What Jesus Would Do

The interview with John Dear is an affirmation of the strength of the human spirit when sustained by the divine. Our tendency toward violence sometimes seems as deeply entrenched as our instinct for survival, but as Dear and many others have evidenced, it can be overcome.

Nonviolence is practiced not only in courtrooms and jail cells, where Dear has spent time, but wherever people stand their ground peacefully against domestic violence, child abuse, and intolerance. Each individual effort adds to the collective momentum toward a world at peace — maybe not tomorrow, but inevitably.

Reading the interview with John Dear, I am puzzled by how he can deliver Christ’s message of peace and at the same time give his obedience to the Roman Catholic Church, which teaches its faithful to refrain from using birth control in a world overflowing with people, and which forbids condoms in a world where many thousands are dying from HIV.

It is important that we stand for peace, but it is also important that we stand for justice, and justice is not being served by Father Dear’s Church. In Dear’s own words, “Everything is connected — every aspect of how you live and what you do: it’s all one.”

I respect John Dear’s courageous efforts to build a nonviolence movement, but I disagree with his stance on vegetarianism. (I eat a mostly vegetarian diet but occasionally eat meat.) Dear states that modern meat production is so harmful to the health of both the planet and its people that Jesus would be a vegetarian if he were alive today. I agree that global vegetarianism is one solution to modern factory farming, but is it realistic? Vegetarianism is a modern concept born from economic prosperity and our separation from agriculture and animal husbandry. Food production was once a family or community effort in which those who ate meat were actively involved in raising and slaughtering animals. They cared for them in life and respected them in death.

I would argue that, rather than discouraging people from eating meat, we could save the planet and ourselves by supporting grass-fed animal husbandry at a local or community level. Animals are a necessary part of small-scale, organic agriculture. They provide valuable manure and turn grass into eggs, milk, and meat. This kind of agriculture was practiced successfully for thousands of years without harming the earth. I think Jesus, with his own experience in the Middle East of two thousand years ago, would agree.

Although John Dear has no doubt done much good with his nonviolent resistance, words are actions, too. As a Jew I’m struck by the unconscious violence in the wording of his Christian theology, which describes Jesus as opposing a corrupt system represented by the Judaism of his time. Jesus, Dear says, “marched into Jerusalem, to the source of the problem, where the religious authorities were working with the empire to steal from the people in the name of God.”

There were those Jewish authorities whose positions were dependent on Rome. Their job description involved keeping a lid on insurrection. In doing so, they forestalled retaliation by Rome and also ensured taxes for Rome. Nevertheless, the religion of Judaism was not being practiced to extract money for the empire. Jewish leaders and religious authorities did not constitute a corrupt system burdening the people with rules or guilt. Can Christians not imagine that Jews in Jesus’s day were practicing their religion freely and with deep religious feeling?

It may be that Dear does not realize what he is saying or the harm that words such as his have done over the centuries and are still doing. I challenge him, in the name of his own nonviolent principles, to discover a Jesus who emerges within his Judaism, speaking as a militant against the vested interests and power structure of his own day, but not against Judaism or its practice.

I was bewildered and disturbed by Annette Hoff Danzer’s response [Correspondence, September 2009] to John Dear’s statements on vegetarianism [“What Jesus Would Do,” interview by John Malkin, June 2009]. She says, “Vegetarianism is a modern concept born from economic prosperity and our separation from agriculture and animal husbandry.” In fact, ancient Indian and Greek philosophers, and the Buddha himself, held that eating animals is wrong. If Danzer would like to go back even farther, she can flip open the Bible and read about Daniel, the vegetarian prophet.

In India 400 million people are currently vegetarians and follow a tradition of nonviolence that’s more than two thousand years old. They practice love and compassion toward all beings, despite their own economic vulnerability.

I have been a vegan for nineteen years and have never experienced “economic prosperity.” As a child I lived in poverty with my bohemian mother before spending nine years in various foster homes. At the age of eighteen, a year after I’d been emancipated from the foster-care system, I watched a documentary on PBS on the torture and cruelty that cows suffer to support humanity’s consumption of their flesh. I had never before thought about the source of the cow or chicken that lay dead and cooked on my plate. When I became a vegetarian, I was broke and starving, sustained only by an apple and popcorn each day. But at that moment my life became richer.

It’s amazing to me that a man can claim to know the thoughts of a deity. The interview with John Dear is a fine example of human arrogance masquerading as piety.

Dear considered it his duty to protect the “boys” — as he called the National Guardsmen in New Mexico — from “the forces of evil,” even though his proselytizing was unwelcome and caused the soldiers “to burst out laughing.” When the “boys” returned from service in Iraq unharmed, Dear implicitly took credit for their safety.

Protesting war is valid, but the religious do not have a monopoly on being decent human beings. Without an innate sense of morality, we could not have survived as a species for more than a hundred thousand years before Abraham showed up. Survival and prosperity are sustainable only when we all get along. Our ancestors understood this, and our very presence here is proof.

Dear practices a kind of corrupt salesmanship, failing to mention the fine print while fetishizing his own sense of martyrdom. The works of missionaries like him are deep manipulations of social responsibility, each act of kindness coming with a threat of eternal punishment. Nonviolence and social progress are realizable in a secular society without talk of hellfire.

John Dear’s idea of what it means to be a Christian [“What Jesus Would Do,” interview by John Malkin, June 2009] is right on the mark. It is not a matter of imitating Jesus but of simply paying attention to his words as recorded in the Gospels. Jesus makes clear, unequivocal statements that any grade-school child could understand. Just get a red-letter version of the Bible (with Jesus’s words in red print) and see for yourself what Jesus teaches, without commentary, theologizing, or Church pronouncements. Unlike the dangerously deluded members of the so-called “Christian” Right, Dear has taken Jesus at his word.