Yet I’ve always wavered. I am a scholar of early Judaism and early Christianity. One just did not find Jesus or the early church engaged in such activities. One finds them consciously avoiding direct confrontation with the powers in order to fulfill their divinely appointed task. They prayed for the kings and emperors that they might live quietly and pursue holiness – they had to so pray because they were hunted down and martyred for their refusal to acknowledge their legitimacy, or join with the central activities that the powers used to legitimate their activity. Martyrdom, not protest, was the early Church’s response to the unjust, violent structures of their world.

In my reading of the philosophical and theological critics of liberalism, certain Marxist calls to resistance resonated with me. Yet Marxism itself entailed a large web of other convictions that I wanted nothing of – it shared too many presuppositions with its liberal democratic opponent. To shift from the totalitarian regime of liberal democracies to a totalitarian regime of a socialist state seemed to do nothing to remedy evil in the world; only to shift the perpetuators of this evil. To protest without an alternative seemed vain. I tired of supposedly radical talks about the evils of global capitalism at conferences within exquisite hotels by lecturers who walked past the homeless without looking at them in their eyes. Such behavior seemed to dehumanize human beings every bit as much as structures of global financing.

This week I think things came together why “protest activism” in a liberal democratic regime is counter-productive for Christians. I saw on Aljazeera.com that 3000 evangelicals gathered in Washington D.C. to influence the U.S. government to give the State of Israel the “green light” to obliterate Lebanon – so much for the ability of the church to witness in the Arabic world. If one shifts to the left, protests in support of leftist projects can surely result in the same damage to Christian witness.

But more importantly, I read an early article by Alasdair MacIntyre from The MacIntyre Reader. The article, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ was written in 1959, when MacIntyre was in his Trotskyist stage. MacIntyre wrote in response to the moral objections of certain Western Marxists to Leninism in Russia. He recognized that such “protests” rang empty from within a leftist perspective because liberalism easily assimilated such protests into its own legitimacy. It is a long quote, but well worth it:

“For the Western social pattern has a role all ready for the radical moral critic to play. It is accepted that there should be minorities of protest on particular issues. And it is even a reinforcement for the dominant picture of morality that the moral critic should exhibit himself choosing his values of protest. For they remain his values, his private values. There is no set of common, public standards to which he can appeal, no shared moral image for his society by means of which he can make his case. And if he chooses his values in the spirit of Hier sich ich, ich kann nicht anders, is it not equally open to his opponents to do the same? . . . the isolation of the moral from the factual, the emphasis on choice, the arbitrariness introduced into moral matters, all these play into the hands of the defenders of the established order. The moral critic . . . pays the penalties of both self-deception and ineffectiveness for imagining that moral knight errantry is compatible with being morally effective in our form of society. (pp. 34-5).

MacIntrye is entirely correct, even forty-five years later, in his analysis. One thinks, for instance, of the Bush administration’s pride in allowing the “freedom of protests” to occur during the run-up to the immoral US invasion of Iraq – and the immorality of the invasion is not my private moral judgment, but the truthful application of Christian just war principles. These protests had no effect as the Downing Street Memo makes clear – the invasion had already been determined, with intelligence being shaped around the policy. By reducing moral statements to private values, liberal political regimes enfold protests into the justification for its own totalitarian rule over its citizens.

Within liberal democratic society, the ability to protest provides the means by which the state determines the best course of action through the marketplace of ideas. Once the state determines the “right” course, however, all are obliged to obey. We see this in Immanuel Kant in his “What is Enlightenment” – an important document in the history of political liberalism. Kant speaks of the necessity of each individual to “use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” and therefore, the moral necessity of freedom – the ability of “a man of learning addressing the entire reading public.” Yet “in some affairs which affect the interests of the commonwealth, we require a certain mechanism whereby some members of the commonwealth must behave purely passively, so that they may, by an artificial common agreement, be employed by the government for public ends (or at least deterred from vitiating them). It is, of course, impermissible to argue in such cases; obedience is imperative.” For Kant, as for George W. Bush, there can only be one “Decider” – the head of the state whose moral authority is absolute as matter of law. Protest is fine; disobedience, however, cannot be tolerated.

If protest activism has no precedent in the Scriptures or early Christian history, if it displays the ability of liberal democratic regimes to justify the positions against which it is protesting, if it reinforces social impressions that moral decisions are mere subjective preferences, it seems to me that it is not prudent, in most circumstances, to focus the energy of members of congregations in such activities. Perhaps some members will want to be involved to stay informed on issues, to determine how the church might be involved in other ways consistent with its inner call.

What then about the mission of the church in the world? It seems to me that we look to the inner resources – exclusive faith in Christ manifested in works of mercy and love and the church’s non-coercive discipline over its own people through catechesis and, in extreme cases, excommunication.

In response, for instance, to the decision to invade Iraq, the appropriate Christian response would not be to issue a statement of condemnation, nor even to join in street protests. It would be to excommunicate any baptized Christians who played crucial roles in the decision: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Condoleeza Rice, and other officials who played a key role in determining the attack. It would be to stop Christian officers and enlisted to participate in the attack.

But more, we see the importance of direct active involvement in the works of mercy and love for all members of a church, activities that we must refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state to regulate such activities. The church must engage in direct action to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, etc. If global capitalism exploits the poor, we must discover ways of directly forming and sustaining businesses that pay just wages, care for the environment, contribute to a common good rather than the mere wealth of shareholders and CEO’s, develop health care systems where human beings rather than profit matter, which uses technology for proper care of humans, rather than humans as a means to develop new technologies for profit – in sustainable manners. Such things do not need organized through priests and pastors – you certainly don’t want me telling someone how they should draw blood or structure distribution systems. But they do involve Christians in the world, the mission of the church where we understand that we are the church. Nothing, however, will place the direct works of love.

Benedict XVI mentioned well this mission in his sermon from last Sunday. He reminds us that engaging in the works of love through nonviolence is not a utopian project. He spoke about the church as “islands” or “oases” of peace: “This communion exists; these ‘islands of peace’ exist in the Body of Christ. They exist. And forces of peace exist in the world. If we look at history, we can see the great saints of charity who have created ‘oases’ of this peace of God in the world, who have again lit their light, and have been able to reconcile and to create peace again. The martyrs exist who suffered with Christ; they have given this witness of peace, of love, which puts a limit to violence.”

He continues, “This is God's new way of conquering: He does not oppose violence with a stronger violence. He opposes violence precisely with the contrary: with love to the end, his cross. This is God's humble way of overcoming: With his love -- and only thus is it possible -- he puts a limit to violence. This is a way of conquering that seems very slow to us, but it is the true way of overcoming evil, of overcoming violence, and we must trust this divine way of overcoming.”

This slow way of divine patience, the divine way of overcoming, is that to which we must commit. It is this divine patience that we see in the faithful lives of those who have come before us, who in sole faith and devotion to Jesus Christ, have committed themselves to the works of mercy and love among those who are poor and suffering. These are our models. In so far as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so called humans into life in the church through faith in Jesus and lived it out in a nonviolent non-participation in the racism of the United States, and active involvement in direct works of mercy, he represents one of the great cloud of witnesses which continues to surround us.

What about Dorothy Day? What about her involvement in marches, in labor strikes? She called such activities one of the spiritual works of mercy – instructing the ignorant. She did not show up merely to protest; rather she passed out papal encyclicals and the church’s social teachings about the responsibility of Christians to the poor, and to just wages. She called Christians to works of mercy through her own direction action; she insisted that such activities take place faithfulness to the church teachings. She did not consult political strategists, but the lives of the saints. To reduce Dorothy Day to a protest activist is to place her within the liberal democrat, capitalist system that never continually jailed her, but could not contain her. She was not a protest activist; she was a saint.

So for those Christians who gathered in Washington DC this week to lobby the US government to leave Israel unrestrained in its bombing in Lebanon, I suggest that they contact the Churches of the Nazarene in the area. That they take the money wasted to go to Washington DC, and send it to their brothers and sisters who can care for the needs of the saints in such dire conditions and also redistribute goods to others as a witness to the God who is love. I suggest that the rebuild the hospital in Israel struck by a Hezbollah missile, and maybe even volunteer to care for those injured in the bombings on all sides. I suggest that if they continue promoting war, that their local congregations excommunicate them. If clergy are among them, the groups to whom they are responsible should suspend their orders. Let us not be distracted from doing good out of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, refusing the totalitarian claims of liberal democratic regimes and living our lives in quietness and holiness in fear of the Lord.