hristians, Jews, Muslims, and the broad faith community around the world have been given an awesome task in light of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They must seek justice, mercy, forgiveness, and peace—even as many voices scream for vengeance, retribution, revenge, and war.

It’s a formidable challenge. The events of September 11, 2001, cry out for righteous indignation. Terrorists hijacked four commercial planes with passengers, turned the planes into flying suicide bombs, and plowed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of innocent citizens in an audacious, unspeakable act of terrorism.

The appropriate, needful response is “a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two,” wrote Lance Morrow in Time magazine. “Let’s have rage.”

There’s been rage. There’s also been something else.

Stunned, shocked, shaken, and afraid, Americans—indeed, the world—have been searching for answers, and many are reaching back to religion, to a force greater than our vulnerable selves, to the moral compass of the church and to an unfailing God.

“I’m not a religious man,” a colleague said on the day after The Day That Changed the World. “But I want to believe Somebody can come down here and fix this, because nobody down here can fix this mess.”

He wasn’t talking about the imploded 110-story twin towers of the devastated World Trade Center. “The mess” he was despairing of is the one humankind has created—one of selfishness, greed, extremism, and intolerance; a mess that propels some of us to inflict such horror on fellow human beings in the name of a cause or a religion or God.

Faced with the result of these dastardly and brilliantly fearsome attacks and what they signaled about the depths of human depravity, people have flocked to churches, synagogues, and mosques in unprecedented numbers simply to seek answers, comfort, and strength.

What will they find as they increasingly turn to religion for succor during what promises to be a protracted war against terrorism that U.S. president George Bush has promised?

What a betrayal if the world looks to the followers of Christ and people of faith only to find us promoting the very solutions it has tested and found wanting.

It’s not that war is futile and often wreaks havoc on the innocent; or that it too often perpetrates the very atrocities it purports to want to end. Simply put, war is not a course of action for Christians to pursue.

Yes, there is a time for war and a time for peace, and there are some conflicts that might be unavoidable, given humankind’s moral bankruptcy. That’s the business of the state. But the role for Christ’s followers is to be peacemakers, not warmongers. We should turn the other cheek, not promote solutions, explicitly or through our silence, that advance violence, war, and suffering.

America and its allies can carpet-bomb their enemies, kill civilians in the process, spend billions of dollars on security measures, suspend long- cherished civil rights in the interest of national security and gain nothing—except a period of peace followed by more revenge-seeking terrorists. That’s the inevitable fallout of the “eye for an eye” life view.

Christ has shown the world a better, though more difficult, way: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27, NIV). And it’s times like these—when humankind confronts a most hateful enemy—that even the most ardent disciple struggles to pass the toughest test for a follower of Christ.

“Blessed are the peacemakers” is as relevant today as at any time in earth’s history. Our country, our continent, our world, and our freedoms may well depend on how well humanity, following the examples of Christ’s followers, practice this simple and difficult teaching of Jesus.

Right now I want the prayer of Francis of Assisi on my lips, and not the warlike songs in our hymnals, invoking the guidance of God as we march off to war.

“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; . . . where there is despair, hope; . . . and where there is sadness, joy.”

_________________________
Royson James is urban affairs columnist for the Toronto Star. He is also an elder and youth worker at the Toronto West Seventh-day Adventist Church.