Not Peace, But A Sword.
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By Chase Tibbs.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 10:34–39
The question is not whether you bring peace or a sword but in whose interests are you wielding your sword. Peace and swords are not mutually exclusive. There is no peace where there is no sword, and swords can be used in the pursuit of peace.
But if you want to talk about peace, you have to look at your life and the world in which you live and ask yourself :
“Whose peace am I really helping to establish?
“Whose peace am I reproducing?”
How is it that our theologies, our politics as Christians, our ways of being in the world, have simply been welcomed into the reproduction of the very evils in which we may safely protest and verbally critique? Before we can meaningfully speak of and pursue an alternative peace for this world, it is crucial Christians start to ask ourselves how our politics and beliefs actually reproduce the very systems of death and conditions of agony that we may, in theory, oppose.
But I’m not here to talk about peace today. I want to talk about the sword.
After 500 years of white supremacy, including the possessing and enslavement of Black people, the working and kidnapping and lynching and imprisoning and executing of Black bodies, the governing and commanding of Black women’s sexuality and reproductive power, the ceaseless impoverishment of the overwhelming majority of Black people, and the psychological traumatization that comes from living in a world that explicitly and systemically denies you dignity and equality, after 400+ years of white terror and supremacy and domination, the question is not whether you bring peace or a sword, but in whose interests are you wielding your sword?
After 500 years of kidnapping and raiding and scalping and hunting Indigenous peoples..
After 500 years of endless removing and displacing them from their homes and lands and communities, forcing them into concentration camps and prison cells and torture rooms and poverty,..
After 500 years of stealing their lands, selling them into slavery, breaking treaty after treaty, and then pretending that they do not CONTINUE to resist the United States, the question is not whether you bring peace or a sword, but in whose interest are you wielding your sword?
The terms of the popular violence vs. nonviolence discourse, as James Cone pointedly noted, have been defined by oppressors — and I would say, the ruling class. It is the ruling white capitalist elite that has written into law and disseminated into influential cultural institutions what is violent and what is non-violent. But their definitions of violence and nonviolence have not solely coerced us or persuasively manipulated us.
Many of us have willfully accepted and consented to their discourse and to the way in which this world has been organized. We have chosen obedience and conformity. We can’t just blame the ruling class. We have to take some responsibility for our faults and our failures and our complicity. And I especially want to name the pastors and theologians and leadership of church institutions who love their power and authority but have failed to speak of and meaningfully pursue liberation. Confession here isn’t about making us feel better. It’s about getting free from the lies and the systems that reproduce our own oppression and the oppression of others.
This is what we know, liberalism and capitalism are in crisis. More and more people are losing faith in the system. We are tired, we are exhausted, we are angry, and so some people are swinging right, finding the unabashedly racist, sexist, capitalist, and imperialist wing of the US empire compelling.
Others are swinging left, saying these different but interrelated issues that so many people have forever faced are not issues that can be addressed through reform. We are not interested in making the belly of the Beast play a little more comfortable. No, we know that the beast must be destroyed so that more life-affirming systems and structures and ways of being in the world can actually become a possibility.
And it’s because the ground beneath the feat of neoliberalism and the center is falling out. Including excluded peoples and diversifying positions of power in our oppressive and exploitative institutions and structures isn’t fundamentally changing anything for the majority of workers, for the majority of persons of color, for the majority of women and Queer folk and Trans persons. We must refuse to make peace with this system. We must refuse to make nice with its defenders. This system is a racist, capitalist, patriarchal system and we must bring a sword to the peace of this long established ruling class!
The logic and values of the Right are an easy target. But Goddam, I am sick and tired of seeing moderate and liberal Christians talk shit on the rebellions. Liberalism has to deny the legitimacy of the rebellions because if they were to fully acknowledge both the anger and the actions of the people in the streets, they would be accepting the condemnation of the world they have consented to and the powers to which they have taken sides with.
This whole “I get it, their feelings are legitimate, but I can’t support violence” is a siding with the police, a siding with white supremacy and capitalism, and a siding with the ruling class. Some folks even have the hubris to suggest that what they believe to be a “peaceful” protest is a superior, more civilized, more respectable response.
“How dare those lower peoples destroy private property, physically fight the police and white supremacists, disrupt the ‘peace’ of the world in which we were comfortably getting by in?”
We have got to refuse the peace-talk and refuse the status quo’s definitions of violence and nonviolence. You don’t let cops walk in your protests. It doesn’t matter whether they are nice or mean or white or Black or female. The police have a job to do and it’s not serve and protect the interests of “everyone equally.” No, they serve and harass and imprison and kill in the interests of the ruling elite and on behalf of people who have bought into white and American identities. In just 3 months, over 100,000 people in the US unnecessarily died from the coronavirus. The last thing George Floyd did in this life was fight to get a knee off his fucking neck! The question is not whether you bring peace or a sword, but in whose interests are you using your sword?
The destruction wrought by our swords can be symbolic:
• the MAGA hat on the guy at the grocery store
• when Bree Newsome tore down a Confederate flag.
The disruption wrought by our swords can be direct:
• the solitary confinement cells our nation uses
• the thousands of special operations the US has done in Central and South America and now in Africa.
•when slaves overthrew the plantations of their masters and killed them so. they could no longer whip and rape them.
The violence of our swords can be structural:
• accepting the reproduction of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and US imperialism
• the revolutions of peoples in Southern and South East Asia who fought for freedom from French, British, and American regimes.
Christian faith must not continue to participate in the reproduction of this racist, sexist, capitalist peace. We must begin to wield our swords in the interests of working peoples, of unhoused peoples, of peoples racialized and gendered as inferior. We must wield our swords for that which is liberative and transformative, for love that, by any means necessary, pursues the in-breaking of a wholly other world.
For those who have come to find their life in this world and in this system will lose it, but those who are willing to lose their life for the sake of freedom and justice and love and rebellion, for those who lose their life in solidarity with those most brutally oppressed, Jesus tells us, will find it.
This essay first appeared on the podcast Faith And Capital and was written by Chase Tibbs.
