Religion: Battling the Bomb in Church

Nuclear pacifists question the “just war “theory

In successive days, scientists sent by the Vatican met directly with President Reagan, France’s Francois Mitterrand, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and, extraordinarily, the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev. Carefully designed to reimpress the world’s leaders with the horrific biological results of nuclear war, the mission was one more indication of the new urgency that Pope John Paul II attaches to battling the nuclear threat.

The Pope is far from alone among church leaders. Lutheran, Calvinist and Roman Catholic clergy were among the early organizers of Europe’s widespread antinuclear movement. In the U.S. a growing number of pastors and prelates are taking up the chant. The movement is not limited to predictable leftist or pacifist church circles; it has entered the religious mainstream. This month the 37 regional executives of the American Baptist Churches called the very existence of nuclear weapons, much less willingness to use them, “a direct affront to our Christian beliefs.” The bishops of the United Methodist Church proclaimed in November that “all other issues pale” by comparison. Billy Graham sees a moral crisis that “demands the attention of every Christian.”

Activists are urging confrontation. The radical Evangelical magazine Sojourners calls for prayerful protests at all U.S. nuclear facilities. Seattle’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen suggests a tax boycott. In Amarillo, Texas, Bishop L.T. Matthiesen is asking employees to quit work at the nearby Pantex plant, which assembles nuclear bombs. Clergy in California and Connecticut have been prominent backers of legislative petitions endorsing a freeze of U.S. and Russian nuclear-weapon production. Says Pastor John Thursby of Lyme, Conn.: “God would not be pleased if we return his creation to him in ashes.” Other local congregations are backing a months-long, nationwide Peace March to the U.N.

Christianity, of course, has not generally been pacifist, subscribing instead to St. Augustine’s “just war” theory. That theory, argues San Francisco’s Catholic Archbishop John Quinn, requires that a licit conflict must produce more good than evil and must protect large populations from indiscriminate injury. On those criteria, says Quinn, “it could never be morally justified to use strategic nuclear weapons.”

Since 1976, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy as a whole has opposed both the use of nukes and any threat to fire them, but the bishops are divided on whether it is moral even to possess them as part of a deterrent strategy. In his Christmas message to Catholic military chaplains, Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York stated that deterrence was not satisfactory or safe, but could be considered morally “tolerable,” so long as the U.S. seeks disarmament in good faith. But that once commonplace view is now being questioned. The Cardinal’s talk drew immediate criticism.

Some religious doves have suggested that Washington should take the first step on its own. Though the Vatican does not support unilateral disarmament, the U.S. branch of the Catholic peace organization Pax Christi believes the U.S. should act alone, in the hope that the Soviets might later go along; in the past year, membership of U.S. bishops in Pax Christi has risen from 17 to 54. Unilateral U.S. initiatives have also been endorsed by the United Church of Christ and by a panel of the World Council of Churches.

Most antinuclear church activists still stop short of the unilateral strategy. Even on milder antinuclear positions, “the churches are quite a bit ahead of the people,” concedes Presbyterian Pastor David Erickson, head of a New Jersey interfaith peace group. But more and more U.S. church authorities are committed to guiding their congregations toward a moral “nuclear pacifism” as a replacement for what they see as the immorality of nuclear fatalism.