I Would Defend My Wife. Can I Still be Pacifist?

I made a new friend last week. One of the joys of my work is that I get to meet new people with unique and interesting stories. In this case, I met a brother in Christ who’s involved in some great youth work in Manitoba. Maybe it was because Remembrance Day was coming up, but for whatever reason, we got onto the topic of peace and war. He wanted to know where our brand of Mennonites stood on this issue.

It seemed to me that although he believes in peace as a good idea, he didn’t seem to believe that true pacifism was possible. He used an age-old example that I’ve heard many times before: Imagine you came home and someone was raping your spouse. Although you might want to try non-violent means, nothing will work. The only way to stop them is with violence and there just happens to be a baseball bat in the room. Would you use it to beat the person in order to defend your partner?

This is a common thought experiment in the peace-violence conversation, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I wonder if this is a helpful question at all.

First of all, it’s a hypothetical and extreme situation. It tries to isolate a violent act from any context so that hitting someone with a baseball bat is the only possible choice to save your spouse. What it implies is that if you don’t act violently, you are willingly allowing your spouse to be raped. What kind of partner would you be if you did that? Well, almost as bad as the person committing the rape, it would seem.

This scenario is as extreme as asking - would you drive a car if you wholly believed that you shouldn’t because of climate change, but were in a situation where you had no choice but to drive a car in order to save your family? Or, would you eat meat if you were a vegetarian and were in a situation where if you didn’t eat meat, you would die?

The problem I have with this type of question is that it’s used as a means to justify a certain perspective. In the case of pacifism, if you would choose to violently defend your spouse from being raped, then you must also condone violence in other situations. If that’s the case, then you can’t be a true pacifist, which means you should support just war theory and the like.

Again, I think this type of reasoning is unfair. Let’s use another situation as an example:

Corrie Ten Boom was a Christian. She followed Jesus. As Christians, we believe that God calls us to be honest. One of the ten commandments is to not bear false witness; Jesus also tells us that we should let our “yes” be “yes” and our “no” be “no”. We would expect nothing less of Christians than to strive to be honest people.

But during the Second World War, Corrie Ten Boom and her family hid Jews from the Nazis. They lied to the government about hiding Jews and were eventually found out and sent to a prisoner of war camp. The question is: Was Corrie Ten Boom a liar? If you followed the same reasoning of the rape question, the answer would be “yes.” She was dishonest with the Nazi authorities about harbouring Jews, knowing that if she told the truth, they would die. But I know nobody who would say that what Corrie did was wrong, or that she was a liar. She was an honest Christian who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews.

Life is much more complicated than the hypothetical, extreme situation posed to me by my new-found friend. I’ll admit that if placed in a situation where my absolute only choice was to use violent force to defend my wife - I would do it (I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t). But the amount of violence we would use in this hypothetical situation is also important. Would we use the minimum possible force in order to stop the attack, or would we let hate and vengeance overtake us to the point where we use the maximum legal amount in order to inflict as much pain on another person as possible? Would we kill if we were legally justified to do so, even if it wasn’t necessary? Our intentions and restrictions make a difference in these thought experiments.

Deciding to use the least amount of violence in an extreme hypothetical situation doesn’t by any means justify violence in real life situations. In the same way that Corrie lying to the Nazi’s didn’t necessarily make her a liar, using violence in these extreme situations doesn’t disqualify us from believing in and working for peace. And if that’s the case, there may be many more pacifists out there who don’t realize they are.

Think about your real life. Think about the actual situations you live through that allow for the possibility of violence. There’s no real life situation I can think of where another way other than violence isn’t possible. The problem is that we have many more things other than our spouses that we want to defend. Threats to our lifestyle, wealth, land, and pride can all be reasons for us to lash out violently.

Pacifism is choosing to act non-violently in real, everyday situations where violence and vengeance seem like the preferred responses. Pacifism is about humbling ourselves and realizing that we don’t need to defend our pride or reputations by taking an eye for an eye. It’s about finding creative ways that build peace for individuals and communities. It’s a mindset to not turn to violence as our first response to conflict. Pacifism is a question of allegiance and whether or not the first place in our lives belongs to God or to an ideology, country, race, or social class. It’s about actively responding in situations of injustice and hate by offering love and grace in return.

The way of peace is the way I believe God calls us to walk. As a pacifist, I ask all the aforementioned questions in my real life context. I strive to experience the love of God to such an extent that I can share it with everyone I meet. I choose not to glorify violence, even for my own defence, because there’s always another way. And even if, hypothetically, I was in a position where I had no other choice but to use force to defend my wife from being raped, I would use the least amount possible. I don’t believe that disqualifies me from striving to be a pacifist in my real life.

Of course peace isn’t easy or popular, but it is possible. We see it in Jesus and in countless glimpses throughout history. It’s worth living out, as difficult as it may be, knowing that God is always with us to give us strength, wisdom, and grace through it all.