Foreign policy theorists have a term for when two countries unwillingly drift toward war. It’s called a security dilemma, and as Harvard diplomacy scholar Stephen M. Walt has explained at Foreign Policy magazine, it’s a scenario where “the actions that one state takes to make itself safer—constructing armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming latest alliances—are likely to make other states less secure and cause them to respond in kind.”
“The result’s a tightening spiral of hostility,” Walt wrote, “that leaves neither side higher off than before.”
It’s easy to grasp how this plays out internationally, with armies and bases and bombs. If Washington is worried a couple of rising China, for instance, it might expand US naval presence within the Indo-Pacific. But then Beijing, seeing American warships massing off its shores, might reasonably conclude our plans are more aggressive than we’re letting on—and amp up its weapons development and naval drills in turn. And so we could go round and round until one side or the opposite, perhaps in an unintended failure of communication, starts a world-altering war.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, it’s time to use this idea closer to home: America’s right and left, Republicans and Democrats, are in a security dilemma. This tightening spiral of hostility is dangerous, and it should be unwound.
This shouldn’t be a prediction of a second civil war within the type of the primary, with large-scale armies and battles within the streets. I’ve long been skeptical of such forecasts, and I remain skeptical now. But an American version of Ireland’s Troubles, during which we live in fear of sporadic political violence, is increasingly plausible. All it might require is for a really small portion of the general public, numbering within the hundreds or tens of hundreds at most, to see their rivals’ fear as fight after which match deeds to words.
Political violence is off the table for Christians, full stop. If we’re to be “holy and pleasing to God,” living in “true and proper worship,” we’ll leave vengeance of wrongs against us in God’s hands alone. We will “not repay anyone evil for evil,” be “careful to do what is true within the eyes of everyone,” and live at peace with all, to this point because it will depend on us (Rom. 12:1, 17–21).
Our citizenship is in heaven, and we don’t “live as enemies of the cross of Christ,” on which Christ died for his enemies (Phil. 3:18–20; Col. 1:21). Jesus commanded us to “not resist an evil person,” to permit people of sick will to benefit from us, to like and pray for our enemies, that we “could also be children of [our] Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:38–45). If we love him, Jesus said, we’ll keep his commandments (John 14:15), including these very difficult ones that run contrary to our fallen instincts and corrupted common sense.
Ours is an increasingly post-Christian country, but allow us to not exaggerate the decline. It continues to be the case that a majority of Americans declare themselves followers of Jesus—individuals who have, whether or not they understand it or not, committed themselves to serving a God of peace and acting as his emissaries.
For a rustic during which two of each three people claim the name of Christ to devolve into routinely hosting political violence can be a disgraceful and pathetic thing. Violence looms large in our national history, and that too is to our shame. But it doesn’t must figure prominently in our future.
There are Christians within the Republican Party, and there are Christians within the Democratic Party. Faithful followers of Jesus will vote for President Joe Biden (or whoever is on the Democratic ticket) this November, and faithful followers of Jesus will vote for Trump. This is a fact. It could also be a regrettable fact; as a member of no political party who has never and won’t ever vote for either man, I’m inclined to say it’s. But it is usually a fact God can use for good, even perhaps for “the saving of many lives” by having voices for peace on either side of the aisle (Gen. 50:20).
When two countries are in a security dilemma, the spiral of hostility tightens because neither side is willing to be the primary to disarm. Neither is willing to take a step back down the spiral, to shut a military base or call a warship back to port or dismantle a nuclear weapon. They are each unwilling precisely because they’re afraid and don’t trust the opposite’s attempts to allay their fears. The other side is wholly foreign, frightening, a threat.
But American Christians with different domestic politics than ours—nonetheless wrongheaded and mistaken and maybe even deceived or silly we imagine them to be—should not a threat to us. They should not frightening. They should not our enemies. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the top cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21). If we’re the body of Christ, we remain of 1 piece even when the hand checks the incorrect box on the ballot.
In our domestic security dilemma, then, Christians of all political persuasions have an obligation to God and neighbor to be the primary to “disarm.” That means, first, absolutely forswearing violence ourselves. It means obeying Jesus.
This obedience shouldn’t be something anyone can learn overnight. It is a long-term project of endlessly reorienting our wayward selves toward costly, deliberate peacemaking against all our inclinations to fight. It is a project during which we’ll undoubtedly fail but must eternally resume. It is a project during which the God of peace will probably be with us (Rom. 15:33).
Beyond that, we cannot control what others will do. As we were reminded on Saturday, the violence of a single person may change every thing. Every professed Christian on this country might be wholly obedient to Christ and troubles might yet come.
But we each contribute, in some intangible and unmeasurable way, to the norms and culture of our country. We are each responsible, by easy virtue of living here, for standing within the breach against chaos, for doing constant maintenance to maintain our free and functional society afloat. We each have some small influence on what Americans are like as a people, on what the United States is as a polity.
This is true even of those of us who’re completely disengaged from politics and public life; consider how powerful a witness for forgiveness were the famously apolitical Amish when violence got here to them.
The wisdom of our fallen world is a wisdom of violence. It is a wisdom of “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” of “disorder and each evil practice” (James 3:13–16). As true because it is that the political stakes are very high, that we’re coping with incommensurate goals for this country’s governance, this must not—cannot—be our wisdom. For “the wisdom that comes from heaven is to begin with pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, filled with mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (v. 17).
Nowhere does Scripture guarantee that our peacemaking will bring peace to us, that it’s going to be surprisingly successful, an unanticipated strategic asset. The final verse of James 3 guarantees peacemakers a harvest of righteousness, not triumph. Nowhere does Jesus say obeying him will probably be a backdoor to victory. Victory is his business. Ours is peace.
Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of books and concepts at Christianity Today.
