Two Short(ish) Thoughts About Socialists and other Nice People to my North

Minnesota isn't Ontario, of course, and Tim Walz isn't a secular Jew and bass player who became passionately devoted to hard and progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same way Geddy Lee isn't a Minnesota Lutheran schoolteacher turned Governor and now possibly the future Vice President of the United States. But I see something similar in them nonetheless.

First, a couple passages from Lee's autobiography, My Effin' Life, which I just recently finished. It's a good book! Not fantastic--while I appreciated the way Lee wove into his reflections about Rush and their albums and their tours numerous insightful observations about his family history and the music industry and much more, the encyclopedic character of the memoir was ultimately a little much. Still, one of those insightful observations stood out: a two-page rant on libertarianism. Preceding his comments is a short reflection on an interview the band had with Barry Miles for NME in March 1978, who pushed them to get political:

“Admittedly, we were a little too young and naive to have arrived at a fully informed worldview. We considered ourselves capitalists but voted Liberal; we thought of ourselves as independent but valued our country’s social safety net and national health scheme. We didn’t see that conservative and liberal--or even capitalist and socialist--were values necessarily at odds.” 

Keep that in mind as we jump a few pages forward, to some thoughts of his about Rush's wonderful (and, in this context, notorious) song "Freewill“:

"In 1979, when [Neil Peart] handed me the lyrics for ‘Freewill,’ I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the the heart of it--the idea that our lives are not predetermined--and I hope that would come across, but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus: I will choose a path that’s clear / I will choose free will.

“To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a license for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naive, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society....

“I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply ‘choose free will.’ You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably Talmudic ones) have spend their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretations of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will?...A vague grasp of complicated ideas is not the same a virtuous independence.

“I may sound like I’m a grumpy old man yelling at clouds or that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of my quasi-socialist country, but my point of view has evolved with experience as I’ve watched and cared about what life has thrown at friends, neighbours and strangers alike. We have a social safety net here in Canada that includes national health care, day care and so on--it isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time, especially for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Living in that kind of society of almost (ahem) seventy years has made me see the world through more compassionate eyes than I had as a youth or in 1979. Sure, we pay more taxes than many other do, but I prefer to live in a world that gives a shit, even for people I don’t know” (pp. 250, 289-292). 

What's the point of pulling out this reflection, aside to make the banal observation that the stuff people think they understand when they're 27 isn't going to be the same when they're 70? It's to underscore something that gets lost so often in polarized ideological arguments that it needs to be repeated, again and again and again: that what people like Geddy Lee--a smart, observant, and well-read man, a bit of an armchair historian, but not a political philosopher, much less an economist or politician by any means--mean when they speak of "socialism" (or "quasi-socialism") is, almost always, very simply: not being a radical individualist, and instead, choosing to give a shit about one's friends, neighbors, and even strangers. 

There are, obviously, a great many ways to do that; providing guaranteed health care and day care is just one of those ways (though looking around the world, it's obviously an exceptionally popular one). "Socialism," in all its various construals and constructions and controversies throughout world history, some murderously horrific and some peacefully communal and most some mangy democratic compromise in between, always begins with this: the socialization, or in other words the sharing, the making public and available and collectively empowering, of the goods which human beings find and refine and create. If you insist that there is no other possible use of the term, no other possible articulation of any of the above, which can be separated from, say Karl Marx's materialistic dialectic of history, or from Vladimir Lenin's advocacy of a revolutionary vanguard, or Mao Zedong's collectivization of agriculture, then you're both wrong, and not listening with any kind of open-mindedness to the way many hundreds of millions of human beings (38 million of whom live in the country just north of us Americans) happen to talk about their own political choices when it comes to, yes, giving a shit about one another. Is that real world talk itself often contentious and critical of others' (including their own national histories') formulations of socialism? Of course; human beings make sense of and situate their own thinking in endlessly diverse contexts and ways. Sometimes they even think, as Lee wrote, that "capitalist and socialist" value schemes aren't at odds with one another. Which, depending on the claim you happen to be making, they aren't necessarily at all.

And that, of course, is what brings us around to Tim Walz, who has many of the usual people up in arms, screaming about the Minnesotan's secret wish to impose the Khmer Rouge upon America, all because he said...what? Oh yes, while talking about his "progressive values" (which, accordingly to him, includes things like pouring money into veterans benefits, free breakfast in public schools, strong support for NATO, etc.) to his political supporters, he observed, in the campaign context of reaching out to those who disagree, that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." Which is exactly the correct point to make. Walz is a progressive Democrat in the United States in 2024; he wants to use the power of government to, in Lee's words, give a shit about his neighbors: to be neighborly, in other words, and to do so via funding and expanding government welfare programs to aid children, veterans, the elderly, the unemployed, the poor, and others (including some not in the United States) in need. Is that "socialism"? Or maybe "quasi-socialism"? Could be! It's not Bernie Sanders's New Deal-style, so-called "democratic socialism," but obviously it's related to it. (Sanders's influence on the Democratic party of today, including on Walz, is deep and, I think, entirely for the best.) Far, far, far more related to it, to be certain, then any of the horrific Ghosts of Certain Types of Socialism Past that too many people--people whom for the most part I (like Walz!) assume to be good people, just ones who happen to think that the progressive Democratic form of giving a shit about one's neighbors either doesn't work or isn't worth the cost or actually makes things worse--are tempted to associate this genial Minnesota liberal with.

This isn't going to change this discourse, of course. Libertarian paranoia is too deeply embedded in too many assumptions throughout our political culture to imagine that Sanders, or Walz, or me, or anyone else is going to be able to get a paradigm going such that a critical number of Americans might actually start getting comfortable (again!) with seeing in the broad umbrella idea of socialism arguments about how best to give a shit about one's neighbor. Hopefully, generational change will take care of that; Walz is only 61, after all.

On George Scialabba and the Left Conservative Possibility

[A version of this piece is cross-posted to Current]

How might one politically categorize the following statement?

[M]y apparently disparate-sounding worries....all result from one or another move on the part of the culture away from the immediate, the instinctual, the face-to-face. We are embodied beings, gradually adapted over millions of year to thrive on a certain scale, our metabolisms a delicate orchestration of innumerable biological and geophysical rhythms. The culture of modernity has thrust upon us, sometimes with traumatic abruptness, experiences, relationships, and powers for which we may not yet be ready–to which we may need more time to adapt....If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities–even the potentially liberating ones–the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive. 

For those whose exposure to or engagement with political ideas is fairly minimal–whether by choice or by circumstance or both–the question would likely seem strange. After all, there are no obvious partisan markers anywhere in this statement, no references to presidential candidates or global events or policy disputes. So what is political about it? But for those who have some familiarity with the history of political ideas and arguments, as well as some of their attendant philosophical formulations and literary tropes, there are flags in this statement which suggest an answer–and that answer, in all likelihood, would be “conservative.”

Not “conservative” in the way most Americans would be likely to use the term today, to be sure. The passage doesn’t provide anything that connects to Donald Trump or lower taxes or tighter immigration or anti-LGBTQ positions or the Supreme Court, at least not directly. But astute readers would pick up on the final sentence’s reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man,” his vision of a humanity that has succumbed to nihilism, hedonism, and passivity, and thus falls into a kind of groupthink where all individual accomplishments are lost. The passage also speaks warningly about developments and innovations of modernity which humanity, whose embodiment reflects a deep evolutionary grounding in small-scale interactions, needs to be far more cautious about embracing. Hence, the politics of this passage could be–and, I think, would be, if read without any additional context–plausibly coded as small-c conservative, or at least as philosophically anti-progressive. Its implications include a preference for the local, a suspicion of intellectual abstractions, a discontent with the ennui that consumer wealth and technological ease has enabled, and a fear of a too-rapidly pursued future whose liberating possibilities will likely be lost unless they are approached incrementally (if at all). In short, it communicates a respect for, even a valuation of, a more limited conceptualization of our social world–and, aside from certain strains of environmental concern within the current constellation of liberal thought, talk of “limits” is generally seen as the provenance of conservatives, not progressives.

 And yet, the author of this passage is George Scialabba, a man of–as was once not infrequently said of writers like him–“the left.” Scialabba is a highly regarded essayist, book review, and public intellectual, whose latest collection, Only a Voice: Essays (Verso, 2023), is a brilliant collection of insightful readings and contrarian arguments about some of the most important thinkers and writers of the past century, and some from centuries earlier: Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, Irving Howe, I.F. Stone, and many more. The essay “Last Men and Women,” a survey of criticisms of mass society and modern democracy, includes the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, but also this plain self-description: “[This]...is where I also stand–with the Enlightenment and its contemporary heirs, and against Straussians, religious conservatives, national greatness neoconservatives, Ayn Randian libertarians, and anyone else for whom tolerance, civic equality, international law, and a universal minimum standard of material welfare are less than fundamental commitments.” Whatever else might be said about that self-description (which was published in 2021), it doesn’t sound at all “conservative,” even in the small-c sense. So should we conclude therefore that Scialabba is simply inconsistent? Or might there be a political categorization which can, in a theoretically consistent way, capture both his progressive Enlightenment aspirations, and well as his worries about the same?

I think there is–though, as with all ideological labels, it’s a categorization with greater use as a conversational reference than as an analytical tool. The label is “left conservatism,” and applying it to Scialabba’s writings–or, perhaps more accurately, using Scilabba’s writings to apply the label more broadly–is an intellectual exercise worth engaging in, especially in our moment when so many other political categorizations seem either overthrown or irrelevant or both.

 The term “left conservative” is hardly new; it’s been coined and re-coined multiple times over the decades. Most recently, the term been revived in some conservative publications to describe a mix of anti-globalist, socially conservative, pro-labor, subsidiarian perspectives which recognize the need for protectionist action to strengthen national economies and local cultures. Those considerations are accurate, so far as they go. But to really dig into the idea–and to assess its fit with Scialabba’s incisive considerations of our moment–we need to look to an earlier expression of it, one found in the third-person self-description Norman Mailer provided in his book Armies of the Night: “Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” What is it that Mailer was describing there, this Marxian-style attainment of Burkean principles? By “the style of Marx” one must presumably mean employing a revolutionary, or at least structural, set of intellectual tools, ones addressed to emancipation of persons and goods in society; by “values suggested by Edmund Burke,” one must presumably be talking about local communities and the traditions they give life to, and the need to maintain and strengthen them. So how to put that together?

The most intellectual plausible articulation of this idea, I think, is to say that modernity–whether that is dated to the Protestant Reformation, the Declaration of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, or any other particular historical landmark or era–is simply different from what came before it. The 18^th-century (and earlier) traditions and communities which Burke defended cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, capitalism, democracy: all are genies let out of the bottle, in the face of which traditions of all kinds suffer. (Marx’s famous statement in The Communist Manifesto that, with industrialization, “all-fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away....all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” is an obvious support to this formulation, but Scialabba himself adds one as well, describing Burke’s own writings as “expressions of outraged common sense” in the face of the inevitable—and, he asserts, entirely justified—transformations that came with the expansion of suffrage and other “democratic truths”). Hence, the preservation of Burkean values–acting “conservatively,” in other words--now requires actions which go beyond the expansion of liberal guarantees or the amelioration of socio-economic disruptions.

This reading of Mailer may simply sound like the conservative insight famously expressed by G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy: “If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” But the “revolution” invoked by Chesterton in the name of conserving a particular state of affairs was a formal, not structural one, whereas the better understanding of Mailer’s point about “think[ing] in the style of Marx,” I believe, means something truly “left”in the structural, even radical, sense. Maybe, the left conservative thinks, only a radical shift towards the democratization, the socialization, and the equalization of the products and processes of modernity will be sufficient to enable people to continue to thrive in their communities.

And it really is communities which are central here. (One could argue that “left conservatism” might better be expressed as “left communitarianism,” and there’s some value to putting it that way. But since the connections and commonalities which emerge in the context of communities are, I think, something that human beings, as political animals, always seek to construct and always mourn the absence of–and here I am heavily influenced by the writings of Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, two political philosophers that were frequently labeled “communitarians” when that term enjoyed a boomlet 30 years ago–focusing on the concern to literally conserve that which is genuinely valuable about our communities is appropriate.) Our individualistic age puts an asterisk of suspicion beside all communities, however defined, seeing them all as potential sources of majoritarian abuse or undemocratic tyranny–which, of course, they too often are; as Christians at least ought to be quick to acknowledge, we are fallen beings, after all. But the conservative desire for belonging and rootedness and community, whatever evils it enables, also grounds both democratic and egalitarian possibilities: traditions are forms of meaning and fulfillment which cannot (or at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions and thus be taxed away from you or turned against you by those who wield power. To the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--one could argue, if one is of this particular conservative orientation (as I think Scialabba is, at least partly), that something in the modern world has gone wrong, or at least has gotten too far away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence, truths and necessities which are the necessary (if not sufficient) prerequisites to treating all people as equally capable of self-rule and equally deserving of respect. That’s not necessarily a defense of all communities, especially not national ones, which too regularly employ the coercive power of the state to maintain the definition and borders which those in power decide upon; Mailer’s communitarianism, a term he probably would have blanched at, was decidedly small-scale and anarchic. But the centrality of being in connection with others, and defending those connections, remains.

Not many have picked up on this reading of Mailer’s ideas in the two generations since, to say the least. On the left or progressive liberal side of America’s intellectual divide, as it began to deepen and sharpen in the decades following the upheavals of the 1960s, leftism mostly focused its decreasing energies on various statist parties and platforms, while most liberals came to treat those who worried about the excesses of their individualistic liberatory language as either 1) accidental intellectual traitors (as it was frequently expressed at a UC-Santa Cruz conference on the “specter of  left conservatism” in 1998, these unfortunate folk are genuine leftists whose distaste for the latest theoretical developments has tricked them into allying with conservative forces), or 2) just remnants of an old rural conservative Democrat faction, soon to die out. That’s assuming White voters were the ones being discussed, of course; the religiousity and social conservatism of many Black voters was treated very differently, though not until Bill Clinton was its preferred language given much credence, and even that didn’t last–Barak Obama, our first Black president, reflected very little of that sensibility while in the White House (which, cynically speaking, is perhaps one of the reasons he was able to attain it.)

As for America’s rightward flank, the rise of a pro-business, anti-socialist libertarianism as a component of the Republican coalition from the 1960s through the 1990s made any kind of liberal egalitarianism, much less leftism, unwelcome there. Occasionally you see attempts to import into American conservative discourse “Red Tory” formulations more common to Western European conservatism generally, but despite gestures in that direction (George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” for example), none of them have in any significant way shaped the overall conservative coalition in the U.S. Of course, some would insist upon adding a “until the rise of Donald Trump in 2016” to that sentence, and it is true that Trump’s profound lack of ideological (much less ethical) grounding has arguably presented an opening for leftist ideas to experience a revival in Republican circles. But while in today’s America you are, in fact, more likely to hear talk of structural or revolutionary changes to our liberal capitalist and democratic order coming from the Trumpist corner of the Republican party than from the Democrats led by Joe Biden, that talk is generally, and tragically, reflective of a fascist-adjacent authoritarianism which too many social conservatives, following Trump, seem to have become comfortable with. Even thoughtful and nominally worker-friendly treatments of the integralist argument in favor of more firmly supporting traditional community-based values seem to presume egalitarianism itself to be the real problem, and what limited appreciation for the solidarist approach to building economic equality–meaning unions, mainly–which still exists in America today is found coming the Democrats and the White House, not Mar-a-Lago.

All of which means that the left conservative position lacks a broad constituency in American politics. But that does not mean it lacks a voice. Perhaps most influentially, the historian Christopher Lasch, long a hero to many dissident and contrary conservatives (even as he remained personally a committed Democratic voter and a firm-if-worried supporter of the liberal egalitarian project overall through his life), and someone who himself never used terms like “left conservative” or “communitarian” in a self-descriptive way (even as close students of Lasch work subsequently used both), articulated at least the outlines of what could be called a left conservative ideology as well as anyone. And Scialabba presents, in multiple essays, Lasch as perhaps the most valuable of all the “antiprogressives” (which is not the same as “conservatives”) whom he holds that fans of the Enlightenment, like himself, must learn from.

That learning, he writes, involves grappling with the best thinkers’ “combination of discrimination and democratic passion,” defining the latter as “the constant remembrance that democracy entails not merely that the people should be governed well but also that the people should govern.” Mourning the tendency of intellectuals and politicians of all stripes–including both what he calls “the business party” and “the Progressives”–to ignore this fundamental principle, Scialabba’s cast of heroes includes, as he lays them out in his introduction to Only a Voice, scholars and activists and writers who, in one way or another, demonstrate a “moral intelligence” that “allowed them to make relevant distinctions and get the difficult decisions right.” This means, rather than simple apologists for the Enlightenment, such figures as Randolph Bourne, George Orwell, Irving Howe, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Richard Rorty, Bill McKibben, along with Lasch, earn his praise. These are people who, in his view, take seriously their “democratic obligation to persuade people before legislating for them”–and that means taking seriously the “anxieties about modernity” which confront all those whom these thinkers and writers, like Scialabba himself, attempt to clarify the democratic options for. The responses to this anxiety which these writers all wrestled with obviously vary greatly, from Rorty’s advocacy of setting aside worries about “self-creation” in the name of a bland yet vital “tolerance,” to Howe’s insistence that the ideal of socialism “will need to be reimagined in every generation,” to, perhaps most centrally, Lasch’s populist insistence the “the democratic character can only flourish in a society constructed to the human scale.” Yet Scialabba thoughtfully considers–and by so doing, makes it possible to learn from–them all.

That this practice of thoughtful learning includes giving sympathetic attention to what he calls “perhaps the most significant strain of social criticism in our time,” the “antimodernist radicalism” of limits one can find in writers like D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, or Lasch himself, is not entirely pleasing to even some of Scialabba’s most enthusiastic readers. In a review essay on Only a Voice in Commonweal, Sam Adler-Bell gently suggests that Scialabba misunderstands that modernity’s anxieties and doubts are less to be responded to than embraced as actually one of its strengths: the modern person “is not necessarily a conformist, a face in the crowd, incapable of independent thought,” but rather “is someone who detects these frailties in everyone else.” This is a subtle point, and a good one, but it also strikes me as an inverted application of Robert Frost’s famous comment that a liberal is someone too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument. Scialabba is far too conscientious a thinker to deny the immense accomplishment of Enlightenment liberalism in teaching people to be skeptical of the limits and presumptions they inherit or which have been imposed upon them. But he also recognizes, as anyone with even a smidgen of leftist suspicion of the bourgeoisie should, that such skepticism, without a foundation in practices and places and, yes, even prejudices–in the sense of “pre-judgments”–to draw upon, will often result not in robust, democracy-defending free-thinking, but rather in a literally care-less disconnection, a tendency to abstraction which capitalist overlords will be more than happy to use to manipulate and oppress. As Scialabba writes in “Progress and Prejudice,” the first and most overarching essay in Only a Voice, he has come to recognize “with some reluctance” that thinkers like Lasch are correct: that “as long as modernization is involuntary,” then conserving our ability to draw upon and stay within “our own skins—and even, perhaps, within traditional social forms” is needed, if our “every liberation” is not to be “captured and exploited.”

Left conservatism is one way of articulating a set of political convictions that can, at least as a matter of theory, see this needle, the needle which modernity has presented us with, and thread it, thus enabling the continued project of weaving together (or sewing up tears within) our democratic political fabric. Scialabba, through his writing over the decades, like Lasch himself in decades prior, has been an insightful advocate for the kind of democratic learning which all of America’s diverse communities need–a learning which reminds us of modernity’s liberating and equalizing accomplishments, and what must be conserved if the left’s emancipatory project is to continue. Whether this political categorization fits him well or not, his position is one much worth contemplating–an action which would have to begin with reading his most recent, and excellent, book.

Some Thoughts on Martin Luther King, Mormonism, and the Unfinishable Christian Witness Against War

 

Minerva Teichert, “Christian Converts” (1949-1951), Brigham Young University Museum of Art 

[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism]

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s preaching of non-violence is widely acknowledged, often praised, and almost never practiced. King himself accepted that fate, or at least came to by the end of his life; in one of his final sermons, he reflected that “one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable,” something that we are “commanded to do,” despite its hopelessness.

Except, of course, none of it—the “beloved community,” the “peaceable kingdom,” the whole Christian vision—is actually hopeless, at least not if one understands “hope” in the way King and those who know his ideas and words best did and still do today. This is a hope that does not ignore practical planning for tomorrow, but is nonetheless mostly eschatological, one that accepts the unknowable and miraculous potential of the future, and acts, with faith, accordingly. It is a hope familiar to socialists of nearly all stripes: the hope for a different world, and the motivating determination to believe in its possibility. Setting aside the historical determinism of Marx, even most secular socialists hold fast to it, whether they realize it or not. As the radical sociologist Erik Olin Wright reminded all those inspired by socialist possibilities: “what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions.” King’s vision of non-violent change brought him, as he laid out in his famous sermon against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967, to see the witness of peace as something that must be held comprehensively, in regards to foreign policy as well as interpersonal relations. Such a vision might be, in Wright’s words, a “utopian ideal,” but doesn’t mean it can’t also be realistically practiced all the same—assuming one is prepared, as Christianity teaches, to take up the heavy cross it implies.

For my vision, I’m particularly influenced by the work of Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian whose approach to the visionary message of Jesus is famously radical. In a nutshell, he thinks (and he believes King also thought, or at least came to so think) that accepting the message of Jesus both obliges and invites believers to enter into a relationship with one another and with God that rejects the world of violence entirely. Setting aside the conventional “in the world, but not of the world” gloss on John 17, Hauerwas adopts what has been described as a “neo-Anabaptist” or a “pacifist-communitarian” perspective on those New Testament verses and many others. Christians are, as the title of his most famous book puts it, “resident aliens” in a fallen world, called to collectively live lives and witness truths (in a body he calls “the church,” without reference to any particular denomination) that reflect to our very real and violent world a redeemed reality. The most important aspect of that reality being that, for believers, “war has been abolished”:

[T]he Christian alternative to war does not consist of having a more adequate “ethic” for conducting war…The church does not so much have a plan or a policy to make war less horrible or to end war. Rather, the church is the alternative to the sacrifice of war in a war-weary world. The church is the end of war….

Christ has shattered the silence that surrounds those who have killed, because his sacrifice overwhelms our killing and restores us to a life of peace. Indeed, we believe that it remains possible for those who have killed to be reconciled with those they have killed….This is the reconciliation made possible by the hard wood of the cross….[B]ecause King understood nonviolence to be the bearing of Jesus’s cross, King was able to choose the path of vulnerable faithfulness with a full awareness that such a path would be costly. King operated with the conviction that the victory had been won, but also with the realization that the mopping up might take longer than expected (Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity [Baker Academic 2011], 68-69, 92).

This radical reading of the Christian message, as exemplified by Martin Luther King’s life and words, is not especially strong in my own religious tradition of Mormonism. (The Utah legislature actually refused to acknowledge Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for 17 years after it was first established by the national government in 1983, recognizing what they called “Human Rights Day” instead, tying with South Carolina as the final state to finally endorse MLK Day in 2000.) But the Book of Mormon, the religious text which gave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (our denomination’s official name) its most common designation, actually includes a story that exemplifies this pacifist vision supremely well.

First, some context. The Book of Mormon purports to be an ancient record, one that Joseph Smith was led to by what most of the Mormon faithful accept as angelic visitations, and found buried in a hillside in New York state in 1823. From that point he was blessed with the spiritual power to translate the book, which was eventually published in 1830, then becoming the cornerstone of the Mormon church.

The text of the Book of Mormon itself unfolds as having been assembled, over a period of many years, by the descendants of an ancient Hebrew family that fled Jerusalem before its destruction by the Babylonians over 2500 years ago. This family was led by God across the desert and the ocean, eventually settling somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, where over the centuries they grew in number and divided, all while prophets regularly emerged to remind the people of God’s commandments, most of whom were ignored as the people made war on one another. The patriarch of the original clan that fled Jerusalem was named Lehi, and the son of his who took command of their divided community was called Nephi. Those names echo down through the hundreds of pages of the text, taken up by different descendants of theirs in different contexts, all in the midst of explicit prophecies about the future coming of Jesus Christ, as well as tales of civil conflicts and rivalries and conversions stretching out over many generations and many distant communities, all related by a variety of narrators. In time, the narrative presents readers with a small group of members of a distinct tribe who are converted (or re-converted) to the words of God through the actions of a missionary, and they, rejecting the larger warlike population (called the “Lamanites”) which they were part of, took the name “Anti-Nephi-Lehi” for themselves. And that is where this story, so relevant to our time, is told. As is recounted in the part of the Book of Mormon knowns as the Book of Alma:

And now it came to pass that when…all the people were assembled together, they took their swords, and all the weapons which were used for the shedding of man’s blood, and they did bury them up deep in the earth. And this they did, it being in their view a testimony to God, and also to men, that they never would use weapons again for the shedding of man’s blood; and this they did, vouching and covenanting with God, that rather than shed the blood of their brethren they would give up their own lives….

And it came to pass that their brethren, the Lamanites, made preparations for war, and came up to the land of Nephi for the purpose of destroying…the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi out of the land. Now when the people saw that they were coming against them they went out to meet them, and prostrated themselves before them to the earth, and began to call on the name of the Lord; and thus they were in this attitude when the Lamanites began to fall upon them, and began to slay them with the sword.

And thus without meeting any resistance, they did slay a thousand and five of them; and we know that they are blessed, for they have gone to dwell with their God.

Now when the Lamanites saw that their brethren would not flee from the sword, neither would they turn aside to the right hand or to the left, but that they would lie down and perish and praised God even in the very act of perishing under the sword…they did forebear from slaying them; and there were many whose hearts had swollen in them for those of their brethren who had fallen under the sword, for they repented of the things which they had done. And it came to pass that they threw down their weapons of war, and they would not take them again, for they were stung for the murders which they had committed; and they came down even as their brethren, relying upon the mercies of those whose arms were lifted to slay them.

And it came to pass that the people of God were joined that day by more than the number who had been slain; and those who had been slain were righteous people, therefore we have no reason to doubt but what they were saved. (Alma 24: 17-26)

In the formalized Sunday School curriculum of the Mormon church, one that is followed in congregations worldwide, the Book of Mormon is read in its entirety every four years. When it last came around for faithful members, in 2020, there were, of course, vicious conflicts and wars being waged around the world, as there tragically always are. Then, the wars which inflamed the passions and made the option of non-violence seem hopeless were in Afghanistan and Sudan; today, in 2024, the same can be said about Ukraine and Gaza. With all these conflicts very present in minds of us all, the potential of using this story—among whatever audience, Mormon or otherwise, willing to take it seriously--to present a radical, pacifist reading of how Christians are to respond to violence (much less the prospect of endorsing or supporting it) shouldn’t be ignored. (Pairing such a story with the practical ideas of peace activists like George Lakey or the Engler brothers wouldn’t be a bad idea either!)

Hauerwas, reflecting upon King’s call to exercise a “love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution,” argued that “non-violence…seeks not to defeat or humiliate an opponent, but to win a friend….to awaken in the opponent a sense of shame and repentance” (Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, 90). I, at least, can’t think of a more dramatic literary demonstration of both the costliness of non-violence to the practitioner, and the space for redemption and reconciliation which bearing that cost opens up, than the story of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies.

That space, it must be emphasized, is not uncontested; as it is with Hauerwas’s or any others’ radical readings of Jesus’s message of non-violence, there are, in my tradition, many who reject the pacifist interpretation of these Book of Mormon passages. More importantly however, this space, even if it is embraced, cannot be understood as self-justifying; to stand with faith in a space which renounces war is to stand in a place where the results of one’s non-violence--to say nothing of the justice of such--are unknown. The Anti-Nephi-Lehies obviously couldn’t—and never did, at least insofar as the Book of Mormon’s narrative tells us—know the result of their refusal to defend themselves: they were killed by their enemies in the very moment when they prostrated themselves before them, proclaiming their conviction that, as a people redeemed by God’s grace, they dared not do violence to any other creature. To them it was, simply, an act of loving, utopian faith.

Few of my fellow Mormons are pacifists, much less people who embrace socialist hopes. But this MLK Day, I take some small inspiration from the knowledge that in my own tradition, like in Christianity more broadly, for all its endless faults and compromises with the warlike reality around us, one can find stories of Jesus and others which point toward a utopian, perhaps unfinishable, but still better, more peaceful world. King’s courageous insistence upon justice was grounded in such stories; may ours be a well.

[For an even more explicitly Mormon version of this essay, see here.]