All around us — in the TV shows we watch, many of the books we read (for those who read), the policies of our government — we are receiving what theologian Walter Wink has called the myth of redemptive violence: Violence brings about good.

Jesus preached a different message: Good comes from sacrificial love. It is a struggle to keep that message front and center in our lives. Ben Daniel’s Grace Over Guns can help us do that.

A Presbyterian minister, peace activist and author, Daniel uses stories, statistics and scriptural teaching to argue that “war has never worked to bring a just peace,” that war is “morally untenable and profoundly illogical” and that we — especially Americans — need to break our addiction to war.

Why is it illogical to think that war can make peace? he asks. His answer: “Because it ignores the astonishing human capacity to hold a grudge and seek revenge.” And it ignores the lessons of history.

Daniel says he is addressing war in general, not specific wars, though he does discuss some wars as examples, including World War II, often called “the good war,” a description he disputes. He seeks to discuss the morality and efficacy of all war. He clarifies that when he talks about peace he is referring to “a holistic peace, one that is not just an absence of conflict but also an indwelling of goodness.” This peace is reflected in the Hebrew word shalom and the Arabic word salaam, so he refers to it as “Abrahamic peace.”

While this Abrahamic peace encompasses a broad range of peacemaking efforts, it “does not give us permission to ignore the vast and evil depravity of war,” Daniel writes. For those of us who live in countries like the United States where “the confluence of militarism and patriotism saturates popular culture,” it can be difficult to recognize this depravity.

Daniel believes grace can change our attitude toward war by empowering us to embrace peace. He writes: “By grace we don’t have to consider as enemies people we’ve never met. . . . We don’t have to kill or maim or leave children orphaned or parents bereft, and we don’t have to overlook such bloodshed in the name of patriotism or support for the troops.”

Daniel laces his book with stories from his experience as a pastor and offers examples of nonviolent resistance, such as Costa Rica, which doesn’t have a military; and choirs in Estonia that kept its language alive and endured occupation from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; and Nagasaki, the Japanese city with the largest Catholic population, where people pray for peace rather than seek revenge.

As a pastor, he notes how “the spiritual pathology reflected in our fixation on patriotism and militarism is tied to loneliness, shallow spirituality and a longing for transcendent connection.” This can lead to an idolatrous misdirection. “To stand with a hand over one’s heart,” he writes, “to pledge allegiance to a flag, to be moved by the iconography of military might is, indeed, to practice a kind of religiosity.” The prophets called it idolatry.

Daniel has a chapter on the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States, from extermination of Native peoples to slavery to treatment of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. He writes: “If I believe Jesus’ golden rule applies to populations as well as individuals (which I do), then I have to reject the propriety of American military violence in response to actual or potential crimes against humanity committed elsewhere.”

In another chapter, he looks at the cost of war: “One nation — the United States — is responsible for nearly 40% of the world’s total military expenditures. Meanwhile, the United States ranks 16th in the world among per capita spending on the well-being of its citizenry.” And there are other costs: “As of 2022, more than 770 active and former military sites in the United States were contaminated with toxic waste.” Then there is the moral cost: “There is no moral or ethical system — Christian or otherwise — that supports the idea that people’s goodness is reflected in maintaining high levels of poverty in order to fund the capacity to kill.”

Anabaptists might see this book as preaching to the choir. Yet Daniel ­provides reasons for being a ­pacifist beyond being born into a peace church. His focus on the evils of war begs the question: What do we do about it? His answer is to opt out of empire: by God’s grace to “harness ­determination and strength of character so that we may abide physically within an empire’s borders while choosing to make a spiritual and — whenever possible — economic and cultural home outside the imperial geography.”