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I claim no novelty for the following reflections on violence and coercion. Certainly there is no new data presented here. I offer, rather, simply a discussion of values and how to value certain things, and even in this sense I doubt that newness will appear. This, however, is no apology. For regarding value and how to value, I am increasingly convinced that much of our responsibility consists in rediscovery rather than discovery.

The question of justice and war is precisely a question: Can war ever be the task of justice?Pacifism is one clear response to this question. There are different pacifisms, certainly, but they seem to converge at the point of policy. There is a pacifism which may be called experiential, in the sense that one's reading of the history of armed conflict forces one to conclude that, on balance, war will never produce good fruit. There is another which may be intuitional or deontological, in that one somehow knows, independently of inductive, logical processes, that the life-taking which war is, is intolerable. Both positions yield a general policy posture: War may not be done.

In The issues of the New York Times from February, 1965, to November, 1967, religious leaders and groups are reported 185 times commenting on one political issue: Vietnam. If a comparable search were done on an inclusive list of political topics, such as civil rights, the number of citations would be greatly multiplied. Most of these statements are on substantive issues — the United States should do this, do that — rather than on the theoretical questions about religion's role vis à vis politics. Most of these religious interventions presume some connection between religion and politics, whether articulated or not. A similar examination of some leading religious journals, for example, Chrisianity and Crisis, Commonweal, Christian Century, America, produces similar results: in articles and editorials, such publications are deeply immersed in direct commentary on political problems of our time.