No Peace Churches


There are no peace churches in the United States. Because when you have
got more than you need, and other people do not have enough to live
on, you only keep the excess by violence. You do not keep it by appeals
to faith or to love or to reason. And the churches are up to their ears in
wealth. . . . And it makes no difference what church it is. I once gave a talk
about twenty years ago at the Quaker Meeting House in Cambridge. . . .On
one side of the Quaker meeting house in Cambridge there is Harvard
University with property that is worth tens upon tens if not hundreds of
millions of dollars. There is this one little acre that the Quakers have. The
property is worth millions. So I raised the issue of the excessive wealth
that this property represented as well as the issue of what would you
do if someone came in here and just started tearing down this place. In
both instances they would resort to violence. That is no different from
the Catholic Church or anything else. Cardinals call the police on people.
But the point is none of that is consistent with loving as Christ loved.
Does that mean if you have property and you can’t love as Christ? No. It
probably means you cannot have luxury property because once people
have more than they need and other people do not have enough, you
have got to have the gun to keep them off your back. And that is where all
the churches are for the most part in Christianity in the Western world.