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Letter to Bishop Desmond Tutu

Daniel Berrigan

1986. Dear Bishop Tutu,

I wish to thank you for your visits to America, visits which invariably hearten us; to thank you, even more importantly, for the consistent example you are offering us from your homeland. Believe us, your faith and courage are a beacon. You keep us walking, and in a good direction.

At the same time, as your sisters and brothers, we wish to voice reservations, sotto voce as it were, and as Christians to a brother, about certain remarks attributed to you during your last visit to the States. We regret that you were not better advised about those who were chosen to honor you in Baltimore. The mayor of the city, for instance, has ignored the plight of poor Blacks, especially in matters of housing. His economics are pure Reagan selfishness. The widely touted refurbishing of the inner city is a sop to tourists and real estate con men, and of no conceivable benefit to the poor.

Another local figure loud in your praise was Stephen Muller, president of Johns Hopkins University. Someone might have informed you; Muller and his school are front runners in the mad marathon of academe for Star Wars megadollars. The huge military research center of Johns Hopkins makes the university president a curious figure indeed to honor a champion of peace.

As to the remarks attributed to yourself in the N.Y. Times, you are quoted to the effect that the successful practice of nonviolence requires a minimal human sense in the opponent. In the absence of this, nonviolence goes nowhere. Further, a stalemate between the nonviolent community and the conscienceless authorities (according to the report of your speech) sums up the present situation of your country.

Dear bishop, may we say that we have heard analyses like this one rather constantly in our lifetime. Hitler's Germany, Russia, Nicaragua, eastern Europe, these have been slandered again and again as the common ground of the unredeemable, of opponents morally beyond the pale.

The argument implies too that Dr. King and Gandhi had a comparatively easy time of it. Their opponents were human; they listened to reason, they were not indiscriminately murderous and unjust, they hearkened to the rule of law. Whereas opponents presently encountered, whether in Latin America or the Philippines or Russia or southern Africa, are of another stripe entirely, beyond appeal or reason or compassion.

Such leaders appear remarkable in other ways. It is somehow presumed that they are magically able to control a volatile situation indefinitely. Neither strikes nor sabotage nor sit ins, nor the death of the innocent at their hands, nor international rage nor economic sanctions, nor arrests nor protests at home or abroad -- no one of these taken alone or in combination can unseat them. The arrows of misfortune, the traditional tools and skills of peaceable resistance -- these strike harmlessly off the impermeable armor of these godlings. Only counter violence can bring them down. Or so it is implied.

Surely we have here a set of adversaries sprung from Mars. They must be demonic or godlike to make such sport of outraged but undefeated humans.

The question that occurs is whether such demigods exist at all -- or whether we ourselves create them; whether it is our fear that grants them their unlikely stature and tenure.

Indeed if the gospel of nonviolence applies only when inhuman conditions bend in our direction, when cultural and political times are ripe -- if the gospel waits on a species of ideal enemy in order to signify -- then we are free (as the world is free) to reach for our weapons.

What happens to the gospel in such a hypothesis is another matter. It is reduced, I would venture, to a matter of purely local interest, dependent on a given culture and time. Its insights and instructions are apt only for this or that ideal situation, and frozen there. The tactics and ethos developed by King and Gandhi are restricted, national, indigenous; admirable indeed, but without universal import.

Alas for nonviolence! It can no longer be considered the very essence of the human, a clue to the mystery of grace -- and in a mad nuclear world, a last sole hope for survival. It is something entirely other: a kind of cottage theory and industry, a quaint relic, of only relative interest to Christians or others as they reel and react to worldly systems of terror.

In the supposition implied, nonviolence is reduced to a tactic, one among many. So considered, it becomes problematic. In this or that crisis, the tactic may or may not prize open the stranglehold of history.

But its meaning in the final analysis becomes strictly utilitarian. It is one "method," one tool in the human workshop, one weapon among many in the arsenal of change.

Tactics above all. Efficiency first. Results, success. Thus go the incantations of the 'real world.'

What the reality of that world is, we know to our dismay. It is obsessed, soulless, sexist, racist, bent on self-destruction, savagely competitive, cold or hot in pursuit of utterly heartless 'security,' always and everywhere violent. This is the polluted moral climate misnamed 'reality' by our misleaders; and alas, now and then by ourselves.

There exist, as we know to our chagrin, a multitude of ways in which Christians can concede the moral field in times of crisis. One way, and by no means the least subtle, is to conclude that our adversary, however benighted, lies beyond the redemptive hand of the non-violent community -- and of our God.

Indeed if leaders of apartheid or naziism or communism or heatless capitalism -- if these are judged outside the pale, immune to appeal, reason, suffering -- then very little remains to us except a slide toward violence. The gentle grow sour; resisters reach for their guns. Such an outcome is perilously close, as you warn, in South Africa today.

What, we ask in torment, has led us to this brink? Can our analysis include the admission that resisters, including now and again Christian resisters, have stigmatized the opponent, as someone less than human? (Is this not, one asks, a mirror game? Has not the opponent, beforehand, thus stigmatized us?)

Do we seriously believe that Gandhi or Dr. King (or perhaps Jesus) faced some 'ideal' enemy, the like of whom no longer exists on earth? From Pilate to the British occupiers of India, to Sheriff Bull Connor of Birmingham, were these eminences morally superior, say, to Botha and his crew or (to take the worst case) Hitler and his?

Alas, as Americans of some experience in such matters, please allow us to say: Bishop Tutu, you grant your opponents too little, and ours and India's too much.

King and Gandhi (and perhaps even their mysterious Mentors), recalling the guns and cattle prods and dogs, the beatings and high pressure hoses, the massed troops and the shootings, the hanging judges and racist juries, the fate of the untouchables; and then further back, the chattel slavery, the burnings and bombings, disappearances and lynchings -- perhaps at the summoning of such hideous memories, such realities, the holy ones would shake their heads in disbelief. Humane adversaries indeed!

The great strength of King, his legacy, was his faith. Which is to say, for him the Sermon on the mount was not primarily a handbook of tactics at all. It was a Way, a Way named Jesus. It had little or nothing to do with success. It was a matter, as the Buddhists would say, of mindfulness; also of dignity, of the salvaging of one's humanity in a devastated time. And a matter of political good sense as well.

But the way of Jesus did not under any circumstances wait on the moral quality of the opposition in order to be invoked and set in movement. Jesus had not waited on Pilate's mercy (or his mercilessness) in order to embody in His person the words spoken on the mount. He simply stood by his words, come what may. Thus He offered us a light for the darkest of times. In spite of all.

And what do we make of Jesus if we believe that 'success' is to any degree the criterion and credential of virtuous conduct?

I confess that the nature of this success remains elusive. I ask myself, what is this success I speak and dream of? Is it a human vision that surpasses the justice and compassion of the system I mean to replace? Does it imply a more purified sense of God and one another?

Or are we merely being ground into the gears of secular history, losers as we win, future czars and juntas and shahs? Do we offer a social and personal alternative, something superior to crime, to murder, to the crushing of opponents, to ironbound injustice?

Or is our tactic, all said, merely another enticing form of the old crime -- Cain against Abel his brother?

I speak here of our own experience. We have, alas, no successes to point to. Many bow out of the thankless, generally fruitless haul of civil disobedience. It is all too much, it goes on too long, it has nothing to show for itself.

Let me say it as plainly as I can. Whether we bow out or stay in (but in the very choice, if we adopt meantime a new agenda) we demolish a citadel of protection and conviction, one that is beyond assault. I mean the strongly hopeful and evangelical outlook of Dr. King and others.

That outlook, as I understand it, grants us an unbreakable courage. This courage, believe me, reaches our shores through you and your people. Courage to pose a question again and again, unwearied and uncowed; to pose the question in a multitude of ways, as a gospel or the fruit of human ingenuity or plain stubbornness, or all of these in concert. But you pose it most strongly for our sake simply by taking your stand wherever the question is ignored or defamed.

The question, as you and your community remind us, goes like this. What may humans be and become in such days as we are asked to endure? The question cannot be answered, I think, only by having recourse to those who agree with us or stand with us. Such a survey might be consoling; but it would leave out too much.

I say it with fear and trembling, amid a great darkness. Our question must be posed in the teeth of contrary winds. It must touch on the persecutor. It must include, and in hope transform, the most intractable and vicious of those who would destroy us. The question must be posed (and indeed to pose it is to approach an answer) by looking straight in the eye of the storm, the eye of the 'enemy,' and declaring the humanity of just that one -- a humanity denied and contemned, in misconduct and crime, constantly, stubbornly.

In so doing, we draw the lost home. And at the same time, we offer a new richness and range to our own understanding. We also move closer to the gospel definition of the human. That definition beckons the torturer, the informer, the executioner, the armed coward, the racist, into its ambiance and embrace. 'Love your enemies.' Thereby you transform the enemy. And thereby an obscene reality loosens it demonic clutch upon the innocent and helpless. Upon us. The believer is strengthened where (s)he must stand. Even to the point of the gift of life.

Your words in Baltimore emphasized the chancy, obscure character of non-violent action. Who can say whether it will succeed? Who can say where it will go, or, indeed, whether in this or that crisis, it will go anywhere at all? I do not know, nor do you.

But we know something. Even from a tactical point of view, it is better to be uncertain of success than certain of disaster. Doctor King was not the first to point to this; but perhaps his conclusions are still of import. In confronting the Black Power advocates in the mid sixties, Dr. King was characteristically blunt. Non-violence had made more political gains and resulted in far less deaths than had the new, widely attractive slogans and theories of violent resistance. The statistics verified the morality. The Sermon on the mount was not merely an ideal of human conduct and soul; it was the only workable political basis -- for survival and more.

You yourself, dear bishop, have referred to the truly horrendous possibilities in South Africa, of white violence leading to civil war. The final outcome might well be domestic nuclear war. Does not such a possibility, so mad a fantasy, impel us more and more strongly in the direction of non-violence?

I think of America also. What South Africa would not hesitate to loose on its own people, our government is willing to loose on the world. This is a fact of life here. It is illustrated, as our Swords into Plowshares members know, in jails and courts, year after year -- as we note the refinement of first strike nuclear weapons, the numerical increase in stockpiles, the incantation of hateful ideology -- as well as the neglect of the poor and disenfranchised; and all in favor of a military race to oblivion.

You see perhaps why we view your praise of America as a bit wide of the mark, considering our own experience -- jails, courts, exorbitant prison sentences, virtual silence in the media.

But the substance of your life and the lives of your people -- this stands firm, and heartens us. Your call to the Christian community for prayer, for works of resistance done in faith, this echoes strongly among us. Our prisoners know what you mean, those accused and convicted of 'criminal activity,' even stigmatized as terrorists, their crime being the vindication of life against the nuclear death squads.

Who knows, perhaps on your next visit, you may choose to visit prisoners of conscience in America! They would welcome you; you would hearten them.

No one is so able as yourself to analyze the horrid possibilities that lie ahead for South Africa. No one can pay more beautiful tribute to the patience of Black people, so exemplary and enduring. We thank you for these gifts; we join our voice to yours.

We also long to meet your people. Virtually the only Americans who venture into South Africa these days are politicians. These may or may not be Christians; but they certainly do not speak for us, the indicted and imprisoned Christians of the U.S. We want you to know this. We want to speak to you -- for ourselves.

Dear bishop and brother, we are conscious of the very thin line you, as well as ourselves, must walk day after day, the provocations, the despair in high places and low. We have at least some sense of the cost of endurance to yourself and your community.

You stand at a crossroads of time and place where conscience must withstand the slings and arrows of distempered power. But what a future you create and exemplify, making a human future possible by making the present heroic! With what grace and dignity you and your people show us the way of Jesus!

If we dare voice certain second thoughts, please believe our first thoughts are all of gratitude. We are blessed to be one with you in the body of our Christ, wounded and violated throughout the world, and nowhere more terribly than in your country.

We hope that in the face of the suffering of your people, we ourselves will come to a better mind. In this we ask your prayers, your counsel; to you we make confession. Our churches are unable to end the murder of the innocent in Nicaragua. The Christian 'no' to nuclear war is hesitant and slow, and hedged about with self-interest and Cold War frenzy. In our cities, the homeless walk the streets day after day, a suffering text illustrating the moral folly, the waste of the earth, the small worth of the living, all implied in the divagations of a war-making society.

We believe that in many ways America is aping South Africa in its main disastrous decisions. In light of this (or in darkness) we know, if we know anything, that we have a task no less exigent than your own.

In that task we have been less than courageous, less than patient, less than persevering. Few of us have been willing to stand vigil, to fast and pray in vindication of peace or justice. When endurance of the courts and prisons is in question, alas, very few come forward. In this 'few,' this 'less,' these backward looks, is our sinfulness. Please pray for us.

Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

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