There are no peace churches in the United States. Because when you have got more than you need, and other people do not have enough to live on, you only keep the excess by violence. You do not keep it by appeals to faith or to love or to reason. And the churches are up to their ears in wealth. . . . And it makes no difference what church it is. I once gave a talk about twenty years ago at the Quaker Meeting House in Cambridge. . . .On one side of the Quaker meeting house in Cambridge there is Harvard University with property that is worth tens upon tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. There is this one little acre that the Quakers have. The property is worth millions. So I raised the issue of the excessive wealth that this property represented as well as the issue of what would you do if someone came in here and just started tearing down this place. In both instances they would resort to violence. That is no different from the Catholic Church or anything else. Cardinals call the police on people. But the point is none of that is consistent with loving as Christ loved. Does that mean if you have property and you can’t love as Christ? No. It probably means you cannot have luxury property because once people have more than they need and other people do not have enough, you have got to have the gun to keep them off your back. And that is where all the churches are for the most part in Christianity in the Western world.

—Rev. Emmanuel McCarthy at the 2009 Christianity and Anarchism gathering

Extracted from this outstanding blog post.

Photograph by Petros Efstathiadis

Tags:Center for Christian Non-ViolenceChristianity and AnarchismJesuslovepacsifismPetros EfstathiadisRev- Emmanuel McCarthy