catapult magazine

“We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty . . . We must find an alternative to war and bloodshed . . . It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or non-existence . . . and the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation . . .”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.

Thanks for the quote Laurencer. It made me think of a documentary I just saw on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi where Muslims and Christians are fighting each other in one of the newer civil wars on the planet. Both sides were interviewed. Both Islamic and Christian fighters are composed of young men in their twenties. Both sides are fundamentalist.

Until I saw this documentary, when I thought of Christians fighting a religious war, I would think of Ireland or Yugoslavia where religion is not really the fundamental issue (in a faith sense). I was very struck by images of these Indonesian Christian fighters first showing off their homemade firearms and bragging about their victories over the enemy—then picking up their guitars and launching into contemporary evangelical worship tunes—the same ones you hear in our churches. Considering the violent and military imagery often contained in these otherwise vacuous praise songs, I should not have been surprised that they don’t see the contradiction between praising God and extinguishing a life.