I can hear Jack saying now, “With all due respect professor, I must torture this terrorist in order to save innocent lives.  I’ll kill him if I have to.”  I can see Dr. Hauerwas shaking his head and saying, “We were not created to kill one another, we were created to commune with each other.”  I’ve heard it said over and over from theologians to professors to pastors that we want theology to be accessible to the common man.  Well friend, this is what it looks like – great theological figures in imaginary dialogue with fictional television characters.  I’ll refrain from that but here’s what I am thinking.

At ephiphaneia’s Amidst the Powers Conference, Dr. Hauerwas asked, “What would the pacifists do if they got a world in which they wanted?” I have spent two weeks falling in love with that idea and I like that image more and more.

He also asked, “When was the last time you went to see a movie that was about peace?”  I think for me, it was when I took Susan to see “He’s Just Not That Into You” around Valentine’s Day.  I am grateful he didn’t ask, “What were the last three movies you saw about peace?”  And if I’m being honest (which is one of the vows, I decided not to make for Lent), my first answer probably doesn’t even suffice because that movie is not about peace, it’s a chic-flick void of physical warfare. 

I’ll tell you the truth, though it would mean that I would go to less movies, I would gladly trade my beloved Braveheart and your beloved Star Wars if it meant that we could eliminate the war narratives and their violent results that have permeated our culture.   While I’d like to imagine refocusing our imagination and efforts from warfare to addressing some of our other world crises, I know this is not our present circumstance.  Discovering how it could be is obviously a long unending discussion that I am not ready to dive into here.

The strength of  Dr. Hauerwas’s message was how we as a “civilized” people have moralized war.   It may be helpful to insert here that I am not a pacifist but like most people, I hate war. I do believe there is righteousness in just-war theory.  I do not equate the pre-emptive strike in Iraq.  I do credit the Bush administration with the safety of our country of having no terrorist attacks since 9-11.  I pray against living in a situation like Israel where I would think twice of taking my wife and son out to the grocery store.  This imperfect, self-contradicting reality comes with significant prices and I think all of us need to have the integrity of not over-simplifying the problem. 

While it may bother me that Hauerwas writes these words from the safety of his office at Duke Divinity School, and I get to write these words from the safety of my home and you get to read these words in the presumed safety of your workplaces and coffee shops, this is where we should remember Jack Bauer.  Jack Bauer makes it possible for us to believe in pacifism.  Further, I am not sure one can truly be a pacifist if they live in the safe police-protected middle class American suburbs.  The point of this post is not to give license of who can and who cannot be a pacifist under what circumstance.  That would be even more self-righteous than I already am (and I am trying to cut back on that).  But seriously, if a Palestinian citizen tells me he/she is a pacifist, I’ll listen.  

To be fair to people like Dr. Hauerwas, it is that Palestinian or that Rawandan that he’s speaking for but here in the West it’s become too convenient to identify with being a pacifist.  Would we be pacifists though if the opposite views were not symbolized by characters like George W. or Jack Nicholson’s’ Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men?   Would we be pacifists if our enemies were attacking our soccer games on Saturday mornings? Would we be against all forms of torture if we had a terrorist in custody that admitted to planting a bomb in our elementary school but refused to disclose its actual location.  Meanwhile our children are learning their multiplication tables … perhaps for the last time.  On that day, I am praying for Jack Bauer. 

Again, I mention this because if we are being honest, it’s easy to be a pacifist today here in the West in 2009.  I want to know if you’re still one when the serial killer is trespassing through your home and is not interested in your material wealth, he just wants to see you and your family suffer.  On that day, I wish I was Jack Bauer.

This season on 24  has been entertaining.  Hauerwas’ words echo as we watch Jack suffer and lament the many people he has killed and the person he has become.  As I think about this, I think it’s just as fair to ask what if Jack became convicted at Stanley’s lecture during “Amidst the Powers”.   What if Jack Bauer became a pacifist?  (If this has already happened, know that I haven’t’ watched every season.  If it did, umm, he’s regressed).   I can picture him sitting in between Evan and I hanging in his head as Dr. Hauerwas told the story of his friend Roger who explained that killing and then being asked to return to normalcy was the hardest part of war. 

What would it look like if Jack Bauer became a pacifist?  It’s almost comical because I cannot divorce the violence from him.  He’s a one-dimensional character. I cannot see Jack taking up gardening and discussing Wendell Berry with Thom.  I am not even sure he can enjoy going to a baseball game for the paranoia of vulnerability would drive him crazy.  Nor could I see him opening a coffee shop with Tony Almata.  They would have a back up in line and Jack would yell into his Bluetooth, “Chloe I need more espresso beans NOW!”  

This is Hauerwas’s point.  War robs too much from men and women.  Survival, though obviously significant, is only part of them dilemma, re-acclimating is truly another part. That is something that we can agree on, pacifists and non-pacifists.  Some days, I am not sure if there can be a compromise between the two.  Being “only a little violent” or “non-pacifist when necessary” are among the reasons for the creation of just-war theories.  Perhaps another post, I’ll speculate on what Dr. Hauerwas means when he says, “The Christian alternative to war is worship” and “Because of the cross of Christ, war was abolished.”  It seems we can learn a lot from Dr. Hauerwas and even Jack Bauer but I find it difficult to think of one and not the other.  Who knows, maybe Jack would be relieved by the ideas that people like Hauerwas promote and maybe he’d say to Stanley, “Thanks.”