God or Nations: Radical Theology for the Religious Peace Movement (review)

This volume is a reprint of William Durland’s God or Nations, originally released in late 1989, at a time marked by the style of American triumphalism that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that moment in history, it may have been easy to assume that the threat of violence, which had manifested itself in latent and blatant crises for some four decades, had subsided. However, it was the backdrop of these crises, in particular the threat of a nuclear Armageddon, that precipitated Durland’s movement away from the life of an army officer and member of the Virginia legislature, at a time when he advocated militarist positions, toward the embrace of what he now understands as a more continuously pertinent alternative vision of radical Christian pacifism and social activism. Supporting his personal transformation on an intellectual level, God or Nations represents Durland’s efforts to form a positive articulation of radical theology for the Christian religious peace movement. As such, this monograph does not hide its normative nature, seeking to provide detailed theological arguments for the premise that God’s way is the path of nonviolence, requiring the Christian faithful to nourish and model substantive peace and justice.

Durland’s specific reason for formulating these arguments is to respond to critics who accused him and his fellow peace activists of always saying no. His goal is to meet the challenge by developing a positive intellectual understanding of his alternative vision of religious life’s imperatives for nonviolence. As he shades this project, more simply, God or Nations represents Durland’s unfolding of the “yeses” of the Christian religious peace movement. In laying foundations for his affirmative positions, Durland takes inspiration from several points in the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the Jewish patriarchs, pre-Constantinian Christianity, Francis of Assisi, the Quaker George Fox, along with the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Caesar Chavez, and the Berrigan brothers. He centres his efforts on a revealing exploratory question: “What is the essence of this alternative Christian life in the religious peace movement today?” (xvii). Durland answers that question with a specific focus on the North American culture and capitalist economic systems, which seemed so triumphant in 1989. His resultant answers are most definitely radical by both secular and religious standards. In this regard, he dismisses both political reformist and revolutionary approaches to change as ineffective because of the propensity for new power holders to reproduce systems of oppression. For instance, he argues that the U.S. electorate is generally presented with what is essentially a false choice between Democrats and Republicans, who both fail to be a creative voice for the people and only “push the American Dream—wealth, weapons and waste—to a greater or lesser degree” (278). In the place of anthropocentric methodologies for change, Durland calls on Christians to live as if the Kingdom of God had come. According to his analysis, such a faithful response to contemporary crises means living in the world of the nations (today manifest in the form of the nation-state) but complying with the state structures and laws only insomuch as they are free from domination and violence.

It follows for Durland that Christian duty to the state ends where and when human governments fail to provide adequate support for nonviolence, equality, and justice within their geographical jurisdictions. In his terms, that holy duty toward equality and peace trumps national duty to obey unjust laws. Durland adds that until the Kingdom of God comes, there will always be the need for critical Christian voices to ensure that governments are reminded of the imperative to foster substantive peace. Further, building on the Catholic Worker model and his life experience, he recommends intentional communities as the best location for Christian faithful living in face of U.S. economic, cultural, and political domination...