"History cannot teach you anything you do not already want to learn"

 I read every issue of Public Orthodoxy. It is a learning experience, never quite sure what I will learn - other than it improves my thinking.

This week's History is Not Your Friend: Christian Pacifism and the Imagined Past by Katherine Kelaidis is very much of what keeps me reading Public Orthodoxy. I assume you will not read the whole piece, so let me lay this on you:

One could go on, but suffice to say, the evidence continues to mount that first-century Christians had as diverse of views about violence as 21st-century Christians. If history shows us anything, it is that diversity and conflict, not uniformity and agreement, have been the norm for Christians throughout history. And it cannot be ignored that those most intent on enforcing a view of Christian history in which “in the past everyone agreed with me” do so almost always from a position of immense privilege. While it likely does not bear repeating how this is with respect to issues of gender and sexuality (how many times have married heterosexuals lectured gay and lesbian people to “choose celibacy” or men chastised women for questioning their treatment at the hands of the patriarchy?), it is perhaps a fact less familiar with respect to pacifism. It is easy to be a pacifist if you happen to be a middle-class white American man living in New England, in no small part because society—the world actually—is constructed in such a way as to insulate you from violence. Of course, it is possible from this position of safety to adopt a radical pacifism, one that does not even leave space for self-defense, because someone else is doing the dirty work to keep you safe, and society writ large is concerned about your safety. This is not true if you are a poor or working-class woman trapped in an abusive relationship, a Black man living under the threat of police violence, an indigenous teenager sexually assaulted on the reservation you call home, a gay couple holding hands on a public street, or, today, a Ukrainian under the brutality of the Russian invasion. It is a radical failure of compassion to believe that these people, living under the persistent threat of violence, should just accept their imposed martyrdom. And it is offensive in the extreme to use a widely debunked view of history as a cudgel against these people trying to survive in circumstances you will never face.

The fact is, in the past, not everyone agreed with each other, and they absolutely did not all agree with you. Moreover, today there are people living very real lives under present circumstances. We behave with a flagrant and (dare I say) un-Christian disregard for those people when we construct a false narrative of the past and then declare, from a position far removed from those real lives, that now these people, those people, must live up to this fictional past. History cannot teach you anything you do not already want to learn, but sometimes, other living human beings can. We would be well to listen to them.

You need not be religious to see the importance and intelligence of what was published, nor does one need to be Orthodox. What is in these two paragraphs are several truths about people, about our societies, and the politics that comes from both. Think about it.

sch 7/14