New Voices: By and about young adults

As a pacifist Christian and U.S. citizen, I am troubled by my country’s military campaigns, but our preemptive strikes are particularly disturbing. If we are going to be involved in warfare, couldn’t we at least wait and respond out of self-defense rather than bringing aggression based on so-called intelligence or even assumptions?

In relationships, whether national or personal, a preemptive move reveals a particular posture in relation to the other. Sadly, we are too often guilty of a similar posture within the church. While not guilty of launching preemptive missiles, we respond to the other by building preemptive walls.

Let me give two personal examples of preemptive walls.

When I was in college, my mentor and adviser strongly encouraged me to take a summer internship with a wealthy Methodist church on St. Simons Island, Ga. I trusted him enough to go, and the experience formed me by forcing me to reckon with preemptive walls in my life. There were walls I put up between myself and wealthy Christians because I struggled to know how they could live faithfully a life of Christian discipleship while maintaining a standard of living much higher than my own. I put up walls between me and these Christians who organized patriotic church services for the Fourth of July and for the return of a church member finishing a tour of duty in the armed forces. Throughout the summer, I found myself needing to disassemble these walls I had erected—walls built on assumptions I’d made about these people based on our differences. I built walls before I knew them and needed to remove the same walls before I could form deep relationships with people in that community. By the end of the summer, I was grateful for all I learned from people from whom I had initially separated myself.

I’ve also constructed preemptive walls outside the confines of a church building. When my wife and I moved from Harrisburg to Lancaster, Pa., we expected to experience much of the same demographic makeup in our new neighborhood. Instead of the rich racial and ethnic diversity we were accustomed to, we found ourselves in a much different place. Unlike in our old neighborhood, we shared a common skin color with almost all our new neighbors, but we discovered that our new community was quite different from us in many ways. Our new community had a lot of NASCAR-watching, cigarette-smoking, motorcycle-riding Pittsburg Steelers fans, and I am a non-NASCAR-watching, nonsmoking, compact car-driving Philadelphia Eagles fan. I had hoped to form positive relationships with my new neighbors, but my preemptive walls went up quickly. In fact, we caught ourselves bemoaning the fact that we had not done better research before moving into the area. With the help of a couple of big snowstorms that required a lot of block teamwork, my preemptive walls began coming down. Now I value my relationships with my neighbors and consider them friends, recognizing the foolishness of my initial response. Instead of being people from whom I wish to remain separated, my neighbors are overwhelmingly generous and compassionate people who, like me, have their own strengths and weaknesses.

I don’t assume that everyone throws up preemptive walls in response to patriotic Methodists or Pittsburgh Steelers fans on motorcycles, but a moment of introspection leads us to recognize our own shortcomings in this area. Adjectives such as atheist, fundamentalist, liberal, conservative, pro-life, pro-choice, gay, homophobe, Catholic, Protestant, modern, postmodern, undocumented, Tea Party, universalist or evangelical may be the trigger for us to start our preemptive construction project. These labels may be based on our own assumptions, or they may even be how others describe themselves, but the end result is a wall separating me from someone else, a wall built before I’ve even taken a chance to know this person for who she or he really is.

By now you may recognize that my “preemptive walls” are essentially another term for prejudice. You’re right, but I think this term is still helpful. We tend to get into a narrow focus when thinking of prejudice, and maybe a new term can break us out and allow us to see how often we really respond to people in this way throughout our daily lives.

I may not be able to get the U.S. government to refrain from preemptive military strikes. But can I, along with my sisters and brothers throughout Mennonite Church USA, refrain from building preemptive walls that separate us from other people? I hope so.