‘We aren’t Jesus. And living just like Jesus doesn’t get done what Jesus wants done’

John Stackhouse writes:

But show me where [Christian anarchism] has worked and what’s been the result. The Berrigans? Martin Luther King Jr? Mahatma Gandhi?

Bore into the history of those times even a little and you’ll see that a lot of political realism executed with dirty, even bloody, hands made the crucial difference. The antiwar movement didn’t win a thing: the Viet Cong did.

MLK is indubitably inspiring, but without Stokely Carmichael to his violent left and Lyndon Johnson to his ruthless right, he was getting nowhere.

And Gandhi could teach us all a thing or two about media events, hard-nosed negotiation and economic pressure.