General Assembly 2006

Peacemakers Anne Barstow and Tom Driver receive the Andrew Murray award

[7-3-06]

One feature of this year’s Witherspoon Awards Luncheon was a double-header. Anne Barstow and Tom Driver, a couple both of whom have long been active in working for peace in the U.S. as well as in Colombia, Haiti, and Central America, received the Andrew Murray Award in recognition of their courageous work, especially in acting as accompaniers to people whose lives have been under threat because of oppressive (and often U.S.-supported) regimes.

Their comments on accepting the award were appreciated by many at the luncheon. We post them there as complete transcripts, only slightly edited, from a recording of the event.

Jake Young, Witherspoon vice president (and a bit later elected as co-moderator) introduced Anne Barstow and Tom Driver, saying he got to know them last year during the Ghost Ranch seminar, where they discussed the U.S. empire and Colombia.

Young introduced Tom Driver acknowledging that, while the Murray Award is normally given to a Presbyterian, this year

we’re stretching things a little bit here, with Tom. He’s an ordained Methodist minister, but an affiliate member of Rutgers Presbyterian Church in New York City. And maybe more importantly, he is adopted into the Presbyterian Church by Anne Barstow and his relationship with her. Tom has been working for peace and justice for many years. Well, actually, since before I was born. It’s not often we get to give the Andrew Murray Award to people who are theater critics; some of you may remember Tom as the author of a theater critic’s column in the Christian Century.

Tom was drafted into the army during WW II; that experience made him a pacifist, but he examined his pacifist convictions critically when he studied under Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Both of our awardees have been arrested for civil disobedience. Tom was arrested once while protesting against apartheid at the South African Consulate. Tom’s activism took a great step forward in 1988, when he went to the war zone in Nicaragua, with Witness for Peace, to oppose the U.S.-backed contra war. After retiring from the classroom in 1992, Dr. Driver became the chairperson of the Haiti task force, with the Witness for Peace organization.

In 2001, both Tom and Anne went to Colombia for the first time; they’ve gone back many times, and they’ve produced two videos from their experiences there.

Now I get to say a little bit about Anne: Anne Barstow first began to recognize that religion is not only for our comfort, but it’s also a form of resistance, when she watched the civil rights movement in this country. It is good that we’re in Birmingham for this General Assembly, in offering this award today. But it wasn’t until 1986 when she took a trip to Nicaragua, that she first became angry enough to engage in civil disobedience. She went to Nicaragua for only two weeks, but that is when she learned to be an activist. She was not arrested, thank goodness, in Nicaragua, but was later in Las Vegas, for protesting the nuclear test site in 1987, and then once again when she protested the CIA in 1989.

In 1999 Anne found herself in Nicaragua once again because of Hurricane Mitch, and the devastation it caused – as always more among those with less resources, than those with more.

Her awareness of the Colombian situation was piqued in 2001, because it began to look like, not another Nicaragua, but another Guatemala.

Young invited Barstow and Driver to come forward, and read the citation for their award:

Driver then responded:

We have agreed that I would speak to you first so that Anne may have the last word.

I have always said that the most immediate rewards that one gets for being involved in the peace movement is that you get to meet the best people. So it’s wonderful to be here today among a whole roomful of the best people – and to have them recognize and value what you have been doing with your time. We thank you very, very much for the Andrew Murray Award, and for giving it to the two of us, who have endured so many years of marriage together. It’s a triumphant time in many many respects.

While unhappily, I have to speak to you in a time of war, and I have to champion that misunderstood and often maligned opposition to war, namely peace – which seems, like the peace of Christ, to pass all understanding. War is much easier to grasp.

As Jake has told you, I did go to war when I was 18 years old; he did not tell you that I was drafted into the war by my own father, who was the head of the draft board in our small town. And I did emerge two and a half years later with an intense antipathy toward all things military, so at that time I joined the World Federalists and I joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and was active in those until I got to Union Seminary and ran into Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Niebuhr could be scathing in his references to non-violence, and I as a green student of theology wilted under his remarks.

I tell you this because I want you to know that I have had to learn the hard way to stand up to the self-proclaimed realists, who sit in the pews of our churches and stand in our pulpits and teach in our seminaries, and make their peace with war.

Jake used the term "pacifist." I don’t object to that, but I don’t really like the term, because my stand is that of a person who has dedicated himself to opposition to war. The idea that we may achieve peace through war – that oxymoron – is lethal, and it is killing us. And of course I don’t mean only in times of combat; I mean also at the other times when we sell our souls, as America has done in my lifetime, to the idol of security through war and militarism.

It has been said, and very wisely, that peace is not the absence of war – it’s that connotation, which is usually attached to the word pacifism, that worries me about it – but war is the absence of peace. And so the task is that of making peace, as Jesus said, and not just of having peace, or waiting for peace, or something else. It is a task.

One more twin aphorism, I guess, that I would like to leave with you as I close: Most people, certainly most church people, say to themselves, "Peace if possible, but war if necessary." And thus they leave the way open for that resort to war which betrays us.

And that’s exactly what has happened to us in recent history: we have been led by the noses into a war that nobody needs, and on which there is widespread agreement now that it was a mistake. But we let it happen because we have observed the idea that war may be necessary. Never again.

As long as we do not close that loophole, our dedication to peace is going to be half-hearted.

The root of war is fear. The root of peace is courage.

My friends, thank you very much for this award. And may you have courage.

Anne Barstow then gave her comments:

Years ago I joined the Witherspoon Society because of the clarity with which you spoke out against racism. Now I am learning from Witherspoon what it means to be steadfast in the long struggle for gay and lesbian rights. I want you to know how much I am in awe of your determination to see justice done, and I thank you, for that’s your continual gift to the church, about what our church should be.

My own calling is to work against war. I accept the challenge that if we agree that war is not the answer, we must have an alternative. If we say that peace has got to be an active thing, we have then got to work and learn about direct action for peace, and we have got to learn the active meaning of non-violence for our time.

What keeps me awake nights – and when you think about war there are a lot of things you could focus on in the small hours of the night – is the way in which war has changed so that now the main victims, and the intended victims in fact, are civilians. It’s no longer a case of armies fighting it out. Did you know that today there are 8 civilians killed for every 1 soldier? All these deaths are tragedies, but what has happened in this equation? Look at the reports from Iraq today and ask, who are the main victims?

Above all I am concerned, however, that our fellow citizens are largely in denial about this. We are at war, but you’d really never know it. I was grateful beyond words to find like-minded people in the Peace Fellowship, where we work to understand better the grip that militarism has on our country, and to ask what is the church’s role in time of war.

For years the activist side of my life centered around taking delegations of North Americans to Latin America. For 20 years I’ve studied the effects of U.S. policy there, and much of this work Tom and I did together. My work changed, however, when Rick Ufford-Chase returned about a year and a half ago from his Moderator’s trip to Colombia, to report that the Colombian Presbyterians are receiving arbitrary arrests, death threats, and other forms of persecution, despite the fact that their church stands very firmly for non-violence, and is a peace church.

Rick has insisted that we must make an immediate response to the Colombian Church’s urgent call for accompaniment. When Rick said that the Peace Fellowship must do it, and that I must organize it, I said, "I’m old. I’m not looking for a new challenge. I’m just finishing up my work in Latin America." Have you ever tried to argue with Rick? He never said a word, but the look on his face said "You talk about direct action for peace. You worry about civilians being killed in armed conflict." What could I say? Nothing! Nothing I could do.

So today the Peace Fellowship works in cooperation with our Worldwide Ministries Division. We have now trained 35 courageous volunteers. They accompany Colombians who are under this form of persecution and threat. We have learned that in the last two years, 40 Protestant pastors from various denominations have been murdered in Colombia.

How can we as Christians not respond to this call?

Let me say in closing that the result, I believe, for both of these churches – ours and the Colombians’ – are beyond anything we could have imagined when we began this project.

We are learning the price that a church must pay for speaking out against violence, even when it must speak out against its own government. The Colombians are learning that they are not alone in their time of struggle. I believe that the Colombia accompaniment program is the church being the church. And I believe more than ever in doing direct action for peace.

Thank you for recognizing Tom’s and my work.

She then added:

I don’t see Milton Mejia, the former head of the Colombian church, in the room. He is here at the Assembly, but I don’t think he was able to make it here. I will therefore ask for just one more moment to honor him for his courage in the face of death threats, to continue the message and peace work of his church in this extraordinary time. And I ask you all to pray for the Colombian Presbyterian Church in this time of persecution.