Scary Stories: Is there a way to love others in the midst of violence?

This post continues where my previous one left off. To review: I've studied martial arts in reaction to being scared of people. The situation I am writing with in mind is sexual assaults on women. However, how ethical is studying ways to hurt people (to put it bluntly)? What about self-defense? The first place to for this ethical dilemma was Scripture. It has examples of both violence and restraint. Out of all this, however, there is a demand to love others. How on earth can I do that when we are talking about sexual assault? In this entry, I will look at the second source that informs my actions - stories and statistics.

 For me, the most compelling arguments for self-defense is the stories and statistics of rape and attempted rape (this can also be extended to other violent situations!).  I live with fear and wariness every day.  Every time I go for a walk I am constantly aware of my situation, who is near me, and whether I have a good grip on my pepper spray. I am careful when I load my groceries in the car. I don't answer my door. The fear and cautiousness that many women are forced to handle daily is a significant portion of their lived experience.  I think a lot of people don’t realize this aspect of violence – the dread and exhaustion of always being cautious is something I carry heavily on my shoulders in a way that many people don’t quite understand. (I totally know that men are also victims of sexual abuse, but I am just trying to share my experience as a woman.)

  I have only been caught in an extremely compromising situation once and it scared me to death.  I left my friend’s apartment around midnight and started to walk to my own apartment by myself – just a few hundred feet away.  A man appeared out of the dark parking lot, and started coming directly towards me, carrying a motorcycle helmet (a potential weapon), making threats about what he was going to do with me since he had me all to himself. (It was really vulgar, so I will not repeat it. However, those words often echo in my mind when a stranger comes too closely into my personal space).  In a split second, I realized what a stupid situation I was in. I was all by myself, I didn't have keys, a phone, my pepper spray, or anything to use as a weapon except myself. So, I screamed. And then started to threatened him in turn.  I told him what I was going to do to him if he did not walk away.  The most shocked expression appeared on his face and he turned and ran. He didn't know what to do with a woman ready to fight back. However, I never lifted a finger.  This was a bold move and I have no idea how it happened. I didn't even think, I just started talking. Call it Providence, God, or whatever you want, but the night before this occurrence, my Aikido instructor gave me a book that suggested one way of getting out of dangerous places is by taking control of the situation and startling the attacker before it turned physical.  I read a chapter that very morning and I did exactly what the author suggested – and it worked! (Don't take this as what everyone should do in every situation. It was one way that happened to work to get out of a dangerous situation.)

 It is not only the stories of terror that propel women like myself to take self-defense measures – it is also statistics that show it is a common occurrence. Every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted.  Over 90 percent of the victims are female and 1 out of every 6 American women will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (that is just ridiculous!).  Females 12 to 34 are at the highest risk, with 80 percent of rapes happening to women under age 30.   These statistics scare me to death.  In reference to the self-defense question (What do I prepare myself for?), the vast majority (87%) of assaults are done through physical force alone (that is, with no weapon at all).  Putting all these numbers and percentages together, we can tell that it is most likely that a young woman will be the target and the assault will be made by using physical force alone as a weapon. And she will most likely not report the incident to authorities or tell anyone (but more on that later).

 The initial reaction of most people is to do anything necessary to stop the assault.  For many women, the reason they learn self-defense is  fear of assault and the desire to learn how to respond effectively in a compromising situation (this is me). But what does an assault look like? How are women assaulted by strangers? Years ago, reporter Ann Landers at the LA Times received this letter from an anonymous rapist, who wanted to warn women about his tactics:

 "I'm a rapist.  I do it because I like it.  It's like hunting, only easier.  Mostly because [women] travel by themselves, work by themselves and are so dumb about taking care of themselves… I pick my women because of their situations, which I've studied before I move.  Looks don't mean a lot to me, but she's always alone in a place where nobody else will come, or I get her to go to one.  You'd be amazed how easy that is.  About self-defense for women: Don't make me laugh.  I don't go after a woman who looks like she'd be able to whip me in a fight.  The best protection from me your working women have is company or a locked door you're smart enough not to open when I ask.  More than that, the best protection from me is for you to remember that there are lots of guys like me out there who are looking for you." 

Yep, this is my definition of terrifying and what it is that I am afraid of.

 Now I have to take what I wrote about in my previous post about the biblical ethics of violence and weigh it with this second kind of information that informs my decision on what to do. If I only consider my fear, then I am simply reacting to a situation. I would like to go a step further and create an ethical framework that includes more than just data and terrifying stories. I have wrestled with experience, the frightening statistics, and biblical texts for a long time.  For me, a response emerges where I must balance experience with the biblical ethic of caring for my neighbor and enemy. I spoke in my previous post about the somewhat nebulous biblical passages about violence and love. One thing stands out to me – there is some type of command that demands that I consider others. What this looks like is really difficult to discern. Is some violence acceptable and other kinds not? Do I need to think about how lethal my response is? If I also care for self (which is equally important), I will not allow the violation to occur without fighting it, but where do I draw the line? I feel like my ethical framework must balance care for self and care for others. It is an extremely difficult position to hold these two values in tension with one another. For my next post, I will start to flush this idea out further.

Possessions as the Source of Violence: But What About MY Body?

A few eons ago, I started a blog series on the compatibility of self-defense/violence and Christianity.  This issue is incredibly important to me and the questions continues to haunt me.  As I described in the blog post prior to this one, I have taken martial arts for the purpose of self-defense for the last several years.  Why? People scare me.  I have friends who have been attacked and assaulted.  I have been approached by a stranger but was successfully able to deescalate the situation.  Statistics show that way too many women will get sexual assaulted in their lifetime, the vast majority before they hit 30 (and usually by someone known to them, but also sometimes by strangers).   So, both reason and experience point to idea that it is not too crazy to be watching your back and have a ready answer with what you would do the day the approach/attack happens.  The moral source that carries the greatest weight on this issue for me is Scripture.  But it is way more complex than most Christians admit it to be.  Not only is there a mixture of both violence as well as commands to love one another, but Scripture also does not address my moral question directly.  This creates a complex issue to wade through.

 Loving Your Enemy            

The majority (all) of Christians pick and chooses which biblical passages are their norm and leave out anything that may challenge their interpretation.  Nearly everything I have read on this topic falls into to extremes. For example, I was reading a blog recently entitled, “Love Your Enemies, Unless…” where the guy argues that there are no exceptions to Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies (Luke 6:32-36).  He argues that many Christians mistakenly view this command as an ideal that does not have relevance in the real world.  The blogger particularly emphasizes that when personal safety or the well-being of a loved one is at risk, Christians’ quickly dismiss concern for one’s enemy (which is a fair critique).  The guy contends that Jesus and the early church praised self-sacrifice, love of neighbor, and even died before lifting a finger to save themselves.  There are no references in the Bible to putting one’s own safety above the well-being of another person.  Many pacifists similarly quote examples from the Sermon on the Mount, which contains many of the passages that are said to argue for following the higher calling of loving others.  Hauerwas (probably one of the best known Christian pacifists out there with a lot of great questions on how to live life with a higher calling), for example, cites Matthew 5:43-48, as well as other pericopes from the Sermon on the Mount, to justify his argument for the ethical significance of Jesus and the foundation for his book, The Peaceable Kingdom. He writes, “For our possessions are the source of our violence.  Fearing that others desire what we have…we seek self-deceptive justifications that mire us in patterns of injustice which can be sustained only through coercion.  And of course we believe our most precious possession to be the self we have created, that we have chosen…What Jesus offers is a journey, an adventure.  Once undertaken, we discover that what we once held valuable, even the self, we no longer count as anything.”  Hauerwas argues that once we become disciples, we cannot count our personal safety as more valuable than another person’s well-being; the question of self-defense is no longer an issue when the self is viewed in this light. (But…it’s still an issue for me and I’m guessing most other people. So, why I think his statement is incredibly enlightening, I have some more ideas to wade through before I my “that’s it!” moment turns up. I would however, like us to keep it in mind as we continue, since there is a lot of truth to it.)

 The Grey Area: More Complications

            Both the blogger I mentioned and Hauerwas argue that Jesus’ command to love one’s enemy is a Scriptural ideal that is meant to be applied literally and in all circumstances.  When a person uses violence against another, both men would see this action as morally wrong.  However, it is extremely doubtful that Jesus meant all of his statements to be taken literally by his followers.  He often uses hyperbole to make a point, such as cutting off body parts in order to keep from sinning (Matt 5:27-30).  Few theologians argue for Christians to follow this command, despite the fact that it is in the same chapter as Christ’s command to love one’s enemies.  Additionally, does loving one’s enemy always necessitate a non-violent response?  Could one show love to a neighbor by stopping them from assaulting a woman?  Furthermore, passages from the Sermon on the Mount fail to deal with violence supported by Yahweh in the Old Testament and even by Jesus elsewhere in the Gospels.[1]  If Scripture includes a mixed assessment of violence, why should the Sermon on the Mount be more authoritative than other passages?[2]  Since self-defense against assault does not have an exact analogy in Scripture, the issue becomes a complex puzzle of different viewpoints from Scripture in addition to an attempt to apply passages to situations that were not necessarily written to address it.  Neither violence nor pacifism is upheld throughout all of Scripture.

 And that is where I am going to stop for today. (I know, cliffhanger!). The hope of the series of posts I am going to be putting up this week is that people will take a second to see where they fall on the issue of violence (I’ve heard one or two people talking recently about guns and gun control?) but then also on the issue of self-defense. Just to clarify, this has absolutely nothing to do with constitutional rights and national laws. I am concerned not about what the law allows me to do, but what can I ethically condone in my own life with an issue that terrifies me?
 Join me next time for how experience and stats are a second moral source to draw from! (This part is one everyone can relate to, I’m sure of it!)
 

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[1] OT references include Nehemiah 1:14. References for Jesus’ support on violence, see Matt 26:51-53 and Luke 22:36.  A great book to check out is by Brendan F. Furnish, and Dwight Hervey Small, The Mounting Threat of Home Intruders: Weighing the Moral Option of Armed Self-Defense (Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1993), 107-125. Also, David Matson argues that modern translations of Luke 22:51 are portrayed as more pacifist than the Greek allows.  Any edition prior to WWII has a very different translation of the passage. One cannot help but wonder if this tragic war left its mark on the pages of our Bibles. David Matson, “Pacifist Jesus? The (Mis)Translation of Luke 22:51,” a soon to be published paper presented at the Stone-Campbell Journal Conference, Nashville, Tenn.: March 2013.[2]  Hauerwas rejects the depiction of war and violence in the OT as legitimately Christian.