Response to "The Proper Response"

Here's a comment I posted in reply to this article by Rebecca Bynum at The New English Review, which asks, "How do we do as Jesus commanded and love our enemies while at the same time preventing our culture and civilization from being destroyed" by those enemies?

There is a rather important difference, it seems to me, between individual non-resistance to evil and collective non-resistance. When a family member is being attacked, do you refuse to fight her attacker on the grounds that she ought to be behaving like a good little Christian and submitting? No, this is her decision, not yours; to turn it into your decision is a moral monstrosity (if it isn't merely cowardice masquerading as high-mindedness). The situation is quite different from when you are personally being attacked, in which case the decision whether to resist is yours. [Similarly,] as members of a political community we have no right to require our fellow-members to submit to aggression. More generally, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the decisions of the community should be based on justice, not charity. Charity is for individuals.

Christianity does not make this very explicit, probably because nobody until recently ever thought that political communities would be crazy enough to attempt to run their affairs on the basis of nonresistance to evil. My impression is that traditionally, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity arrived at ways of keeping nonresistance out of the public sphere; and that the recent tendency to apply it to political questions represents a dangerous innovation. Perhaps it also represents a return to pure, primitive Christianity. But then it has never been demonstrated that such Christianity is a viable basis for a civilization. For one thing, it was based on the idea that the world was about to end.