All the statistics point to an increase in acts of aggression and violent crime in our society. But why is this happening? Secular thinkers used to opine that religion exacerbated violence; the theory being that commitment to absolute truth would cause people to insist that their viewpoint must be adhered to and that violence would be the tool most readily used by close-minded bigots to force others to change. But the twentieth-century gave the lie to this notion - instead of the religious zealots being the violent ones, it turns out that the atheists and pagans (from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Pol Pot to Mao) have been most guilty of acts of violence and that frequently against people of religion.

In other words, secularism seems to be less of a bulwark against violence than it is a foundation for it. But why would this be? Chuck and Aaron discuss how belief in absolute truth creates the possibility of rational discourse as a tool to persuade others, but a lack of belief in God lends itself to an abandonment of the hope of using logic as a means of personal contact. This makes education hopeless, and the only tool left for personal persuasion is power. The end result, unfortunately, has all too frequently been violence.

For Christians, the hope of peace can only be found in the God who personally took on the violence of this world but didn’t respond in kind, who absorbed the physical terrorism of the Roman Empire, absorbed it, and loved in return. If Christians can model for our culture what it means to live in the God who eschewed violence for self-sacrificial love, and if Christians can recommit to the truth which comes from the God who is the Truth Incarnate and persuades others with relational love instead of force, then the Christian church can become a paradigm for how the world can run on peace and not violence.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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