Jim Wallis, a pastor and political activist, urged nonviolent alternatives to the war in Iraq and criticized the situation's impact on poverty to a group of Duke and Durham community members Thursday night.
Recently named one of "50 Faces for America's Future" by Time magazine, Wallis founded Sojourners magazine and now helps organize "Call to Renewal," a faith-based anti-poverty coalition.
The speech was part of the Divinity School's annual Unity in Action conference, which aims to address issues of division within the church and the Divinity School, and how to make unity within the church a reality.
"We face deep and profound questions as to what this war will do to us," he said, speaking both about the possible war in Iraq and the larger war against terrorism. "We cannot let them drive us away from being the people God has taught us to be."
Wallis urged his audience to remain hopeful that a nonviolent solution could be reached. "The real battle for us as Christians is not the battle between belief and secularism," he said. "The battle today is between hope and cynicism.... Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change. The time calls not just for resistance, but for a radical declaration of our hope."
Nonviolence, he said, does not mean submission to terrorism, but rather a more thoughtful response.
"Religious people are often accused of being soft and unrealistic," he said. "But a true religious response to evil should be powerful enough to uproot, defeat and overturn evil. The fact is that we wildly underestimate what we are up against."
Wallis said the possibility of war with Iraq is rooted in the United States' role as a world power, adding that U.S. interest in Iraq is about maintaining global military superiority. He said that Christians worldwide do not want to put the decision to intervene in the hands of just one nation, because both inside and outside the United States, few people are actually clamoring for war.
As a political activist, Wallis has worked extensively with Senate leaders on welfare reform. Before Sept. 11, Senate leaders from both parties were nearing an agreement on welfare reform that would have vastly improved U.S. social conditions, Wallis said, but the focus on terrorism pushed that issue to the back burner.
"The poor are always the first victims of war," he said. "Until we have economic sustainability, the imbalance will create more and more instability that leads to violence. We have to keep our eyes on the goal of systematic social change."
Divinity student Chris Rice, a member of the task force that planned the Unity in Action conference, said Wallis spoke earlier in the day at Duke Chapel and at a lunch forum, but his evening speech was aimed toward the public and the wider Duke community beyond the Divinity School.
"He raised a lot of relevant issues about our eagerness to go to war and the patience we need to have, and also just to remind Christians they are a people of peace," said senior Kathryn House. "Just the way he makes a statement of hope versus cynicism is very important. People are trying to understand that the opponents to war have a different point of view, and they do it because of hope and they don't give up."
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