Is There Virtue in Silence?

“For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.” Esther 4:14

“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to tear, and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 7.

In moments of crisis and stress, the call often goes out for Christians publicly to take a stand about the issue, even if that stand is as simple as a social media posting indicating support or opposition. Obviously, the greatest portion of anger is directed towards those who chose to speak out in an inappropriate way, those who, by their word choice or basic position place themselves outside what is considered moral behavior and opinon. Yet these are not alone in incurring the wrath of those of us who see this or that as the defining moment when a prophetic call is needed. There are times when we condemn the absence of a statement as complicity with the evil of the day with nearly as much passion as we do those who speak wrongly.

Are there times when silence in the presence of evil is evil itself? Certainly. There are moments when silence is acquiescence. When faced with a grave injustice it is quite possible that we choose to say or to do nothing because we approve of the sin we see. We can think of the German Christians, saying nothing as their Jewish neighbors disappeared, one by one. If we are greedy ourselves, we may refuse to condemn those who exploit others for financial gain. If we are gossips, we may turn a blind eye towards the slander done by others. If we indulge in pornography, we are unlikely to condemn it practice in others. If we carry hatred in our hearts towards another branch of Father Adam’s family tree, we may well find reasons to avoid comment when racial injustice stares us in the face.

Are there times when such a silence, though not malicious, is still the sign of a hard heart, apathetic to the plight of others? By all means. Fiddling while our own Rome burns, we can’t be bothered by the misfortune affecting other people. We in the West with our ample refrigerators and even more ample waistlines shake our heads about the starving peoples of the world, and then head back to our gluttony. We see the suffering of the persecuted church, and then think only to thank God that we’re American. We may dislike the idea of abortion, but we can’t be bothered to rock the boat by saying so publicly. We who are white see the lack of opportunities and hostility endured by ethnic minorities, stoop only offer a prayer that Jesus would come soon, but then go back to our trust funds and friendly policemen.

For many who have raised their voices in protest about a social or moral problem, this is where the story ends. We look with disdain at those who do not take the stand we do or, perhaps, who do so in a different way. When we hear their silence, we can see no alternative but that either acquiescence or apathy rules the hearts of our taciturn neighbors. Is this so? Rarely do we ask ourselves if there might be more going on in our brother’s or sister’s souls than what we will allow for them.

There is another reason for silence, although it is rather less dramatic than the other options. It is a reason which even those who speak boldly concerning situation “A” might find appealing when it comes to situation “B.” It is the silence born of prudence. It is the silence we share when we decide that, whatever the merits of the crisis at hand, speaking out at this moment would not be wise. It may be as private as dealing with an unbelieving coworker involved in some obvious sin and asking ourselves whether the more constructive approach is confronting or ignoring. It may be as public as supporting a political party for the sake of one part of their platform even though we know full well that this means implicitly supporting another part of their agenda which makes our conscience squirm.

Perhaps it is a situation which we think all Christians should avoid addressing publicly. Perhaps it is one where we think that only we ourselves should stand back. We may be glad that the discussion is going on, and that others are speaking up. Yet we still may decide, at times, that we are not pleased with the way it is progressing and that our own particular contribution will not be constructive, for one reason or another. Any of us may imagine a moment, and more likely we have experienced a moment when we, too, have decided, for whatever reasons, that godly wisdom entails silence in the face of sin.

This will be of small comfort to those who have concluded that this moment or this crisis is the time to speak. What is more, we may be right. The moment we see today or tomorrow might well be one of those times when it is irresponsible of any Christian to refuse to let their voices be heard. It might be that to stay silent now makes us culpable of accommodating sin. Yet, when we say that there is no moral option other than the one we have chosen, we must be on our guard that we have not limited wisdom to what we can imagine in our finite and fallen minds.

The combination of life’s complexity and human frailty entails that there will be disagreements in this life. We will not all agree on all issues. Even if we do agree on the goal, we will not all agree on the best course of action towards that goal. For some this will mean deeds, while, for others it will mean words. For others still it will mean silence. Before we start accusing our brothers and sisters in Christ of sins of omission, we must ask whether it is us who have left something undone which we ought to have done. Have we gone to them with a humble spirit and asked them if their silence has some purpose we have not considered? Let us make manifest grace to one another by assuming that our fellow members of the Bride of Christ are not acting according to our worst imaginings of their silence until forced to do so by their words. Let us do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Thoughts on the Iraqi Blame Game

As the world stumbles from one crisis to another with alarming frequency, we are reminded once again that ours is not stable planet. Conflicts once forgotten have roared back into our consciousness. Even those no longer leading the evening news, if there is such a thing in today’s 24/7 media world, have lost their places not because they have become more placid but because another equally or more intense conflict has gripped the imaginations of journalists and politicians. Ukraine screams back into view with yet another Malaysian Airlines disaster, Israeli incursions into the Gaza strip remind us of the unending war in the Levant, and Syrian war dead have long since lost their significance as the numbers climb ever higher.

The ongoing crisis in Iraq is particularly keen in this regard. In the last decade-plus we have seen one President declare “Mission Accomplished,” and another pronounce that the United States could leave Iraq a stronger and more stable place. A brief glance at any news website will disabuse you of any such thought. Rather than the stable democracy acting as beacon of American goodwill or as the happy results of a less unilateral Yankee foreign policy, we see monks expelled from centuries old monasteries and Christian homes marked in a chilling echo of similar signs on Muslim homes in the Balkans of the 1990s. Where we once were promised a democratic peace would engulf the region with the Arab Spring, we  now see new dictatorships in Egypt and a Caliphate established encompassing Syria and Iraq. Many are left asking, "How did we get here?"

In our hyper-polarized political world it is a rare moment when a joint opinion is held by President Obama's fans as well as his most ardent foes. One of the more popular answers to this questions is to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of President George W. Bush. Doing this is made all the more easy by the fact that the former Commander in Chief has answered any such criticism with a clear "No comment." This vacuum is enthusiastically filled by President Obama's defenders, restating their regular refrain that any problems in the world are only the residue left by his hated predecessor and joining them are the pseudo-isolationists of the Libertarian movement who say the world would have been better had US troops stayed at home. Though they disagree on nearly everything else, these two groups, the "America is evil" Left and the "America first" Libertarians, stand united in their belief that the world would be a far better place had Bush not led the nation to war.

To this way of thinking, Operation Iraqi Freedom upturned the apple cart of the Middle East, inciting rage against the West in the "Arab Street" and radicalizing millions in one fell swoop. Whatever peace had been maintained in the volatile region became unbalanced as Iran, once hemmed in by a hostile and powerful Iraq, was now freed to instigate chaos at will. No matter how evil Saddam Hussein might have been, removing him cannot have been worth all this, right?

Anyone who knows me at all will be aware that this is not an interpretation I share. My first reaction was to think that this is rather like blaming Roosevelt and Churchill for the decades-long tyranny of Central Europe by Communist rulers. This is true, to a point. Had the Allies not bothered to confront the Germans in 1939 and afterwards, the Communists would have been checked in their ambitions towards Europe and their moves in China and Southeast Asia may have been curtailed as well. Tens of millions would have avoided death in political concentration camps and hundreds of millions could have retained their dignity as free people in the wake of the post-World War II settlement.

However, this analogy does not hold as the American and British leaders in the 1940s were aware of and accepted the consequences of their deal with the devil, Stalin. They didn't want it, but they saw no alternative, given the global situation at the time. Oh, we can quibble and suggest that US forces could have pushed on to Berlin instead of stopping in central Germany or maybe the Allies could have followed Churchill's advice and invaded southern Europe and thereby prevented Soviet troops from occupying everything from Poland to Bulgaria, but the point still stands. The Western Allies knew that their choices would lead to the domination of half of Europe by radical forces intent on remaking humanity in their own image, an image carrying a cost in human lives which makes the efforts of Al Qaeda and the ISIS look like child's play. In contrast, even though the leaders of the Iraq War are accused the world over of being somewhere between dangerously incompetent and maniacally evil, no one is yet claiming that Bush and Blair knew and accepted that today's headlines would result from their actions the way Roosevelt and Churchill countenanced Communist oppression.

Instead I think the better parallel would be somewhere been bad cooking and worse medical practice. If you decided to make dinner one evening and set about to collect your ingredients and follow your recipe, your plan might work well or it might not. If left to yourself and your meal turned out to taste like rotten skunk, it would be fair of others to blame the cook. If, however, I came along and told you that you were doing it all wrong and proceeded to change your recipe and alter your ingredients, it'd be rather odd if I then complained about outcome.

Or, to use a more visceral illustration, suppose two doctors disagreed about the proper procedure for a given patient. One thinks that an invasive procedure like surgery is the best course of action, while the other feels a milder, more indirect approach is better. Let's say the first doctor succeeds in performing the surgery, but complications arise. Some of these are expected, but others are not. The second doctor now takes over and not only institutes his preferred treatments but also works to undo the work of his predecessor. He removes the stitches put in place earlier and alters the medication to what he wanted before the surgery occurred. Inevitably and tragically the result would be that the patient would likely now be in a far worse situation than before any intervention. 

Right now the critics of Bush's policy are saying "I told you so!" but I would suggest it would almost be better if they said, "We made it so!" Both the Leftist and Libertarian factions claim that had their advice been followed, the mess of the Middle East would be far more bearable than it presently is today. They look to the 2003 invasion as the first domino setting in motion the current crisis. Few are so foolish as to think the Arab World would be a picnic, but they see the Iraq War as making it all far, far worse.

But they are forgetting something here. To continue with the domino analogy, they are forgetting that the tiles have been rearranged in the past few years. They are forgetting that starting in 2009 a new recipe was followed and a new procedure was put in place. The plans and protections enacted by Bush were drastically altered or even removed. Rather than acting as a proactive force in the world which could be relied upon, US policy became far less engaged with the world and far more likely to withdraw in the face of hostility.

The foreign policy of the Obama administration has hardly been akin to what Libertarians would want in the world today. They're not even what his fellow Leftists would have wanted. And they certainly aren't what the conservatives among us longed for. Reversing TR's adage, this administration seems prone to talk loudly and carry a small stick, make big speeches but signal withdrawal from the world. However, what is pertinent to this question, the question blaming Bush for the debacle in Iraq, is that the strategy employed in the last five years has been nothing like what Bush himself would have wanted.

Does Bush bear some of the blame for the mess of the last decade? Certainly. What is more is that he admits as much. Specifically he admitted as much in action in 2006 when he reversed his emphasis on a light footprint and a reactive force in the face of intense terrorist attacks in Iraq. Sacking much of his command staff, he worked to take the fight to the enemy. As a result violence in the nation slackened dramatically. A real hope of peace was on the horizon, only to have these hard-won dreams dissipate with hope and change. Bush took the blame for his actions and then worked to reverse his errors. The champions of withdrawal pass the buck for their choices and double down on non-intervention.