October 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. During that month in 1962, United States intelligence discovered that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear weapons in Cuba. The President of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, and his counterpart, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, were willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizens with retaliatory nuclear strikes if the political standoff over Cuba went unresolved.
Earlier that same year, in April 1962, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, renowned for his writings on spirituality and social justice, among many other topics, finished his book Peace in the Post-Christian Era. The book was not published for decades because his superiors in his monastic order censored it. The book is a thorough but succinct treatment of the complexities involved in the nuclear arms race at the heart of the Cold War. In it, Merton analyzed the Christian response to that crisis. His analysis is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.
The subtitle stands out as a major curiosity of this book. Though the number is shrinking, the majority of contemporary Americans identify themselves as Christian. In Merton’s time, the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. population would have been even higher than it is today. So what does Merton mean that we are in a “post-Christian era”?
He believed that the nuclear crisis arose out of values that do not reflect a true Christian attitude. “The brutal reality is that we seem to prefer destructive measures: not that we love war for its own sake, but because we are blindly and hopelessly involved in needs and attitudes that make war inevitable” (7). Later in the book, he clarified:
When asked what we mean by the ‘American way of life’ we are brought up short, and have to wonder whether we mean more and better refrigerators, TV, Hollywood, Madison Avenue or what? (18)
He urged his readership to consider their purpose in life. He wondered about their ultimate concern. The questions he raised are relevant today: Do Americans pursue material comfort and superficial satisfaction, first and foremost? Or do they pursue abiding value?
Throughout the text, Merton evoked the Incarnation as a basis for evaluating and transforming the “needs and attitudes that make war inevitable.” According to Merton, because God became human through the Incarnation, every person “must in some sense be regarded as Christ,” and, consequently, Merton explained, “no Christian is ever allowed to be indifferent to [humanity]’s fate.”
The Incarnation serves as the basis for the Catholic Social Teaching principle of the fundamental human dignity of all people. This dignity is rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. As aptly summarized by Merton, “We are, then, disciples of Christ and necessarily our brother’s keepers” (10).
See: Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004.
Submitted by: N. Rademacher, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies