Spirit in Action

Religions & Nonviolence: Roots & Reality

Rachel MacNair is the author of Religions and Nonviolence: The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace, an enthralling look inside a number of religions. Rachel's interdisciplinary Ph.D. is in Psychology & Sociology, and her BA was in Peace & Conflict Studies.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 07 Feb 2016
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Peace is always an issue that's near and dear to us involved with Nerden Spirit Radio And on our Spirit in Action program And today's guest provides an invaluable glimpse into the dynamics of non-violence And the history of such principles, especially as they have been manifested and nurtured Or not, through religion. Rachel McNair is author of "Religions and Non-Violence, The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace." Rachel's interdisciplinary PhD is in psychology and sociology She's also author of "The Psychology of Peace and Introduction" and other books and papers Rachel McNair joins us by phone from Kansas City, Missouri Rachel, thank you so very much for joining me today for "Spirit in Action" I'm delighted to be here It's so wonderful, the new book you've come out with, "Religions and Non-Violence, The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace." Could you explain to folks why the subtext, The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace? Well, you know, there's an awful lot of... We look at history and it's like, there was this one war And this is who caused it, and this is all the battles that happened And then there was 300 years of peace And then there was this other war, and there was this, and this is, you know, we're going to focus on it We have so much of an idea that history has been just saturated full of violence That a lot of people just despair that the human race is like this But in fact, throughout history, the human race has also been marvelously good at non-violence And you think of non-violence as an assertive thing, not just a lack of violence But an assertive countering of violence has been happening all along And we need to know that we're not dealing with some violent juggernaut that's going to run over us We are in fact building on a history that's been going on all along And the human condition is not just defined by all its violence If we focus on the violence, we can get really depressed But if we focus on all the non-violence that's been going on all throughout history Then we know that we're building on something We know that it's workable and it has been working And the human mind is able to make it work because it has been doing so all along If you want to know the history of non-violence when you go deep in history You know centuries and millennia into history, you're mainly looking at what religions were doing Because the reform religions, the ones that came along and said We don't want to do it that way, we want to do it this way So Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism and so forth All these religions were reactions against the violence of their time So most religions, if you belong to them and wish to be non-violence In the first place you can find an ample non-violent tradition Every large religion has a non-violent tradition And in most cases you will make a good case for non-violence by appealing to the very beginning of the religion I was pretty impressed by the varieties of religion you covered It's much wider than most people think about And most people can think of a Christian scripture, you know, love your enemy or something like that But they can't really picture it in other religions Maybe Sikhism, they have no idea how Sikhs think of peace and war Or Baha'i or Native Americans or whatever Oh right, the Sikhs were among the most active in the non-violent movement for Indian independence The Native Americans are huge in influence over modern movements Because the very core of the feminist movement, the movement for women's equality Relied quite a bit on early American women having interaction with the Iroquois and other indigenous Americans Who just couldn't understand how Europeans treated the women so right So, you know, women of European descent were like, well, yeah, why? It's obviously not natural because we see right in front of a society where it isn't so And the hierarchy that Europeans took for granted was just puzzling To the Native Americans when they met them And you would have large numbers of Europeans deciding to just go to Indian territory to get away from this nonsense Of the Lord High Pu-ba just, you know, bearing down on them Of course, there were quicker things going on at the same time It was not that it was absence from European culture, the idea of human equality But it was just being quite bolstered And what would happen is the Lord High Mayor would know that if he came down too hard Large hunks of his people would have an escape valve to go to Indian territory And so he wouldn't be nearly as oppressive as they were in Europe where there was no escape valve And this was going on for generations before we got to the American Revolution That's part of what went into it You know, they're just so much more than we know from the conventional way of looking at history We maybe should step back and right away talk about what you're referring to When you talk about non-violence because many people could have said, you know, pacifism Or talk about political activism, social change There's many different aspects that you're wrapping up and including when you're addressing non-violence Right, and including lifestyle for instance So the vegetarianism that Hinduism has had for millennia Would be included and ecological concerns and so forth And the word non-violence has always been kind of a problem because, you know, it's saying what it isn't And you can have, if you talk about non-violent crime, you know, that shoplifting As opposed to armed assault, which is violent crime, you know And that's not what we mean at all We mean countering violence, deliberately countering violence After all, you know, somebody sitting there on the picture is being non-violent But they don't normally think of themselves that way Because being not violent is what most people do most of the time But we're talking about assertively countering violence But I do think that the word non-violence, the reason it's stuck around it People have understood the problem with the word for a long time And that's why Gandhi introduced the idea of calling it Satya Kraha And a lot of people do use that, but it didn't really take off And the word non-violence, I think still has a good point that we are saying that it's not violence That's important to countering violence because a lot of people think the way you counter violence is with other violence You know, the just war theory is basically the idea that you defend innocent people with violence And so I think why the word non-violence has stuck, even though it has all these ambiguities and problems Is because we are keeping it at non-violence and not letting it slip into altruistic violence So I think you explained a little bit of this before It's probably also important to emphasize for people why you're talking about religions and non-violence That's in the title of the book How is this different if you just were looking at non-violence in history? Would it look very much the same or would it be radically altered? You know, I have one full chapter on ethical atheists, too So people who are assertively atheists also have all kinds of non-violence traditions But if you're looking at the aspect of what's motivating people You're going to find that religion is inherent and you're just not going to be able to understand what was really going on If you don't understand the religion, that's one point There was somebody actually said, well Martin Luther King was able to do all he did without religion And therefore, and I'm like, excuse me Somebody is like really seriously ignorant of what was going on with Martin Luther King if they thought he did it without religion Well, that might surprise a lot of people because I think when most people think of religion, for instance in politics They think of the Republican candidates and they don't see a lot of peace advocates there Is there something that's radically out of sync about religions and peace when we look at the American landscape? Oh, it's not just the American landscape, it's been throughout the world and all religions The only religions that have gotten out of having a violence tradition Are the ones that are recent and small and have never had government sponsorship I speak of Baha'i and tenerico Even there, they're not pure But there's a good solid reason for that Which is that if you're going to do violence as a government on a massive scale You do not want to get up and say, I'm going to massacre these other folks because I want their territory I'm going to kill my own folks because I can get away with it You're not going to say that, what you're going to say is this is of cosmic importance God wants it, we're doing the right thing here So you have four reasons, one is that it's necessary for defense, just war doctrine Another is that as soon as the government, which has a monopoly on violence, starts patronizing the religion It wants to because it gets something out of it, but then it also, you know, that's the government It's got a monopoly on violence, massive violence needs justification in order to induce a lot of people to participate in it And then you also have the problem that large religions very often have rulers that impose it You know, the king is now Christian, the king is now Buddhist, the king is now Muslim We're all going to be that way, well as soon as you have any coercion I mean, they think they're doing a good thing, they're spreading the religion But as soon as you have coercion, then you have kind of a lack of sincerity And even people who say, "Oh, the king is now thus and so, and therefore I will be too" Even if it's entirely voluntary on their part, they're not really into it The next king decides he's something else, then there's something else too They haven't really understood the religion, and this has been a constant thing throughout history Any religion that had state sponsorship, the violence is going to follow you You're going to have the just one theory, you're going to have the justifications They want religious justifications because purely explicitly selfless justifications aren't going to work In order to get you the mass of violence, you have to have religious ones Even if you're anti-religious, so the Soviet Union, when Stalin was coming up with his mass of violence The kind of justification he used were not explicitly selfish They were quasi-religious kinds of explanations That's the way violence works, that's the way mass of violence has to work The person who is motivated by nothing other than their own self-interest can only do so much damage I mean, they can right, you know, they can hurt from people pretty badly But they won't hurt thousands of people pretty badly In order to hurt thousands of people badly, you have to at the very least worship the almighty dollar Think about that, people who worship money are engaged in a kind of religion That will cause way more harm than somebody who is simply self-centered Because they're worshiping something that distorts their thinking about being compassionate to other people So in some cases, you have religious ideas that really are just blatantly harmful In other cases, you have people who will conscript the religion in order to do what it was they wanted to do This is why, you know, Gandhi once said something like the greatest sin is to oppress the poor in the name of God And while I'll say among the Ten Commandments that taking the name of the Lord in vain And that's not the trivial thing about cussing, you know, that would be trivial But conscripting God to endorse your own agenda That is worthy of being in the top ten no-nose That's a great new name for the Ten Commandments That's the top ten no-nose And why people get all worked up about ideology, because like I said, they've made money into an idol When you make money into an idol, you can do huge amounts of damage The thing about what makes religion best at violence is also what makes it best at non-violence Which is that we're talking about something that can organize large numbers of people So there's a reason why Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus Can boast of a history, a good large number of huge non-violent campaigns that were successful In toppling dictators, or gaining other important goals You don't find that in Baha'i and Tenricchio and the smaller religions It's not that the non-violence is absent there It's that they've never been able to organize huge numbers of people So it's kind of inevitable that large religions, the very thing that makes them have a problem with violence Is also what makes them so effective at non-violence Well, let's talk about a couple specific examples Christianity My understanding is, and I think you document this while in the book And again, folks, the book is religions and non-violence The rise of effective advocacy for peace by Rachel McNair In the chapter, when you're talking about specific roots and nature of Christianity and non-violence I think you point out that in the first 300 years or so Christianity was a very deliberately and it was in fact legislated You know, you're going to be a Christian, you're not going to be a soldier Right, or if you have to be a soldier, at least only do building projects But you don't become a soldier, if you're already a soldier when you become a Christian At least just do building projects, but you can't kill anybody And that's currently not the view that we have of what Christianity is about But then, I think as you point out in the book, you know, the 300s come along And all of a sudden, Constantine becomes a Christian, and therefore it's the official religion And all of a sudden, the agenda changes And so, that's what happens with Christianity Most people do not understand that there was a similar transition That maybe that happened with Islam Could you explain a little bit about that? Well, actually in Islam, there was the mixture of non-violence And violence was from the start There were caliphates and so forth But there is a lot of thought that what happened with Islam is that they went and conquered places And then imposed the religion on the population And we do know that mainly what was happening was that other places were falling apart at that point And that the conversion to Islam happened over a kind of time period So that it would take you about 250 years to get to half the population And that's about right if you have something like a two or three percent per year growth rate Now, the Christians had a similar growth rate It took them a little longer to make half the population But it does take a little longer when the government is trying to suppress you Than when the government is trying to encourage you Because the kind of gradual change that you would normally expect from people being sincerely converted to a religion What really happened, though, with Islam is that when it spread to places like India and then on to Indonesia and so forth The main people who were doing the spreading of it were the Sufis The Sufis were the kind of mystical branch who was interested in the core of it And was interested in the love and the compassion aspects of it You know, every single flora of the Quran but one starts with, in the name of God, the compassion at the Kari Peace be la chiras man jirasim So when it was spread, they were saying things like, "Oh, well, now you have this Hindu thing This is similar to our thing here," and they weren't clamping down Well, they couldn't, they were trying to convince people and they were succeeding in convincing people Because, I mean, to this day, if you read super literature, they're more interested in how other faiths do it They'll mention that, you know, like the Buddha said, it's such and so So what happens if you look at the Muslim world is that the most minded for being really rigid in the rules and so forth Will be at the center where it began, but not often the peripheries like India and Indonesia and so forth Where it's spread because when it was spreading, it was mainly being spread by Sufis Then, of course, many rulers would come along and try and clamp down and so forth in India in the Mogul empire But that is basic, what did happen and mainly what has to happen You know, Rachel, your PhD is interdisciplinary psychology and sociology But psychology is the major foot forward Right Why do our history books read mainly like war histories? What's the psychology there? The psychology there is over simplification, mainly Basically, you know, this king conquered that country, and what was actually happening on the ground is way, way more complicated That's reality is more complicated So part of it is that they're oversimplifying and part of it is just that there is an ideology to which they are blind A belief system that they don't understand is a belief system that goes from what the kings were saying And people who were historians were writing down what the kings were saying And ignoring what the peasants were thinking or doing So it's a power dynamic, really The person who is at the apex gets to write their version of history Well, they get to write it but also just the view that they have of it I mean, they're so fairly thinking that this is the way the world is But, I mean, getting psychology, you have Freud saying that we have this deaf instinct You have Conrad Lorenz in the 70s saying that we have this basic instinct for violence Psychology figured out fairly quickly that this is nonsense because, you know, if we had this instinct for killing more of us We'd be doing it than are We have an instinct for eating, we have an instinct for sleeping We know that we do because, like, everybody doesn't But violence is not I mean, like, I went to a planetarium and, I mean, utmost of science, right? Science, science, science, here's the science of black holes And they talk about the star with this desperate struggle to survive Well, how can an inanimate object be desperate, right? One star is cannibalizing another They even referred to the rays of the sun as being violent The rays of the sun, if those didn't exist, we'd be dead men These are life-giving These are not violence, they are life-giving You could talk about them as dramatic But as soon as you talk about them as being violent Then you're not paying attention And why are we having battles for black holes anyway? Why not refer to it as a recipe, right? A recipe for black holes And it's not just a male/female thing either because men spend more time cooking than they do battling too Right? I know what the answer is It's because what cells is those graphic depictions that grab moral onks and ethical onks And life struggles of humans And that's why we put them on stars because that's going to sell And also because we want a basic idea that violence is at the core of the universe I would relate it to, like, you have the Babylonian myth Where Marduk kills the dragon Tamut who is either his mother or his grandmother And he divides the body of the dragon in half of its the earth and half of its the sky Well, it's not just that this has a problem with science It is a problem of saying that they like it not just the drama of it all But they're saying that violence is at the core of the universe And therefore the emperor is doing what's natural when he goes off and conquers people And then there were these bunch of upstarts in the Babylonian Empire Who wrote up the creation story differently They said no, there's only one God The stars are not God The one God created the stars for a purpose And the whole process happened day by day And it was logical and it was orderly And it was peaceful Okay? Now, that later story There are millions of people on the planet right now That have that story sitting in a book in their home Most of the people who know about the Babylonian scholars mainly Maybe a few people who take an interest in ancient mythology But nobody takes it seriously So there you have an early instance I mean, most people don't think of the first chapter of Genesis As being like this countering violence, this non-violence advocacy But when you look at it in context of the Babylonian Empire And what it was, what creation story it was that they were countering They were saying no The foundation of the creation is not violence The foundation of creation is peaceful Orderly and logical Not some big chaotic Not only a battle, but a battle against their own mother or grandmother These were the people that were saying that You don't have a foundation that says the emperor gets to go conquer Who he wants, he's just doing what's natural One thing you haven't made clear by the way is that the belief is here that you're advocating or sharing Is that the first story of creation in Genesis and there's two different versions The first one actually maybe was birthed at the time of the Jewish captivity in Babylonia Oh, yeah Well, I thought it was really interesting the way you structured the book The first section of the book you talked about those individual religions And you include a whole lot of information and insights that I did not know about before So I felt like I really profoundly gained from the reading And I think that anyone who reads the book is going to come away with a lot of gems That we're ignorant of until we read Religions and non-violence, the rise of effective advocacy for peace But specifically I wanted to ask you about how you chose the religions that got included in those chapters What was your litmus test for including or not including religions in those chapters? Well, of course, the big four that have over 100 million adherents would be automatic That would be Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism And then there are several that have several million So you'd have Judaism with about 14 million Sikhs with over 20 million And then there were Neopagans and Tenerico with a million and 2 million The Tenerico got in there because I looked at how much each religion had And it was like 2 million people worldwide and I thought okay Well, that counts as major then because of course if you try to get all religions You get religions that have a few hundred thousand people And there are lots and lots and lots and lots of those Then there were a couple of religions that have less than a million people But they used to be really really covering a large area and solid And they've had a huge impact on other religions And that was Zoroastrianism which for over a thousand years was one of the major religions of the world And the Persian Empire and it's down to 200,000 people now Most of them in India, the Parsis, but it had a huge influence on Judaism And on Christianity and therefore on Islam And therefore it's something that we should know about So you cover a really broad expanse of religious thought across the planet And some of it over time too which is particularly interesting When we're talking about non-violence We are speaking by the way folks with Rachel McNair She's author of religions and non-violence The rise of effective advocacy for peace came out last July 2015 She's also written a book psychology of peace, an introduction Second edition is out not too long ago She's written in the journal on peace psychology And you'll find her in a whole number of other things But what you would want to do though is come to NortonSpiritRadio.org Which is a website where you can access all of our spirit and action programs And you'll find links to her and you can listen to all of our programs The last ten and a half years, you can download them You can leave comments and we really appreciate it when you do that Because two-way communication is so vital to us And it's one of the ways we make peace Is by talking things out, sharing views and learning from one another Also there's a place you can donate to NortonSpiritRadio on that site It is by your donations that this project is totally funded Even more important though I think is to support your local community radio station Where you get an alternative slice on news and music That you get nowhere else on the American airways And it's so crucial to have those alternative voices So please start by funding your local community radio station Both with your wallet and with your hands Again our guest is Rachel McNair Religions in non-violence is her most current book And we're talking about a number of the religions and religious ideas Things that have influenced the world and specifically about non-violence And one thing I wanted to come back to Rachel that I thought was particularly Interesting how you approach this In the individual chapters when you're looking at religion So you're looking at Christianity or Baha'i or whichever religion You look at it through several different lenses And at one point you look at how they address or look at Or advocate with respect to certain kinds of violence And you include in your list blood sacrifice, slavery, war The death penalty, infanticide and feticide Meat, poverty, violence and scriptures and treatment of heretics How did you come up with that list? Well there are basically three parts to it One is the blood sacrifice was something that was really really common in ancient times It's darn near universal And then religions came in and had various different ways of saying No we're not going to do this anymore Slavery is another that is depressantly still happening more than it ought to now But generally when it does happen it's uncovered as a scandal rather than people saying Well yeah okay sure, well yeah So these are ancient things that have been struggled with for a long time War and the death penalty we're still struggling with And infanticide has been very common throughout history I put feet aside in with that because of my concern with abortion and consistent life epic Being a vegetarian I'm interested in meat as how we handle the killing of animals But different religions have had different approaches to this And most religions do have some kind of vegetarian tradition Some are more pronounced than others Then the heretics and the violence and scriptures are of course The kind of violence that are very specific to religion You can have the death penalty without thinking about religion at all But violence and scriptures is specifically the thing where there is religion And treatment of heretics is where the violence is clearly motivated by religion At least in terms of the wording that's being used I mean obviously people will have folks that they don't like being called heretics and so forth And would come up with something else if that weren't available to them But still it is an explicitly religious form of violence And we need to face that and we particularly need to face the violence in scriptures Because while I'm going on about how there's this nonviolent tradition I mean you look at the Bible and you look at the Korean and you look at Buddhist scripture You can pull out nonviolent scriptures very easily I do it, I have them in there It's very easy to find them but it is depressingly easy to find the violent scriptures as well And there's some pretty horrific violence in those sources If we're going to be firm about nonviolence We need to face them, we need to know exactly what they are We need to know where they came from We need to know how they can be looked at In the case of violence in what Christians call the Old Testament What Jews call the Tanah, the Torah and the prophets and so forth The history There are some things in there that are saying straight out massacre these people In the name of God People have taken that seriously throughout And people who have wished to justify their own massacres have pointed to the scripture And so we need to be able to be clear-eyed about what is in there If we're going to be talking about nonviolence The fact that there is a mixture in practically all scripture I mean the Buddhists do particularly well at having nonviolence in their scriptures But you can find some violent scriptures If you are a Buddhist who wants to do violence, they're there, you can find them And part of this is what I was saying before about how violence does get into all religions It's because religions are done by huge numbers of people These huge numbers of people, particularly the Old Testament People are arguing with each other A lot of people haven't caught this point about the Old Testament The Old joke is that the Bible has all the answers You name whatever answer you want and it's in there somewhere That's quite intentional Everybody's getting their say I mean this thing was edited by Jews for heaven's sake That's not a matter of stereotype Jews regard arguing as a religious duty It's part of the religion It is glorious, it is wonderful I agree with them on this That you give everybody their say And there's a reason why we still have the Old Testament around And the works of Pythagoras and the works of Motsu Are not as well preserved There's some marvelous nonviolence stuff that Pythagoras in Greece and Motsu In China did and I talk about those in the book too I don't want them in a more miscellaneous chapter But the people who weren't interested in nonviolence didn't carry it forward Because there was nothing there that spoke to their condition Whereas the Old Testament, they went ahead and let the social justice stuff through Because it still had the violent stuff that made sense to them So because everything is in there, everything's preserved And that's why the social justice part and the compassion part And the quality part, the parts that we can fight for our pacifism Are still in there, they're still carried, they weren't failed to be copied They weren't suppressed, they're in there Because the crap is in there too It's a wonderful assortment isn't it? And like you said, you can find something to bolster any opinion that you have And you know, you've talked about a number of these different religions And religious groups and their relation to nonviolence Like you said, Buddhists have a whole lot of scripture which can bolster the thoughts towards nonviolence Of course, there's the practicality and there's the history, how do they live it out And I think that actually Buddhists do relatively well, considering that I'm wondering if you can take on a very, very difficult task And probably one that a writer of a book like this will be leery about doing But I'm wondering in religions and nonviolence, you've looked at all these different religions Are there any of them that you think, you know, when you look at the composite score Not only their writings, but how they lived it out and over history You know, sometimes they're better, sometimes they're worse Where would you give the highest grades in nonviolence to and which might you give lowest grades to? Any of those that you can comment about particular? That would be very hard because the thing is the more recent ones That have never had a problem with the government identifying with them They're more not violent, they've done way, way better on being not violent But they also don't have the marvelous large-scale nonviolence campaigns That require large numbers of people to all be in sync on this You know, both Christians and Islam have such a large number of places Where they've toppled dictators and so forth Hinduism, of course, has the Indian campaign that really introduced the world In a big, splashy way to Satya Graha And then I think this was part of what I was getting at Was that each of them have their different contributions to make So Buddhism, for instance, has the meta mindfulness meditation Where, first, you think about goodwill for yourself and then for your loved one And then for someone you like and then for someone you feel neutral about And then for somebody you can't think of So you're going through all this and it's like nonviolence training That they've been doing for millennia It's getting your emotions in the mode of not having enemies Because, you know, they're not your enemies anymore if you don't hate them So that's a contribution that we can all benefit from And, of course, there's nothing about the meta mindfulness That can't be done by someone of any religious persuasion You have, though, in the case of Buddhism It's well known for the nonviolence, but throughout most of the history It's been a personal lifestyle kind of nonviolence And they had the idea of karma and reincarnation And so if people were poor, it was like, well, we'd like to help them get better karma for the next life But the reason they're poor is because of bad karma in previous lives More recently, there's been a movement called Engaged Buddhism That said, no, if people are poor, it's because there are other people that are oppressing them And we need to do something about this In Japan, you can get its roots back to the 1200s But in most places, we're looking at a 20th century phenomenon Of being more social activists in their nonviolence Well, I think there was probably a lot of prophetic influence there I think an argument, at least, could be made That part of what is going on Is that religions are influencing each other As people look at them and pick up on what's good In the various different religions Now, I remain quite thoroughly a Christian through all this The thing is, when you're doing interfaith dialogue And interfaith movement kinds of things, the normal understanding Is that each person is going to be strengthened In their own individual faith, the one they started with Rather than having it weakened because, you know, knowing about other religions Instead of having that weak in your face because, gee, there are all these other people Looking at things in other ways The opposite happens, you realize that because all these people Are looking at things in other ways, you think your own through more thoroughly And you have insights into your own that you didn't have before Suddenly, there are things that will puzzle in you that make more sense I mean, Hindus have some marvelous Bible commentaries And we can pick up what's wonderful in the other religions But we also deepen our own It's no longer, you know, it's not that we're having blind faith In what was handed down to us by somebody else We are gaining insight into what we're understanding We are sharpening it, it just goes deeper and deeper So, I think in part, what I get out of that wide ranging talk that you just gave That you're not likely to try and grade religions in terms of Yes, I was very deliberately explaining why I was not answering your question I was explaining at length why I'm not answering the question Well, the thing is, as I say, I am Christian I was born that way and I had all kinds of doubts To my mind, a doubt is not the opposite of faith Doubt is part of faith It's what helps strengthen faith Faith is having trust Faith is deciding what your assumptions are going to be Faith is not a set of doctrines that you are sent to I haven't understood faith that way If it were, you know, this concept that doubt is the opposite Means that faith isn't well thought through Doubt help you think the faith through So, I end up understanding Christianity a lot better than I did before And then I expect my Muslim friends to understand Islam better And my Buddhist friends to understand Buddhism better And my 10 rekio friends to understand 10 rekio better Because the core, the core is our relationship with God The mystics do a lot better in terms of understanding various religions The rigid rule type people are the ones that have more of a problem Understanding somebody else's different set of rigid rules So the core of the compassion and the social justice And the human equality and the peace And all this kind of wonderful stuff That's the important part Then this revolution has a bunch of monks in saffron robes Because the Buddhist monks are the people that are most admired Whereas this one over here follows a Catholic trajectory And this one over here follows a Muslim trajectory That has to be expected The variety of human experiences is wonderful I still find myself somewhat unsatisfied That you're not too willing to put your toe in And say, well, on a scale from one to one hundred I'd say, you know, Buddhist, the wide composite score Might be a 53% and Christians Well, maybe that's down at 42% And, you know, Baha'i probably have done pretty good But then they haven't been tested by fire so we got it It's an incomplete score because they don't You know, I mean, I don't know if it'd be possible to do that I mean, I do think there have been Buddhist rulers That have been violent I know about the situation in Sri Lanka And I've interviewed people about that The fact that they're all pristine And have no taint of violence would be a sincere error Well, there's some Buddhist monks in southern Thailand Right now that are being just awful with Muslims there Yeah, and, you know, we usually find our justification for our violence And sometimes we don't But you, in one of your chapters, you face the big question Because whenever non-violence comes up Because history books are not written to emphasize All of the non-violent actions that have been taken place over the centuries The big question, and I face this when I thought about You know, am I a conscience subjector to war, is What about Hitler? Ah, yes, I had a whole section on what about Hitler Yeah, I was talking, it was actually at a Quaker meeting Where I was talking about this book and somebody said what about Hitler And I said, well, yeah, okay, we do need to definitely take a good look at that I have different sections when I talk about the very beginning When Hitler was arising, there were all kinds of things That could have been done with non-violence But we're not even talking about, you know, massive mobilizing of people We're talking about basic things like letting Jewish refugees come into the country Taking a stand so that Hitler knows that we really mean it This Hitler was looking at what people were doing without the Jews I mean, Brazil added a baptismal certificate as a requirement for immigration When this problem was coming up At the time of Kristallnacht, that was a few dozen people that were killed And there were all kinds of things that could have been done And people weren't doing them, and Hitler was saying, yes, see, they don't mean it So right there, that's the important point because it's always easier When you use violence or non-violence, it's always easier to get it when it's small Than to get it when it's large Then in the next step, we look at what was going on When things were really bad and there was a war going on and all We need to know that in Bulgaria They saved Bulgarian Jews with a massive non-violent campaign There was just all kinds of stuff going on in terms of saving the Jews The Danes got all of their Jews across the lake one night Just in a while, one night in order to protect them And they were able to do that because a Nazi officer let them know that the boom was about to fall So that's two countries that were able to, you know, had small Jewish populations And were able to save them all That was, of course, the Underground Railroad No, I didn't do so well by a small number of Jews It did, you know, quizzling took over, and he never was able to take over They tried to get the teachers to teach Nazi stuff, and the teachers just wouldn't do it I mean, it's quite a story It has all the marvelous drama, the women who had married Jewish husbands The husbands were rounded up in Berlin And they went and held daily demonstrations on Rosenstrasse Street And they could have been mowed down by the Gestapo at any time But this was in the heart of Berlin, and they were not There's a whole movie on this called Rosenstrasse, it's marvelous They ended up saving their Jewish husbands They were still alive at the end of the war So there was this huge amount of nonviolence that was successful Certainly enough to make the case that the problem was not that there was nonviolence But that there wasn't enough, that more of it would have been helpful The military strategy of dealing with the concentration camps Turned out to be a total disaster, so they stopped it They wouldn't be doing that anymore Up until the end of the war, the nonviolence was the only thing That was saving Jews And it was saving quite a few of them But if you were to say, okay, we're going to test What about Hitler? We have the violent military thing Which, you know, by golly, that was successful Hitler isn't around anymore, he's gone And then you have nonviolence, okay? If the nonviolent campaign had only succeeded After millions of people got murdered and cities were laid waste It would not be regarded as a successful strategy Okay, this is important that people need to realize That when they say, oh, what about Hitler? We needed the military to defeat him They are using a different standard of what constitutes success for the military Than they are for the nonviolence And after all the said and done, we had the Marshall Plan A very unusual nonviolent campaign And it was actually run by government That's highly unusual But it was seeing to the material needs Of what had just recently been an enemy People don't often think of it as a nonviolent campaign But it fits the definition I think that it did more to defeat Nazism Because it kept it from rising again You know, in the way that the resentments of World War I led to the rise of Nazism It was as if people had learned their lesson Instead of doing that, we're going to do an nonviolent campaign instead And therefore try to talk the folks into the idea That another rise of something similar to Nazism is a bad idea There's no better way to get rid of an enemy than to make them your friend Exactly We get so caught up in the victory of World War II And of course, people were really into victory at the time As a big, major goal That we haven't paused to notice that that is exactly what we did After the war was over We turned an enemy into a friend and they remained friends to the state You know, there's just no way that we can adequately cover the details So I really want to advocate that people pick up this book I found it personally tremendously enriching Again, the book is "Religions in Nonviolence" by Rachel McNair The subtitle is "The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace" And you can read the writings of Gene Sharp and many other people And they're all valuable This one is an excellent overview It really covers the world and it deals with the psychology Because after all, Rachel McNair has an interdisciplinary PhD in Psychology and Sociology You'll find her other books as well We'll be very helpful to you Psychology of Peace and Introduction is one that you'll find very interesting And if you go back to 2008, you'll listen to my interview with Rachel When I had her on with Stan Becker talking about a consistent life and abortion There's many important topics there Now, there's one more thing I want to cover, Rachel, before we hang up And that is, again, your roots now, again, I know you as a Quaker But could you fill me in on the backstory and how you got to this thing about peace and life? I mean, you weren't born a Quaker No, but my parents were Quaker sympathetic enough that when I decided to become a Quaker Which I became as soon as I turned 14 They were totally, you know, that made perfect sense to them My one grandfather was active in the Civil Rights Movement My other grandfather was active in the Socialist Party back in the 1930s And I found when I looked at my genealogy that actually My great grandfather was born a Quaker And he has a family tree that goes back to the 1600s So I do have Quaker ancestors at the time when being a Quaker got you thrown in jail You said that age 14, you became a Quaker And I think you were congregational beforehand How did you go from, I mean, most 14-year-olds are probably thinking more about dating or a car Or, I don't know, whatever, what led you to Quakers at that age? That seemed strange There was a local folk university had a class called Nonviolent Actions for Peace And that interested me and I took the class and it was taking place at the same place that the Quaker Meeting was held I remember the phone had a sign on it that said if you don't want the whole world to know what you're saying, don't say it on this phone That was bugging, bugging, we worked up a sign saying don't stop the government bugging, it's the only way we can get them to listen to us But basically I had been told that my father was a congregationalist, minister, but we were raised in the south And I went to just various Protestant churches, wasn't really in on the doctrinal differences between congregation And they told me that when I got to be 13, I could, it would be old enough to choose which one I wanted, you know, which church I would belong to And I got there and it was like I looked around and there wasn't any that I wanted And then there were the Quakers and I was just right at home And your family followed you? My mother attended meeting just like I did I mean, I became a member and she stayed in the tender, but my father is a minister to this day So he didn't get that? He's a minister and a sociology professor When he retired from being a sociology professor, he's like a substitute preacher I mean, he's retired now and people will say, well, you know, our preacher is sick, could you come in and do it and he's sure Well, whatever the journey, whatever the twists and turns of your journey, it certainly led you to some very good place and good work Religions and non-violence folks is a great book You might as well pick it up. I'll have a link on the nordonspiritradio.org Rachel, I so appreciate it talking to you back in 2008 I hope people listen in on that interview and I think I'll get a different idea about the wide scope of what being peaceful means on this earth than perhaps they had before So I thank you for joining back 2008 again writing this book, "Religions and Non-Violence" and I look forward to more visiting with you soon Thank you so much Rachel Thank you And I want to remind you folks that we have invaluable production assistance from Andrew Jansen on today's program You can find links to everybody out on nordonspiritradio.org and we'll see you next week for "Spirit in Action" The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of nordonspiritradio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website nordonspiritradio.org Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is "Spirit in Action" With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone And our lives will feel the echo of our healing (upbeat music)