in a time of great humiliation, when structures are busting up. Certainly that was the truth in Jeremiah’s case. The symbol functions to illustrate the true state of affairs, as opposed to what the princes and the leaders would like to have set up. So when Jeremiah goes out and puts on the yoke, or breaks the pot, he’s saying that things are breaking up and people are being enslaved. He goes out to illustrate it, to show it in public, on the streets.
Then, of course, all hell breaks lose against the one who does those things, because the truth is in the air and that’s unbearable, simply unbearable. This helped me understand the crucial nature of this kind of activity now. The humiliation and degradation of human beings is absolutely pandemic, and the fiction of keeping up the opposite in public is almost to obsessive. We have to show ourselves as macho, powerful, and united in the bicentennial. Action is almost a vicious circle, because you do the symbolic activity, and that gets the truth going, and the truth gets the anger going, and then the fiction reasserts itself more and more powerfully. I think the breaking of that cycle is a very, very difficult thing. It’s really a matter of keeping at it.
I think another phase of this humiliation is the breakdown of anything rational, which is what we are facing. We are facing the total irrationality of public life and structures, and the personal madness of those who hold authority. It seems to me that you have to get beyond that--the pretended rationality--and appeal to something much deeper, something which has to do with powerful earth symbols and actions. Those, of course, were originally sacraments. That was the understanding: the earth was drawn into the orbit of the sacred in order to release the clogged energy and hopes of peoples.
I think one sign of the breakup of rational discourse and common sense among people is that they still think rationality works. Then they look upon these symbols, and live that kind of anger, because they would like to have a subject next to a predicate, next to an object, to reassure themselves that the world is still reasonable: "World is reasonable." Can’t we all agree on that and stop all this crap, pouring blood and digging graves and all of that?” So the breakdown of reason is accompanied by a great fear of symbols, and symbolic activity, whereas in a reasonable time, of course, the symbols are everyone’s. The nonacceptance of this symbolic activity is a clue to the very deep irrationality of the forces people are working from.
The restoration of these symbols and their purification through suffering and through public exposure is part of the renewal of a community of sanity, which ought to be the definition of the church. The church is formed of people who can be rational in the sense of nonviolent, and who can be a-rational in the sense of using symbols. They can reassert all kinds of things: the sanctity of earth, the sanctity of human life, and the presence of the God who heals and who will not have killing.
One thing that strikes me very hard is that the symbols we are using are as shocking and as unacceptable in the church as they are among people at large. When you do actions like this, your community is made up of both those elements. The church is just as irrational and just as culturally stamped, like meat, as the state is right now. Those actions at the Pentagon for me are not merely a new beginning of my own humanity; they also have to do very powerfully with the second birth of the church.
I was reading about those huge sponges that have appeared on the nuclear wastes in the Pacific, six-and seven-and eight-foot sponges. This is a mutation of life--nobody knows what it is. In the same way, the bomb has been the occasion of the mutation of churches. When you hear these spasmodic, pseudo-rational statements from the church, it would be simpler if you could say, “It’s all dying.” But in fact the church is multiplying and parasitically flourishing. From the point of view of the sanity of Christ or Jeremiah, this is really a terrifying counter-church, or antichurch.
Phil: That gets back to an insight that Lee drew from Karl Barth. What is the church, when suddenly the bomb is on the scene? The bomb itself is a symbol of the destruction of faith and the church. So what is your church when that happens?
Dan: Yesterday the police at the Pentagon were able to absorb the largest scene yet. That disturbed me. It seems to me that the church we are groping toward, given the realities over there, is still ahead of us.
I think about fifty percent of our effort over the past two or three years has been the development of communities: meeting with them frequently, getting deeply into the Bible and nonviolence with them, discussing authors like Gandhi, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Garrison, and others of that stripe. It has given us an opportunity to reflect on the cultural process of life when a lot of our inner lives are impinging upon their lives constantly. In community you are conversing with friends, you are developing an interdependence, an interdependent search for truth, trying to grow in compassion and in public responsibility. We’ve seen most of these groups dissipate over a period of years, after the novelty wears off and after the hard things begin. We found that people were no more prone to stay with that stress and that path--that liberation, if you will--than they were experiencing the liberation of all of us felt yesterday at the Pentagon. So it gave me an idea of what the culture does to a person.
Liz: There’s a sense that I have felt during the past year and a half, thinking of Dan’s sense of new birth, and Phil’s beginning to search the scripture: That book is just the beginning to open. It’s just beginning to be the point of reference, the point of judgment in my life.
We’ve been doing two things here recently. One is a study of the prophets with the Adviata House people on Saturday nights, and then there is our own study on Sunday mornings of Revelations. Now Revelations was a pretty much an incomprehensible book until we began to try to open it up together. The last three weeks or so we have been dealing with the vision of the seven trumpets, and we are beginning to see the relationships between the bomb and Christ, and the superseding of Christ by the bomb. But there is a new birth in that.
Jim: It seems that where resistance has been strong in a crisis, there has often been a turning to spiritual life--to prayer, to the Bible, and to each other--for knowledge of roots, for a foundation from which to act. I was in the antiwar struggle as a nonreligious person. The question of sustenance for a protracted social struggle started me on my pilgrimage. The Bible is looked to in these struggles for more that a religion of propositions. What concrete questions is it answering in your lives?
Liz: The three of us were in the movement as religious people. For myself, it was the moral values and spiritual values in the scripture that led me to say, “There is no way we can justify our involvement in Indochina.” Any political analysis that came, came much later.
I’m trying to find a way of characterizing the new dimension that I’m beginning to feel right now. Maybe it’s something like seeing the scriptures as a judgment on my life much more than it ever was before, and a summons into new life. It’s a call to forging the confrontation, if you will, where the confrontation was already laid out, the lines were pretty well drawn before. Maybe I’m coming to a sense that it’s ever new and ever challenging. I’m feeling that very deeply for the first time.
Dan: We came out of the Catholic church in the fifties. In many ways we were practically illiterate as far as the Bible went, but in a strange way there was a very good seedbed there for some awakening, for some rebirth.
But of course the thing will never be really repeated in that way, you know, because we could at least say that, from the first war onward, the Catholic community was not only ignorant, but it was innocent. It was innocent in the modern world, innocent in America, in anything beyond its own kind of survival, and even prosperity. But now there’s a stigma attached to American life which attaches to the church and more specifically to the Catholic church. So one cannot return to that kind of ignorance, or that kind of innocence ever again, I think. I would use those words about our youth and childhood, whereas I would speak now of a terrifying numbness and a more or less deliberate blindness. I think that is the fruit of Vietnam, especially, though it also comes of racism.
But the whole question of what we grew up with is more and more problematic. And that’s been the reason why I think we’ve had to make exhaustive efforts to create symbols, and to realize that that was the price of being alive at all. If you were going to have any faith, you weren’t going to carry it alone, but you were going to pass it hand to hand.
Jim: You talked about the absorption of the action yesterday. It must be a continual struggle to create symbols that resist the assault of the political and economic system’s long-range ability to absorb everything, including their opposition. How do you deal with the American culture’s desire to politely assimilate your actions?
Dan: We have been talking recently about two aspects of that. One is the necessity to keep the symbols clarified. A group from a campaign last summer, for example, dumped several hundred pounds of ashes on the Pentagon steps in order to suggest the aftermath of what we are tending towards. Or blood. Those symbols have their own viability and their own purity.
But they in turn have to be backed up by a community life that is contemplative, essentially. And that would provide the constant deeper comprehension of those elements in our lives that make the state so necessary, and make the state alive in us.
I think there are only a few classical things to do anyway. There are not an infinite, number of good symbols. Especially when times are bad, and the understanding is clouded, it’s very hard to present the symbol that is apprehensible. One, way I would put the academic inertia and the church’s lassitude is that people no longer believe that simple things have’ any power, which is another way of saying that they despair of basically simple things like yesterday’s action.
Culture is persuading people in a hundred different ways that everything human is useless, and that we can only hope to get lost by narrowing our consciousness and coping with that little bit of life that is allowed to us, and staying where we are with that. I’ve never in my adult life seen the interests of young people so narrowed, so shaped, so childish, and so ultimately in dread of the real world. And therefore the number that can be drawn from that kind of death to a little area of life is small right now.
I had hopes for many more campuses being represented at the Pentagon action, and they just didn’t show. The idea of handing out a leaflet, the idea of talking to somebody going into that building, the idea of standing there like an idiot, with one hand in a cuff--you can’t describe that sort of thing and it’s impact on you, its renewing power, until you’ve done it once or twice and done it with friends. As Gandhi would say, there’s a Himalayan distance between the academic life of the usual campus now and a little thing like that.
Liz: The culminating day of the presence at the Pentagon last Easter had been the fifteenth, and there was a blood-pouring on the door front of the Pentagon. Some people returned on Good Friday for a silent vigil there. All of us came out of that seeing what a brilliant scene it was and feeling that very strongly. And yet we came out of it very humble, with a sense of the enormity of the task. The liturgy we did together on Easter Sunday meant a lot to all of us: to consider the resurrection of Christ, and to once again make the act of faith that the power of that building has already been undone. I think without that faith it would be impossible to to go back there again and again. We can’t undo the Pentagon, even if we were there as we were yesterday, and stronger, every day. We can’t undo it, but it is undone.
Jim: Could you reflect a bit on the ongoing tension between acting simply out of a desire to be faithful and not out of a desire to be efficacious, and yet hoping that it makes a difference in people’s lives and even in U.S. military policy?
Dan: I think Gandhi’s been helpful to us in this regard. At several times in the long fight in India he used to refer to the need for detachment from results or effectiveness, call it what you will. But within that context, he said, we will take any measure possible to communicate with people, to sneak the truth publicly, to offer them options that they perhaps had not considered, in order to break through the present climate of slavery.
Liz: One of the challenges we have felt coming so strongly since our delving into the prophets is the role of the prophet arguing God’s case before all human beings, and arguing the case of all human beings before God. We feel the need to be about both of those dimensions. And we feel that jolting back again and again into a renewed hope in people. I guess if the dimension of advocacy is important at all, it’s important in keeping alive that hope in one another, that hope in the silent majority, the hope in the people who work down there in that building.
I think all of us are capable of dealing with alternatives. In terms of policy, what I find myself saying frequently is that it’s only by virtue of a strong public demand for unilateral disarmament that they’ll ever begin to talk about bilateral disarmament.
Jim: I think sometimes people conclude that there is nothing being said about policy, when there really is.
Phil: If you were to take those beatitudes and trace them through on a practical level in Christ’s life, it seems to me that you can conclude that he was in the process of teaching people and giving them a living example of how to be responsible in conduct. For the most part, before the religious bureaucracy and then in the final confrontations before Herod and Pilate, he was about the business of government all through his public life.
It seems to me that politics is not what they say it is. It’s our conduct, it’s the way we decide to live, in response to the summons of Christ and our tradition. It’s providing for the kids, getting some modicum of hope for the kids. It’s trying to build a community of the future, or a better society right now in our lives and in our relationships between sisters and brothers. That’s politics.
Jim: When you are going around speaking and talking with people, and they say, “How can I contribute to unilateral disarmament? I can’t relate to policy issues.” Then do you begin to talk about the self-governing of our own lives, in choices and decisions?
Liz: I think the thing that we would push most strongly is encouraging people to begin sitting down with one another on a regular basis to talk about their own lives in face of these things, to talk about the scripture and the demands the scripture makes on our lives, and to begin acting out of the growing vision and consensus among themselves. That acting might be something like an hour vigil a week, keeping in communication with other groups like themselves around the country, and growing in that sense. Without that sort of ongoing process with one another, they can hear words you are saying, they can be terrified once again by the menace, and they can be inspired once again by the hope. But they can lose that fear and hope because they don’t have the soil in which to grow. And they have got to create that with sisters and brothers, where they are.
Phil: One of the contributions, it seems to me, that we have as Christians is to take that whole discussion off the physical and material, or economic, or social level. We can ask, “What is the spiritual cost of warmaking? What is going to be the spiritual gain of peacemaking?” And from that level we can make connections to what people sacrifice in war by separation from family and from friends, and then of course what they sacrifice materially. People will need to decide what to do on the practical level in the areas of peacemaking because they have decided spiritually that to live in peace is the norm.
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