Pacifism in a Time of War

Shortly after September 11, a customer at the Olympia Candy Kitchen offered Carrie Stoltzfus a bracelet made with red-white-and-blue cloth, and inscribed with the words "Freedom: 1776 to 2001." She was the only waitress not wearing an American-flag pin or sticker on her shirt. "Here," he said. "You need this."

Ms. Stoltzfus, a senior at Goshen College, was nonplused. A lifelong pacifist and critic of U.S. foreign policy, she had never been comfortable with symbols of patriotism. Now, just a few days after she had started work at the local diner, a virtual stranger had unknowingly put her on the spot.

She meant to respond, "I'm a pacifist." But, flustered, she blurted out the first thing that came to mind: "I'm not much of a patriot."

It took a while for that customer to warm up to her again.

At Goshen College, a small Mennonite campus in the farmlands of northern Indiana, pacifism is revered. It is an ideology at the heart of the country's peace churches -- Quaker, Brethren, and Mennonite -- and in the hearts of many professors and students here. War, they believe, is both against God's will and a futile way to resolve conflict.

But in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, that ideology has been tested. Cocooned in a college where peace and justice are taught alongside biology and accounting, many on this campus were surprised to find how unpopular pacifism is in the rest of the country. Others struggled to deal with the tensions that grew from disagreements over the causes of, and solutions to, the terrorist threat.

For Ms. Stoltzfus, a Mennonite who grew up surrounded by other Mennonites, the flag-waving and military talk that sprang up in the aftermath of the attacks was unnerving. Outspoken on the campus, she chose to remain quiet at her waitressing job, feeling outnumbered and misunderstood. To the average resident in this blue-collar town of soybean farms and trailer-manufacturing plants, laying down one's weapons in the face of violence seems not only naive but cowardly.

Others at Goshen underwent a different sort of struggle. "I had this sense that I wasn't feeling quite as nonviolent as I should," recalls Michelle Horning, an assistant professor of accounting and a Mennonite, who found herself supporting the airstrikes in Afghanistan. "I thought, maybe short-run violence is OK for long-term peace."

Ms. Horning, who is 32, says that September 11 was the first real test for pacifists of her generation. Like Ms. Stoltzfus, she attended Mennonite schools and always assumed she would oppose war of any kind. "I sort of thought this is what I believe, but there had never been a situation where I had to mesh reality with what I believe."

Perhaps it was the brutality of the terrorist attacks, or the uncertainty of what might follow, but Ms. Horning says her first reaction was: "We just have to get these people." Her feelings surprised her, and she wanted to talk about it with others on the campus. But the underlying assumption that pervaded the campus's post-September 11 activities -- the vigils, the guest-speaker sessions, the antiwar petition that ran in local papers -- was that nonviolence is the answer. She chose to lie low but remains disconcerted by the lack of open discussion. "There are faculty like me," she says, "just in smaller circles, where we felt that we are not being heard."

This isn't the first time Goshen has wrestled with the nuances of its pacifist identity. During the Persian Gulf war, the campus debated whether tying yellow ribbons around trees signaled implicit approval of U.S. military action abroad. During Vietnam, some students wanted to start a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, while others disapproved of the group's sometimes militant tactics.

More-seasoned faculty members seem less jarred by the attacks and have focused instead on trying to help students make sense of them. Ruth Krall, head of Goshen's program in peace, justice, and conflict studies, says she remains an "absolute pacifist."

In her office, where books on sexual violence and feminist thought line the shelves and a trace of incense wafts in from the hallway, the gray-haired professor explains that her life's work, in many ways, has been shaped by her witnessing the effects of war. As a young nurse in Arizona, she treated former POW's during the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, she experienced the poverty caused by Central America's civil wars. "Both sides were damaged," she says, referring to the soldiers from Vietnam and the civilians from Central America.

For Ms. Krall, the challenge came in explaining to her students why someone might hate the United States enough to kill innocent civilians. In a course last semester, "Violence and Nonviolence," she set aside time to explain the social and economic reasons that might drive a person to murder. While she encourages her students to seek their own answers, Ms. Krall's views on the subject are clear. "It sounds unpatriotic,'' she says, "but seeing what the United States does at times around the globe, it seems like it was coming home."

After a colleague in her department gave a speech asking people to look for ways "to turn those who view us as enemies into friends," Ms. Krall reports, one student sent her an angry e-mail message saying that such ideas were unrealistic and far too pacifistic. When she suggested they sit down and talk, he showed up wearing red, white, and blue.

Such flare-ups have been common here as people have attempted to sort out what happened. Goshen's pacifist ethos notwithstanding, about 40 percent of students and 20 percent of professors are not Mennonite, and some strongly support the U.S. military response.

Brian Leasor is one of those students. A former marine who served in the gulf war, he finds his classmates' ideology admirable but naive. "They are so idealistic and so devoted to their belief system, they lose touch with reality," he says. The peace activists on the campus may argue that justice would be better served by bringing the terrorists before a world court, but Mr. Leasor has a different vision of justice for Al Qaeda's leaders. "Personally," he says of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, "I'd just like to see them pop them and bury them in a shallow grave."

With his shaved head, bulldog tattoo, and unvarnished talk, Mr. Leasor admits he can be an intimidating presence in class when he argues his views. But, ironically, some of the heaviest intimidation has come from those most vocally opposed to war, students and professors say. Students have reported being hissed at in class, for example, if they said they supported military action.

Carolyn Schrock-Shenk, an associate professor of peace, justice, and conflict studies who has tried to calm the waters, admits that she was troubled by "some of the really ugly ways our pacifism was expressed." She has stressed to students the importance of listening to the other side.

She has also worried about how poorly the pacifist message has played to some in the local community, noting that the petition for a nonviolent response, which she helped organize, generated a number of angry letters to the editor. She'd like to see the college try harder to explain its pacifist philosophy to people off campus. "If we want to be effective in our message," she says, "we have to be better at how we get that message across."

Ms. Stoltzfus was one who took that lesson to heart. As part of a class assignment for Ms. Schrock-Shenk last semester on listening to someone with a different political view, she interviewed a police officer, a regular customer at the diner who she knew backed the military action. She sat down expecting to hear a hard-bitten veteran talk about the glory of war. Instead, she found a thoughtful man who was as concerned as she was about the people in Afghanistan, but had very different ideas about how to improve their lives. "I was so surprised that we found common ground, and we both wanted to see the country come out of poverty," she says.

The experience was humbling. "I realized how silly I was to think that if someone doesn't agree with me, they're not thinking critically," she says.

Apparently, the police officer felt the same way. He invited her for coffee a few weeks later, saying that it was her turn to talk. Ms. Stoltzfus hopes she convinced him that pacifism means more than just saying "violence is not the answer." Neither she nor the police officer had a change of heart, she says. But both came away with a deeper respect for ideas that once seemed so alien to their own.