Reviewer Andy Alexis-Baker

Books

Ivan Kauffman, ed. Just Policing: Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquium, 2002. Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2004.
Duane K. Friesen and Gerald Schlabach, eds.  At Peace and Unafraid: Public Order, Security, and the Wisdom of the Cross. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2005.

Reviewer

Andy Alexis-Baker, AMBS, Elkhart, IN

The premise of Just Policing is simple enough: Mennonites and Catholics accept the police as an institution that at times must use violence, even killing, to maintain some semblance of order. The police, Gerald Schlabach claims, are accountable and restrained in using violence.  This notion of “policing” is what the just war tradition was intended to be about in the first place. So Schlabach believes that rethinking “war” in terms of “policing” will help reinvigorate a more consistent and applicable ethic for all Christians, and bridge the divide between Mennonites and Catholics on the question of war.

The strength of Schlabach’s “thought experiment” is that it aims to hold the just war tradition accountable by seeking to help those convinced by that tradition to be more credible and less violent. Joseph Capizzi and J. Denny Weaver respond to Schlabach’s essay, and Schlabach replies to them.  It is a good example of Mennonite-Catholic dialogue.

Many questions remain about “just policing.”  The concept remains most at home within the just war tradition, and its usefulness in our modern context is limited. The just war tradition was most comfortable in Christendom, where people believed they had divine obligations and duties toward one another.  Today on the international scene there is no recognition of an overarching entity to which any ruler is accountable.  International law has dull teeth, and the U.N. is unable to prevent conflict. Even if the U.N. could be such a police force, who would police the U.N.?  Our world is very different from that of Christendom, and I doubt that “policing” will do much to invigorate just war thinking. 

Similarly, the term “just policing” seems like a semantic game.  Is killing more acceptable if we call it “policing” rather than “war”?  Schlabach does not give much scope to the place of suffering and the cross; police are not paid to love enemies, nor do suffering and the cross seem relevant to people with guns.

At Peace and Unafraid represents a fundamental shift in Mennonite social ethics. This work questions the “two kingdom” theology and provides a more systematic underpinning for just policing.  It focuses both on policing and on how to develop public order policy in ways that do not bless the status quo.  Duane Friesen’s essay, for example, explains that policing is only one way to work nonviolently for an ordered society.

Yet some essays point to problems with the attempt to join in government and policing.  Alfred Neufeld examines how Mennonites in Paraguay have been invited into the national government, and ends with a sobering assessment: “Two years in, the present administration, with a considerable Mennonite presence, is under attack from left and right, from rich and poor” (229).  Paulus Widjaja assesses Indonesian Christians’ desire to enter politics as a self-interested move to set themselves against their Muslim neighbors.  Most strikingly, John Rempel examines previous Mennonite attempts to become more engaged in the political and economic fabric of society, ending with a deep ambivalence about the ability of rich Mennonites to live out the Gospel.

Even so, major questions must still be addressed.  Jeff Gingrich contends that historically the American police arose as a necessary force to combat a rise in violent crime (393).  The evidence, I believe, points to another story.  When modern police forces arose in America, they did not do so from the need to combat crime.  Instead they arose out of the slave patrols of the south and, in the north, out of both wealthy urban elites wanting more control over poor immigrant populations and city party machines using the police to maintain their power.  The police historically have not been a tool for reconciliation; they have, however, served certain interests and been a tool for class conflict.

This brings up serious issues not touched upon in either volume. Nonviolence in the hands of the police is simply a tool for power. Absent a commitment to nonviolence as a life and theology, nonviolence becomes a terrifying technique that is manipulable and malleable by whatever interests might employ it.  Urban police forces have indeed developed less-than-lethal weapons, but this makes officers more violent, not less violent. Police use non-lethal weapons to repress the poor and political radicals.

Even more basic is the ecclesiological problem the police represent.  Every police person must swear allegiance to the state.  In their loyalty oath they form a secretive cult, and the primary value they revolve around is “order,” a subjective, fragile concept.  They end up seeing themselves over against the rest of society, which is always threatening to fracture the order they have sworn to uphold.  The police also undermine the Christian virtue of truth-telling.  Officers are officially taught to lie, e.g., by creating false identities in undercover work, making false promises in negotiations, and inflating initial charges. This catechetical training runs against the grain of Christian catechesis, which is to make the believer a reflexive truth-teller.

Neither book focuses very well on the locus of God’s redemptive action in history in the church.  Generally the two books present an incomplete view of the police, do not ask crucial questions, and move from the local (police) to the universal (international conflict) too easily without first critiquing the local.  Still, they do have value in raising issues that Mennonites have left out of the picture altogether.  Perhaps it would have been even more valuable if these books set a goal of helping congregations lessen their dependence upon the police.