I was raised evangelical. I was raised with a disdain for “dirty hippies and peace-nicks”; but I was also raised with a disdain for the peace process, multilateralism and any sort of lasting effect for real diplomacy.
Now, I wasn’t raised on a compound or home-schooled. I wasn’t even a boy scout. I was Southern Suburban. I say that so you understand I wasn’t raised in a militia-loving or other right-wing extreme household. Hell, we didn’t even have a gun. But, we had an unfounded disregard for peace.
I have since come to see we were not alone. The Neo-Cons with their never-ending quest for war and American Imperialism have co-opted the evangelical hesitancy towards peace for their own means. The Tea Party, being a new face on an old movement shares that disregard. But I still cannot figure out WHY?
I know the scripture telling believers to beware when men cry peace, peace for surely it leads to war. But is that scripture really enough to get Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians who believe in the literal interpretation of the bible, to forsake the very teaching of Christ himself? Christ said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” But to many American Christians there is a loophole in that verse. Somewhere?
The very concept of the United Nations and their peace missions, first popularized by Hal Lindsey in “The Late Great Planet Earth”, have an inspired an absolute fear in Evangelicals . Ridicule was reserved for peace and peace-keeping like nothing else, except for perhaps psychology.
But I say all that, and still cannot figure out why or what causes it. Is peace really such a horrible concept? Did the hippies really muck it up so badly? Is the UN really so scary as to cause an all-out war on the one thing that could be most beneficial to all mankind?
Maybe that is it? Maybe peace is so abhorrent because it means that the small-minded understanding of God that is evident in fundamental religions is wrong. Maybe peace is so transformational that we will not be able to hate “the other”? Maybe peace and working for peace is such a community builder that our understanding of WHO we are and WHY we are will have to change just by accepting it as a goal?
One can only hope . . .