Recently in peace movement Category

Robin wrote a little about the New Monastic movement in a plug for the Pendle Hill workshop I'm doing with Wess Daniels this Fall.

Here's my working theory: I think Liberal Friends have a good claim to inventing the "new monastic" movement thirty years ago in the form of Movement for a New Society, a network of peace and anti-nuclear activists based in Philadelphia that codified a kind of "secular Quaker" decision-making process and trained thousands of people from around the world in a kind of engaged drop-out lifestyle that featured low-cost communal living arrangements in poor neighborhoods with part-time jobs that gave them flexibility to work as full-time community activists. There are few activist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s that weren't touched by the MNS style and a less-ideological, more lived-in MNS culture survives today in borderline neighborhoods in Philadelphia and other cities. The high-profile new monastics rarely seem to give any props to Quakers or MNS, but I'd be willing to bet if you sat in on any of their meetings the process would be much more inspired by MNS than Robert's Rules of Order or any fifteen century monastic rule that might be cited.

For a decade I lived in West Philly in what I called "the ruins of the Movement for a New Society." The formal structure of MNS had disbanded but many of its institutions carried on in a kind of lived-in way. I worked at the remaining publishing house, New Society Publishers, lived in a land-trusted West Philly coop house, and was fed from the old neighborhood food coop and occasionally dropped in or helped out with Training for Change, a revived training center started by MNS-co-founder (and Central Philadelphia Meeting-member) George Lakey It was a tight neighborhood, with strong cross-connections, and it was able to absorb related movements with different styles (e.g., a strong anarchist scene that grew in the late 1980s). I don't think it's coincidence that some of the Philly emergent church projects started in West Philly and is strong in the neighborhoods that have become the new ersatz West Philly as the actual neighborhood has gentrified.

So some questions I'll be wrestling with over the next six months and will bring to Pendle Hill:

• Why haven't more of us in the Religious Society of Friends adopted this engaged lifestyle?
• Why haven't we been good at articulating it all this time?
• Why did the formal structure of the Quaker-ish "new monasticism" not survive the 1980s?
• Why don't we have any younger leaders of the Quaker monasticism? Why do we need others to remind us of our own recent tradition?
• In what ways are some Friends (and some fellow travelers) still living out the "Old New Monastic" experience, just without the hype and without the buzz?

It's entirely possible that the "new monasticism" isn't sustainable. At the very least Friends' experiences with it should be studied to see what happened. Is West Philly what the new monasticism looks like thirty years later? The biggest differences between now and the heyday of the Movement for a New Society is 1) the Internet's ability to organize and stay in touch in completely different ways; and 2) the power of the major Evangelical publishing houses that are hyping the new kids.

I'll be looking at myself as well. After ten years, I felt I needed a change. I'm now in the "real world"--semi suburban freestanding house, nuclear family. The old new West Philly monasticism, like the "new monasticism" seems optimized for hip twenty-something suburban kids who romanticized the gritty city. People of other demographics often fit in, but still it was never very scalable and for many not very sustainable. How do we bring these concerns out to a world where there are suburbs, families, etc?

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Over on Quaker Oats Live, Cherice is fired up about taxes again and proposing a peace witness for next year:

My solution: Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and whomever else wants to participate refuses to pay war taxes for a few years, and we suffer the consequences. I think we should campaign for a war-tax-free 2010 in all Quaker meetings and Mennonite/Brethren/etc. communities. What are they going to do--throw us all in jail? Maybe. But they can't do that forever. No one wants to pay their taxes for a bunch of Quakers and other pacifists to sit in jail for not paying taxes. It doesn't make sense.

A commenter chimes in with a warning about Friends who were hit by heavy tax penalties a quarter century ago. But I know of someone who didn't pay taxes for twenty years and recently volunteered the information to the Internal Revenue Service. The collectors were nonchalant, polite and sympathetic and settled for a very reasonable amount. If this friend's experience is any guide, there's not much drama to be had in war tax resistance. These days, Caesar doesn't care much.

What if our witness was directed not at the federal government but at our fellow Christians? We could follow Quaker founder George Fox's example and climb the tallest tree we could find (real or metaphorical) and begin preaching the good news that war goes against the teachings of Jesus. As always, we would be respectful and charitable but we could reclaim the strong and clear voices of those who have traveled before us. If we felt the need for backup? Well, I understand there are twenty-seven or so books to the New Testament sympathetic to our cause. And I have every reason to believe that the Inward Christ is still humming our tune and burning bushes for all who have eyes to see and ears to listen. Just as John Woolman ministered with his co-religionists about the sin of slavery, maybe our job is to minister to our co-religionists about war.

But who are these co-religionist neighbors of ours? Twenty years of peace organizing and Friends organizing makes me doubt we could find any large group of "historic peace church" members to join us. We talk big and write pretty epistles, but few individuals engage in witnesses that involve any danger of real sacrifice. The way most of our established bodies couldn't figure out how to respond to a modern day prophetic Christian witness in Tom Fox's kidnapping is the norm. When the IRS threatened to put liens on Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to force resistant staffers to pay, the general secretary and clerk said all sorts of sympathetic words of anguish (which they probably even meant), then docked the employee's pay anyway. There have been times when clear-eyed Christians didn't mind loosing their liberty or property in service to the gospel. Early Friends called our emulation of Christ's sacrifice the Lamb's War, but even seven years of real war in the ancient land of Babylonia itself hasn't brought back the old fire. Our meetinghouses sit quaint, with ownership deeds untouched, even as we wring our hands wondering why most remain half-empty on First Day morning.

But what about these emerging church kids?: all those people reading Shane Claiborne, moving to neighborhoods in need, organizing into small cells to talk late into the night about primitive Christianity? Some of them are actually putting down their candles and pretentious jargon long enough to read those twenty-seven books. Friends have a lot of accumulated wisdom about what it means the primitive Christian life, even if we're pretty rusty on its actual practice. What shape would that witness take and who would join us into that unknown but familiar desert? What would our movement even be called? And does it matter?

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Anyone interested in thinking more on this should start saving up their loose change ($200 commuters) to come join C Wess Daniels and me this November when we lead a workshop on "The New Monastics and Convergent Friends" at Pendle Hill near Philadelphia. Methinks I'm already starting to blog about it.

There's some interesting follow-up on the Cindy Sheehan "resignation" (see yesterday's post). One fellow I corresponded with years ago gave a donation then sent an email urging us not to fall into despair. It's hard.

Go beyond Democratic Party fronts like MoveOne and you'll find the most of the peace movement is a ridiculously shoestring operation. Nonviolence.org's four month "ChipIn" fundraising campaign raised $50 per month but the sacrifice isn't just short-term--just try applying for a mainstream job with a resume chock full of social change work!

Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Levellers blog talks about keeping going through the despair:

This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, including myself. Outrage, righteous indignation, anger, public grief, are all valid reactions to war and human rights abuses, but they will get us only so far. They may strain marriages and family life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spirit of nonviolence and active peacemaking. And, since imperialist militarism is a system (biblically speaking, a Power), it will resist change for the good. Work for justice and peace over the long haul requires spiritual discipline, requires deep roots in a spirituality of nonviolence, including cultivating the virtue of patience.

Michael's answer is specifically Christian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one's motivations.

Sheehan's retirement didn't stop her from talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this morning. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and contrasts them with the tens of millions presidential candidates are raising, most of which will go to big media TV networks for ads. Sheehan says we need more than just an antiwar movement:

Like, ending the Vietnam War was major, but people left the movement. It was an antiwar movement. They didn’t stay committed to true and lasting peace. And that’s what we really have to do.

More Cindy Sheehan reading across the blogosphere available via Google and Technorati.

And for those looking for a little good news check out the brand new site for the Global Network for Nonviolence. I designed it for them as part of my freelance design work but it's been a joy and a lot of fun to be working more closely with a good group of international activists again. Their nonviolence links page includes sites for some really committed grassroots peacemakers. This long-term peace work may not give us headlines in the New York Times but it's touched millions over the years. If humanity is ever going to grow into the kind of culture of peace Sheehan dreams of then we'll need a lot more wonderful projects like these.

Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush's Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she's all but resigned from the protest movement. She posted the following on her Daily Kos blog

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party... However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it's claimed.

Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush's outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they authorized his war of aggression anyway. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November's elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton's repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.

Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.

I feel for Cindy. She's been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it's the work of a movement. Sheehan's witness has touched people she'll never meet. It's made a difference. She's a woman of remarkable courage who's pointing out the puppet strings she's cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

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Nonviolence.org's fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we've raised $150 which doesn't even cover that period's server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it. It's up to you now.

Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.

I must be honest and admit that I've always found President Bush's State of the Union speeches unbearable. The distortions and half-truths are infuriating and the unearned confidence of a draft-dodging rich kid turned failed military adventurer just sends my blood pressure through the roof. I wish I could be detached enough to listen at least to the art of fine speech-writing but the message gets in the way.

Better then to listen to the Democratic response, given by Senator James Web. The transcript is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here's a taste.

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues ­ those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death ­ we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way. We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us ­ sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.

Worth a look: Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for people to give their own video responses to the State of the Union.

In the news:  more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren't being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a "surge") of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?

Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he's fumbled this whole war?

On Saturday, November 26, 2005 four members of Christian peacemakers Teams were abducted in iraq. On March 20th the body of American Quaker Tom Fox was found; on March 23rd, the remaining three hostages were freed by U.S. and British military forces.

Here at Nonviolence.org, we have always been impressed and highly supportive of the deep witness of the Christian peacemakers Teams. Their members have represented the best in both the peace and Christian movements, consistently putting themselves in danger to witness the gospel of peace. Not content to write letters or stand on pickett lines in safe western capitals, they go to the frontlines of violence and proclaim a radical alternative.

While we can be grateful for the release of the three remaining hostages, we should continue to remember the 43 foreign hostages still being held in iraq and the 10-30 iraqis reportedly taken hostage each and every day. As iraq slips into full-scale civil war we must also organize against the war-mongerers, both foreign and internal and finde ways of standing alongside those iraqis who want nothing more than peace and freedom.

Here's links to recent articles on the situation.

Memorials to Tom Fox » Free the Captives Giving Thanks "We do not support the ongoing occupation of Iraq, but we know that the soldiers serving there are human beings endowed with the same qualities we cherish in our friends and neighbors." » Who Killed Tom Fox? Why and What's the Reason For? "Out here on the radical fringe of Christianity, there are those of us who believe that there are worse things than being killed standing up for what you believe in. We feel that it’s better to honor our personal integrity, our relationship with the div » Add Fox's name to book of martyrs Fox "had been shot in the head and chest and bore scars of torture. And so it was learned he had joined the ranks of Christians who have paid the price of death for the way they chose to live. We call them martyrs, and Fox is one in the true sense." » Mobtown: The Butcher and the Peacemaker "I glanced at Tom's blog once or twice, noted that it seemed to be more about 'current events' than about 'religion,' and moved on... Had I not been in such a hurry to find latter-day, online incarnations of Thomas Kelly and Rufus Jones, I would have foun » Statement from Fox's Langley Hill Friends Meeting "The loss of Tom is personal to those of us at Langley Hill who knew and loved him. We need to remember that personal loss has also happened to thousands of Iraqis -- indeed to tens of thousands of families around the world -- who have lost loved ones in » Remembering Tom Fox A memorial page on the Christian Peacemaker site » Friends Recall Tom Fox "The Tom Fox the world didn't get to see was an affable man with a keen sense of humor, according to those who knew him." » On Death and the Treasuring of Life "The news shook me up much more than I would have expected, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. Of course I realized that this outcome was a possibility... I realize that I feel shaken because this news makes me think: 'the world is worse off than I » Every Church A Peace Church's John Stoner "And I learned that this church sign, passed by thousands of people on foot and in cars every day, has a reputation in Toronto of carring meaningful and provocative truths. Tom's witness has impacted this church... They are exploring the power of gospel » CPT Release: We Mourn the Loss of Tom Fox in Arabic

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