By David Gushee
For those who projected onto Barack Obama the hope that he would be a transformative figure, a peacemaker/great soul like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden ought to put such hopes to rest.
Barack Obama is pursuing a different narrative. First he wanted to be the president of the United States and now he wants to succeed as president of the United States. Presidents of the United States pursue the national interest of the United States and do so in the manner that most citizens of the United States find congenial. That is precisely what President Obama did in this action.
This is probably not the narrative arc that those who voted a Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama over in Norway really had in mind. But it is the narrative arc that Barack Obama is pursuing. He is good enough at it that he was elected once, and now he will almost certainly be elected again. That itself is a richly historic accomplishment; but it is a very different kind of accomplishment than those who put their “Obama ’08” bumper stickers next to their “Coexist” bumper stickers had in mind.
— Speaking of narrative, this action had “True Grit” all over it. In that memorable movie from 2010, an aggrieved young girl hires the dubiously lawful gunslinger Rooster Cogburn to help her find and kill the man who killed her father. She and Cogburn (and Matt Damon) track him across the barren landscape, and in the end she herself is the one who puts a bullet in him.
This Old West style narrative of tracking down the killer and shooting him rather than arresting him appears to be what was being pursued by the president. The fact that bin Laden was apparently unarmed at the moment he was shot is an important fact. It looks like there was not that much interest in bringing him home alive. Americans remain far more attracted to a “clean kill” than they do to the long, drawn-out legal proceedings of our criminal justice system. I do not say this as praise. But it is us, in our marrow.
— Was this vengeance, justice or self-defense? Vengeance says we pay you back for what you did to us. That was what the jubilant students and “Rot in Hell” newspaper headlines were feeling and celebrating. Self-defense says that we kill you to prevent you from killing any more of our people. That was the justification offered, for example, by Attorney General Eric Holder.
Justice — well, it depends on how you define justice. If justice is defined as evening the scales by any means necessary, then it is little different from vengeance. If justice is defined as pursuing legal means to apprehend a person so that they might be tried in a fair criminal justice system, then that is not what we did. And if justice is defined biblically along the lines of actions that seek to restore right relations in community, it would be quite a stretch to say that was what happened on May 1 in Abbottabad.
— The endless question of whether Christians can ever support violence has surfaced again. Every camp has evidence for their view. Those we might call God and country patriots see this as precisely the kind of case in which our nation can unequivocally justify killing. Christian pacifists see this as exactly the kind of case that tests such commitments and therefore as a great opportunity for countercultural reaffirmation of Christ’s nonviolent way. Christian just-war advocates see this as a prime example of a case in which violence may be required in self-defense, but also that there is never moral purity to killing and it can never be celebrated. And Christian just peacemakers see this as an opportunity to look at the deeper causes of the bin Laden phenomenon as well as opportunities for peacemaking that were missed in the way we dealt with him when we finally found him. I go with options three and four.