John W. Oliver

In 1966 I came to teach history at Malone College, where I was reshaped by two influences. The first was contact with Evangelical Quakers, and after that with Quaker history. The second was a growing realization of the need for a higher ethic.

In my first days at the college, the war in Vietnam was heating up. The chair of my department, a friend from graduate school, was noted for befriending African-Americans, but he then supported the war. He later told me, "You were the first person I ever heard speak against the war at Malone." A good man, I am happy to add that he later became active in peace studies at a major university.

The fiercest hawks I knew at Malone were an Evangelical Friend, his anti-communism fueled by a commitment to foreign missions, and a fundamentalist minister steeped in nationalism. At the same time, my initial opposition to this war was not rooted in reverence for life, but in anti-Catholicism. When Catholic hierarchs supported the war, I became skeptical. Yet, if my motives were tainted, I at least began to reflect on the horror of war. In 1964 I broke with my Republican roots to support Johnson, who seemed less militant than Goldwater. In 1968 I supported McCarthy and Kennedy, and worked passionately in 1972 on the local level to elect McGovern. Vietnam was the first time I began to think about the nature and importance of human life.

In the 1980's I began to teach Quaker history and joined the Evangelical Friends Church. Dipping into Quaker history, I was struck by the commitment to "speak truth." I also began to notice how euphemisms skewed our thinking, and how whoever controls the language or frames the question shapes our minds. Speaking truth seemed good not only for the soul, but also for the mind.

My interest in Quaker history led me to Walter and Emma Malone, the founders of our college, who I discovered had opposed all killing. Their consistency led me to wonder why evangelicals who speak of the "sacredness" of unborn life see war as necessary to serve Christ’s kingdom? "Sacredness of life" – words that resonated with the founders in regard to war, capital punishment, and abortion – did not compute with Evangelical Quakers persuaded by the logic of war. When a chapel speaker justified killing Vietnamese and Iraqis because they do not believe in "the sacredness of life," I wondered how this would have stunned the Malones. They saw Christ in every human being, and complained that Japanese and Russians "made in the image of God" were being killed in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. If all life is sacred, I wondered why we fail to "speak [this] truth" about war? Were evangelicals more attuned to modern thought than to Christian mystery, to the logic of war than to Christ in others?

If evangelicals lack consistent reverence for life, the same seems true of liberals. Liberal Friends oppose war, but euphemistically support "choice" [to kill]. Or, I was told by a kind Friend, "Among liberal Friends, when non-violence competes with feminism, feminism wins." "Speaking truth," it seemed, should require these Friends to say exactly what they mean when they speak of "choice." "Choice" has nothing to do with vouchers, or freedom to select vanilla or chocolate. "Choice" means choice to kill.

In short, I saw evangelical and liberal Friends – as with me in my younger years – more attuned to pragmatism or utilitarianism than to the mystery. As a boy, the mystery – God in enemies, even in all creation – never occurred to me. The only time I suspected God to be present in a beggar was when one of these gave us money to build a camp.

A second influence reshaping me at Malone was a growing sense of our urgent need for a higher ethic, especially in the atomic age. This was facilitated by the pro-life movement, and by readings and reflections on history.

I embraced "pro-life" in the later 1970s’s and early 1980's, finding support from Evangelicals for Social Action and Sojourners magazine. The Catholic sources for this movement led me to patristics, and to the brink of mystery. God in an unborn child? Old, if new for me, meanings of: "incarnation" swept my consciousness. I had learned to revere God’s name as a boy. But God incarnate in every person? If so, I began to see, if only dimly, that the preciousness of each life must transcend reason. The issue was yielding to Christ, as earlier when I was struck by what Christ said about the authority of the Old Testament. As with anti-war, this too did not sit well with some administrators, especially those with different ideas about "a woman’s right to choose."

Our need to discover a new – or rediscover an old – way of thinking arises out of the unprecedented difference between our age and every previous era. It was father’s History of American Technology (1954) that helped me see technology as the principal shaper of the modern world.

Western, especially American, technology, father taught me, is on a fast track. Or, as Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, "If the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, . . . the vast majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime."

This is no less true of technologies of death. Churchill was especially perceptive when he commented at the advent of the Atomic Age, "What was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the second coming in wrath!"

The Atomic Age represents a more radical change than earlier transitions from the Stone to the Bronze to the Iron Age. It invites us to look for different categories, different ways of thinking, to step outside boxes represented by modern and post- modern thought, especially as this has to do with ethics.

In this age, for the first time in history, the double standard that treats the powerful (nuclear powers) one way and the weak (non-nuclear states) another way is obsolete. This is because, with technology on a fast track, the weak may one day be able to retaliate in kind. In the future, the weak may no longer be weak.

We may anticipate three things:

1. Our technology can now destroy all human life. It will never go away. We cannot forget it is possible to make nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons

2. In the shorter ranger, information about technologies of death is likely to proliferate. Billionaires, even organized crime, may one day acquire weapons of mass destruction. It is difficult to halt the transmission of knowledge.

3. In the longer range, future nuclear, biological and chemical weapons promise to make present technologies of death obsolete, if not primitive. It is difficult to stop the progress of science and technology.

Given these clear simple realities, why is it so hard to promote nonviolence? Why does opposition to war by many in peace movements seem a knee-jerk reaction rather than a deeply rooted philosophy of life? Do many in the anti-abortion movement shift gears when they talk about capital punishment and war?

We have focused on good things, especially personal freedom and justice. It would be a terrible mistake to abandon these ideals. But even good values, if not kept in their proper place, invite disaster. If our chief commitment is to freedom, those who support killing will carry the day, whether with war or abortion. But what if all life is sacred? Do we have the right focus to pursue a higher ethic? The right question?

I am indebted to evangelical Friends, and to good friends at the college. But, apart from the founders, I found no inexorable vision of glory to withstand previously unimagined technologies of death.

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