Mennonites and Christ's Militia

Does the above message truly reach others for Christ?

    Facebook™ is both and neither good or evil, but it is loud.  Someday, Sociologists will be able to quantitatively sift through this mound of networked words and images to understand, describe and, um, er, yes, well… judge current generations.

    Now let me be straight up – I am a bona fide pacifist non-resister in the tradition of the Brüderthaler, and at the same time, a proud descendent of about 1000 years of military heroes – in fact, my last name was conferred on the family for heroic service on the battlefield some 1100 years ago in the forests and estuaries of the Batavian lowlands.  I have dated military and spend a lot of time worrying about and supporting our boys and girls (my friends, cousins and former girlfriends) in the forces around the world.  But… I am still a non-resistor, a Mennonite and an American.
    So, I understood when my cousin posted the above graphic on her Facebook page, but do indeed find myself, well, yes -- offended.  This isn't the first time -- she has a history of posting similar graphics (see below) and so I am used to the fact that we see things very differently, but...is there a double standard here?  And does this truly reflect a Christian witness?

War Horses and Amish

en Kjrijch Peat
(guest posting)

(c) Dreamworks, SKG, 2011.

    “War Horse” the Steven Spielberg film adapted from a young adult novel by Michael Morpurgo confounds the reviewer:  it has sentiment without being sentimental; it shows an animal being heroic without stooping to supernatural or magic-realistic means, and it heeds the advice of every teacher of writing (whether of novels or movie scripts) to “show your theme; don’t tell it.” 

    Further, the movie (following the book in this instance – which my sister, a junior high librarian in Hutchinson, Kansas, says it does fairly well) uses the technique of novelist John Dos Passos to tell an overarching story in bits and pieces instead of a single narrative.

    Using the horse, Joey, as a framing device, the story manages to show the civilians on both sides of WWI; both armies – officers and ordinary soldiers, the trench warfare on both sides; the devastation in the countryside; 19^th Century military tactics (cavalry charges) vs 20^th Century tactics (machine guns, poison gas, tanks).  Joey the horse is not made to do anything impossible for a horse but is shown, analogous to people, to be able to rise to extraordinary heroism and friendship in time of deep stress.

Basketball Pacifism

    Sports tend to play a significant role in the lives and identities of most Western or prairie teens, including Mennonite youth.  While there are many lessons to be learned on the sporting fields and ice rinks of North America, few would normally expect a proper respect for and understanding of Pacifism to be one of them.

    When the school board of our small Christian Bible academy, located an hour from the next nearest school, considered the cost and commitment of fielding a boys basketball team, many were apparently dubious.  The young men enthusiastically defended the concept by promoting it as a means of reaching out to the surrounding communities and thereby being a witness to them.  On the surface of things, not a bad idea. 

Bluffton College and WWI COs

    Major Walter Guest Kellogg’s World War I memoir,  The Conscientious Objector (1919) (Boni and Liveright, New York, New York, P. 141), is greatly informative, if not highly flattering, reading for those Anabaptists continuing to hold to a Pacifist idealism.  Very intelligently, Kellogg examines the dilemma of the wartime conscientious objector and the necessary conflict with the state needing to field armies of soldiers, “Numerically, the problem indeed is of small importance; as a matter of principle it is of great importance.  The problem is to be fair to the minority without thereby being unfair to the majority.  A sovereign government must not oppress the honest objector nor, assuredly, should it grant him such special privileges that it thereby discriminates against its patriotic soldiery,” (Kellogg, p. 6).