Georgetown University ethicist John Keown
has failed to succumb to the rigor of my logic that the
American Revolution did meet Christian Just War criteria! Once
more, he leaves the same suspicion as when our enjoyable debate
began. Does he believe any war is ever just? Or does he join many
others in recent times who have largely reinvented Just War
standards into a rhetorical tool against virtually all force? This
subversion of traditional Just War teaching has become even more
pronounced in many circles since 9-11, with religious critics of
the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts often solemnly citing Just War,
without fully admitting that they do not find any war just.
Keown hints at the stratospheric standard he demands for
Just War when he argues the American Revolution did not abolish
slavery. Must a war redress all injustices to be
legitimate? If so, no war is just. Traditional Just War teaching,
beginning with St. Augustine, never insisted on such perfectionism,
knowing it would have invalidated this teaching. Both sides in the
American Revolution maintained slavery. Most of the new United
States abolished slavery before the British Empire did. And the
Revolution’s aspirations of human equality and rights for all
certainly animated abolitionism in America and Britain. Keown’s
cynicism is revealed in a quote he cites from one historian, who
harrumphed that the Revolution allowed wealthy “white men” to
advance while leaving virtually all others behind, amid much
persisting “discriminatory” legislation. “Discriminatory” compared
to what? Among discriminations that the American Revolution almost
immediately removed from the old regime were religious tests for
public office, military rank, academic tenure, and
suffrage.
No, the American Revolution, like every war, and every
human endeavor, did not create utopia. Christians typically do not
anticipate the extinction of all injustice until God reigns on
earth. But in the years immediately following the war, most
northern states abolished slavery, and all states vastly expanded
the franchise. The dramatic economic growth after the Revolution,
fueled by low taxes and limited government, benefited virtually all
classes, with the population quickly doubling, tripling, and
quadrupling, thanks to high birth rates and high immigration.
Women’s rights were a natural extension of the Revolution’s
promises. Alexis de Tocqueville observed how the early Republic
highly regarded women, who enjoyed a degree of independence unusual
in Europe.
Keown tries to limit the American Revolution’s origin to a
trifling tax dispute, with all the British repressions simply the
reasoned reaction to misbehaving colonists. Taxation without
consent of elected representatives, the abrogation of colonial
charters, the eventual dismissal of legislatures, the usurpation of
colonial courts, the quartering of hostile troops, the seizure of
colonial arsenals, and the suppression of trade were all assaults
on liberty that the colonists, no less than for their English
cousins in their own earlier struggles, found
intolerable.
Keown blames the victims for starting the spiral by not
passively accepting injustice from their ruling sovereign. Will
Keown more daringly, and with more political incorrectness, next
condemn Gandhi’s revolt, which, though, pacifist, ultimately killed
and destroyed far more than did the American Revolution?
Incongruently, Keown dismissed my reference
to Britain’s own parliamentary led revolts against unbridled
royalism, saying the colonists were rebelling against both
Parliament and King. But the colonists had their own legislatures,
already long recognized in British law, not to mention a
trans-colonial Continental Congress. The American Revolution easily
fit the Christian Reformed tradition’s understanding that revolt
against tyranny is legitimate if led by responsible lower
magistrates. This understanding informed the British parliamentary
rebellion in the 1640s, and no less the American colonists in the
1770s.
Great British statesmen like Edmund Burke and the Earl of
Chatham recognized this principle and openly opposed the British
suppression of the colonists. Keown dismisses their points, rooted
in the British constitution. Instead, in his original article, he
relied heavily on John Wesley, an evangelist, and Samuel Johnson, a
literary gadfly, both of whom were themselves initially sympathetic
to the colonists. Why do Wesley and Johnson trump Burke and
Chatham? And when exactly would the colonists have been justified
to rebel? What more should they have endured? Interestingly, Keown
never explains. He likewise ignored my suggestion that he justify
the British military suppression of the colonists, according to
Just War criteria. He complains that it’s not clear that I abide by
the “standard just war tradition as set out in [his] paper.” But it
remains unclear that his interpretation is in sync with historic
Just War teaching, or instead reflects the modern subversion of it.
He briefly observes that Just War’s seven criteria have been met
“on occasion.” When exactly? His insistence on the American
Revolution’s injustice would be more persuasive if he could point
to a similar conflict, or any conflict, that was just. Revealingly,
he has not.
One of the earliest masters of the Just War tradition,
Thomas Aquinas, argued that “disturbing” a “tyrannical government”
is “no sedition,” unless disturbing it creates greater harm than
the original tyranny. Even earlier, Augustine reputedly wrote,
“True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that
are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with
the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of
uplifting the good.” The parameters of traditional Just War are
considerably wider, and more humanly attainable, than what Keown
now suggests. His insistence on a pure “right intention,” which is
impossible among fallen humanity, effectively means that no war
qualifies as just, nullifying the whole purpose of Just War
teaching.
In their “Olive Branch
Petition” of July 1775, several months even after Lexington and
Concord, the Continental Congress appealed as “still faithful
colonists” to King George III for peace. The monarch peremptorily
responded with a declaration of
war against the “traitors.” America’s Founders and patriots
were not angels, as they themselves readily admitted. But their
defensive war, waged against a foolish monarch who had rejected
compromise and peace, was just, according to the rules of faith
then available. Those rules remain more persuasive than what Keown
now proposes.
