An Honored Prophet
Stanley Hauerwas: “America’s Best Theologian”
by Mark Tooley
Stanley Hauerwas was declared America’s “best theologian” by Time magazine shortly before September 11, 2001. Since then the debate within America’s religious community over the morality of war has only magnified his fame—or his notoriety. Hauerwas, from his perch at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, is also America’s most influential Christian pacifist.
He is largely orthodox theologically and robustly critical of theological liberalism. But his condemnation of American patriotism, distaste for religious conservatives, frequent resort to profanity, and ambivalence about homosexuality have prevented his being an ally to evangelicals in his own United Methodist denomination.
Blaming Ourselves
A chronic and colorful contrarian, Hauerwas is in continuous battle mode against liberalism, which he discerns not only in the Social Gospel or the Jesus Seminar, but also in capitalism, the modern nation-state, democracy, and the United States in particular. “The God that is called forward to God Bless America is not the God of Jesus Christ,” he often says. “I think President Bush represents the privatized form of Christianity that revels in how important Jesus is for them but wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do if they followed any of the radical demands of the Gospel.”
In typical fashion, Hauerwas publicly asked after September 11 why the world shouldn’t “be mad at us,” given that the United States had “sponsored” a “regime of torture” in Chile. After all, he pointed out, September 11 was the anniversary of Salvador Allende’s overthrow by Augusto Pinochet. He did not explain why Islamic fanatics might have sympathized with Allende, who was Marxist.
Hauerwas contrasted the September 11 terrorists who died “as an expression of their profound moral commitments,” with the American people, who were asked by their leaders to go shopping to revive the economy. “A people who have been bred to shop then can quickly become some of the most violent people in the world,” he told the National Catholic Reporter, “exactly because they’re dying to have something worth dying for.”
With questionable accuracy, Hauerwas complained that President Bush, at the National Cathedral prayer service held shortly after September 11, had “reiterated in the midst of an Episcopal Mass that we were going to take vengeance.” (Bush actually said: “This conflict was begun on the timing of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”) More recently he alleged that the United States has “bombed Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” He has called the US atomic bombing of Japan during World War II “terrorist acts.” But he claims not to be especially concerned about developing sophisticated political commentary. As he likes to say, “I don’t have a foreign policy. I have a church.”
Nevertheless, on the one-year anniversary of September 11, Hauerwas edited Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, which is largely devoted to opposing the US war against terrorism. With his co-editor, Hauerwas wrote, “This war has seen the capitulation of church and synagogue to the resurgence of American patriotism and nationalism.” Though stressing that they “abominate” terrorism, they wrote, “We find it unacceptably childish that Americans refuse to take any responsibility for September 11.”
Patriotic Sins
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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