We Christians are running the race, individually and corporately. There should be training, singlemindedness, speed, and perseverance in the race. We are to get to the finish, God’s finish. Paul is quite clear about it. Not just individuals, but the Church is also corporately running a race. God’s purposes are to be met. We should be an efficient international corporation integrated to God’s will, not a medieval starting post.
One of Christ’s aims is peace. He is the Prince of Peace. He instructs us to be peacemakers. In him we are at peace with God. His peace he left with us, and he asks us to pass it on. He requires behaviour ruling out retaliation, aggression and threat. Yet, frankly, in this race we are at present pissing about at the start and even running backwards. Take part in this thought experiment. Listen carefully. Peace is disarmament. Ah. Your mind goes. There is something wrong there. You are not sure about that. If a gun goes off, a harmless gun, like the Lone Ranger’s, you will still be standing at the start puzzling. There is something not quite right about disarmament.
Disarmament has a bad name, because a different message is told each day by governments, the arms companies and their spokesmen, the dominant news media, the military establishment, security groups and the whole establishment including the Church of England in its ritual role. We hear the message so often, we cannot even listen to it. It is already in our heads. This is what we have heard since we were infants. It is the most successful bit of propaganda in the whole of human history. We need to be armed for peace and disarmament means war. The message is Churchillian, though Churchill was complex. It was frozen in the Cold War into an eternal truth, where another bit was added. If you talk disarmament, you are probably a Communist and a traitor. It did not change when the Cold War thawed, and now, thank goodness, Putin is threatening us again with new nuclear strike weapons. We need weapons for peace, no doubt about it. This race for disarmed peace should not be run.
So. Christianity is wrong and pleasantly idealistic, a nice cosy make-believe that clergy can intone, which finishes up with churchgoers kissing one another before they go back out to the real world to back the military for our defence. The bishops and the Church Establishment have more or less accepted that Christ is wrong.
Except that now we have heard that idiot Trump say, “We are all safer with guns under our pillows.” We have seen the obscene statistics of gun related deaths in the United States when everyone is armed, and followed the stories of people being shot by their kids or the dogs by mistake. We know guns do not make us safe; they kill and maim, and a lot of them leads to a lot of shoot-outs. The idiot, Trump, is asserting a lie and hoping it will carry the day. But we are not that stupid..
Except, too, that we are reassessing the biggest failed experiment in history. Arming the world has not led to peace. It has led to two World Wars and countless other ones. George W. Bush’s intervention with Tony Blair in Iraq did not lead to “Mission Accomplished” in 2003 but is still Mission Unaccomplished and regional chaos and devastation now. After a century it is two hundred million dead and still counting. Weapons bring threats, arms races, scares, attacks and most wars are not about territory or empire, but the weapons the other side has, or might have. Weapons, and the people who have bought into militarism cause wars. Every day the mantra that weapons give us peace wears thinner, and now we can easily see right through it.
Of course, there is some small print in the world-wide armament push by the munitions people and their governments. Their deal with us is that weapons might not bring peace, but they will bring peace for us. As long as we are selfish, it does not really matter about the people in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, Myanmar and all the other places which are at war. We will be safe. But since 9/11 even this modified form does not work. Our tiny minds can see the link between western bombing of the Middle East and so-called Islamic Terrorism. OK, so terrorists are attacking us, but weren’t we attacking them. People tend to want to get back at those who drop bombs on them. Bomb London. Bomb Dresden. See the link. In the global military era wars will be global, not local.
Thus, arming, killing does not bring peace. Arms are for war and we disarm for peace. Despite decades of propaganda by the priests of militarism, we can see that arms do not bring peace. Arms brings wars and rumours of wars. The present world military position is akin to the Gaderene Swine at full pelt. We are arming pressure points around the world, and the arms companies, the merchants of death, are loving it.
So, if we stand back and consider, Christ might be right. Indeed, Christ is right. The Christian Church can run the disarmament race, because Christianity is not wrong, but deeply deeply right. The Gospel of peace means disarmament, among other things, as Isaiah recognised long before Christ and disarmament works, even though the arms companies have prevented it being tried since the start of the twentieth century.
We Christians could take this on. We could be focussed, efficient towards the goal. We have 2.3 billion of the world’s population, 31% of the whole, at the starting point, at present unsure whether to run, of even not aware that they are in a race, because they have listened to the false prophets of the arms trade and the military-industrial complex saying weapons give us peace. But now, thanks to Trump, the ludicrous nature of this claim is out of the bag. Actually, arms do not give peace, but generate military crisis after military crisis leaving 60 million refugees and devastation from East to West. Of course peace means disarmament. Aside the brainwashing, there is no doubt about it – no weapons means no threats, mutual, law-abiding, policed, international relations such as operate within most disarmed countries now. In the UK it is unusual to need armed policing. Yorkshire and Lancashire worked out they did not need to fight or arm five hundred years ago and we can do it now. Disarmament is far easier than armament.
So now the Church can be ready to run, can know where it is going, can see the tape. It can back world multilateral disarmament in ten years. It can turn destroyers into aid relief vessels and bombs into quarries. It can make peace. Fully mobilised, we are already well on the way to a world majority. These who take the sword die by the sword, but those who fight with the belt of truth, the helmet of salvation, the boots of peace and as their weapon the spirit and word of God can run and cross the line, some 2 billion travelling in the same direction for a peaceful world.
The race must be well underway by 11/11/2018. There is not much time. And it needs the Christians now who will transmit the central truths. Christ insisted before the crucifixion we must be ready. And here in little Britain with its great self-applauding military establishment, the bishops and other church people must be prepared to quit the Establishment and step up for this race. In fact, the gun has now gone off.
The Church of England can stay in its museum culture, a hundred years behind the issues of the day, lost in its ecclesiasticism, or it can wake up and run, fast and efficiently, in line with the world-transforming Gospel, doing a lot of rethinking very quickly. If the Church is unready, it will be a world calamity, as it was in 1932. Each and all of us can run the disarmament race to God’s finish. The route is actually marked out quite well..
