Reading Scripture and Strengthening Resolve with Wendell Berry

Reading Audaciously

Betsy Simpson
Published 21 December 2024

In the October 2024 issue of Christian Century I was struck by Wendell Berry’s article entitled “Against Killing Children,” and have read and reread it since then. He is a well known poet and author of many books, but this piece hit me harder than them all, and continues to provoke my heart and mind as I consider the state of our world and nation. To quote:

“Today in our not very free country, children are first in line to be unfree. They are enclosed in specialized child worlds constructed for them by frightened and mostly absent adults. And yet they are in danger, now not so much from nature and accident as from industrial instruments made expressly for death-dealing, wielded against them by an irate or maddened gunslinger. They are not safe in their schools, and if not there then obviously not in any public place.”

The proliferation of guns and the inadequacy of gun laws and their enforcement highlight how twisted our common understanding of human value and community has become. Given our national constant preparedness for war we have developed and amassed an absurd arsenal of high tech weapons, including an obscene number of nuclear bombs. And we have become the weapons dealer and provider to the entire world. It is foundational to our economy. This results in untold numbers of children being killed around the world directly and indirectly due to ongoing warfare.

Being a Christian by habit, Berry reflects on how, despite the assumption of our nation being a Christian nation with a variety of other faiths and belief systems, there is nevertheless often a “scandalous difference between the teaching and example of Christ and the behavior of Christians in most of the Years of our Lord.”

Berry goes on to cite George F. Kennan in his book, The Nuclear Delusion: “One of the rules of warfare was the prescription that weapons should be employed in a manner calculated to bring an absolute minimum of hardship to noncombatants and to the entire infrastructure of civilian life.”

Yet, Keenan goes on to say, “Victory, as the consequence of recent wars have taught us, is ephemeral, but the killing of even one innocent child is an irremediable fact, the reality of which can never be eradicated.”

Genesis 1:27 declares that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” And the next verse he grants us ‘dominion’ over creation, but dominion does not imply permission or a right to destroy things. In Berry’s understanding, and my own, “God made us in his image — as his likeness, not his equals.” “To be like God but not God is to be free to choose and to choose wrong.”

With the increasingly rapid advancements in science and technology we have moved away from any sense of the mystery inherent in the source and meaning of life. In their 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow posit that “it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.” If that were indeed true, then our choices would involve no moral consequence, we would simply be entrapped in the flow of life with no power, no agency to change things.

Is this where we are? Trapped in a war economy, fearful of who and what may attack us? What of our faith? What of the story of how life and humanity began, I.e. the Bible? Berry challenges us: “How can we remember ‘But I say to you, Love your enemies’ and not see that we are involved in a world-destroying, life-destroying betrayal? How can we hear ‘Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ and, looking at our own little children, merely regret that they may be killed by an assault rifle in the hands of a fellow citizen, or be merely sorry that thousands of little children like our own have been and are being killed by weapons made and paid for by us? Can we not speak at least an audible no to the meaningless suffering and death of these most precious and helpless ones given in trust into our care?”

Surely each of us, Christian or not, can answer, indeed must answer, or forfeit our humanity in our silence.

Read the full article here: “Against Killing Children” by Wendell Berry