Foreign policy theorists have a term for when two countries unwillingly drift toward war. It’s called a security dilemma, and as Harvard international relations scholar Stephen M. Walt has explained at Foreign Policy magazine, it’s a scenario where “the actions that one state takes to make itself more secure—building armaments, putting military forces on alert, forming new alliances—tend to make other states less secure and lead them to respond in kind.”
“The result is a tightening spiral of hostility,” Walt wrote, “that leaves neither side better off than before.”
It’s easy to understand how this plays out internationally, with armies and bases and bombs. If Washington is concerned about a rising China, for example, it might expand US naval presence in 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 other, 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 apply this concept 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 must be unwound.
This is not a prediction of a second civil war in the style of the first, with large-scale armies and battles in the streets. I’ve long been skeptical of such forecasts, and I remain skeptical now. But an American version of Ireland’s Troubles, in which we live in fear of sporadic political violence, is increasingly plausible. All it would require is for a very small portion of the public, numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands at most, to see their rivals’ fear as fight and then match deeds to words.
Political violence is off the table for Christians, full stop. If we are to be “holy and pleasing to God,” living in “true and proper worship,” we will 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 right in the eyes of everyone,” and live at peace with all, so far as it depends on us (Rom. 12:1, 17–21).
Our citizenship is in heaven, and we do not “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 allow people of ill will to take advantage of us, to love and pray for our enemies, that we “may be children of [our] Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:38–45). If we love him, Jesus said, we will 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 let us not exaggerate the decline. It is still the case that a majority of Americans declare themselves followers of Jesus—people who have, whether they know it or not, committed themselves to serving a God of peace and acting as his emissaries.
For a country in which two of every three people claim the name of Christ to devolve into routinely hosting political violence would be a disgraceful and pathetic thing. Violence looms large in our national history, and that too is to our shame. But it does not have to figure prominently in our future.
There are Christians in the Republican Party, and there are Christians in 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 may be a regrettable fact; as a member of no political party who has never and will never vote for either man, I am inclined to say it is. But it is also a fact God can use for good, perhaps even for “the saving of many lives” by having voices for peace on both sides 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 first to disarm. Neither is willing to take a step back down the spiral, to close a military base or call a warship back to port or dismantle a nuclear weapon. They are each unwilling precisely because they are afraid and do not trust the other’s attempts to allay their fears. The other side is wholly foreign, frightening, a threat.
But American Christians with different domestic politics than ours—however wrongheaded and mistaken and perhaps even deceived or stupid we believe them to be—are not a threat to us. They are not frightening. They are not our enemies. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21). If we are the body of Christ, we remain of one piece even if the hand checks the wrong box on the ballot.
In our domestic security dilemma, then, Christians of all political persuasions have a duty to God and neighbor to be the first to “disarm.” That means, first, absolutely forswearing violence ourselves. It means obeying Jesus.
This obedience is not 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 in which we will undoubtedly fail but must forever resume. It is a project in which the God of peace will 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 everything. Every professed Christian in this country could 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 simple virtue of living here, for standing in the breach against chaos, for doing constant maintenance to keep 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 are completely disengaged from politics and public life; think of how powerful a witness for forgiveness were the famously apolitical Amish when violence came 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 every evil practice” (James 3:13–16). As true as it is that the political stakes are very high, that we are dealing with incommensurate aims for this country’s governance, this must not—cannot—be our wisdom. For “the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (v. 17).
Nowhere does Scripture guarantee that our peacemaking will bring peace to us, that it will be surprisingly successful, an unanticipated strategic asset. The final verse of James 3 promises peacemakers a harvest of righteousness, not triumph. Nowhere does Jesus say obeying him will be a backdoor to victory. Victory is his business. Ours is peace.
Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of books and ideas at Christianity Today.
