AMY GOODMAN: On this day after the funeral of Philip Berrigan, it is International Human Rights Day. In 1948, on December 10th, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then, the world was recovering from World War II, the Holocaust, the rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today, the Bush administration is preparing to unleash another war on the people of Iraq, dozens of prisoners are being held in Guantánamo Bay without access to courts or lawyers, unknown numbers of immigrants have been deported or are still in detention in this country, police are cracking down on public protests, and everyone here is under increasing surveillance by the state.

We thought we’d take a minute to remember the declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A few excerpts:

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal and the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence.

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media.

And Article 20: Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

Well, all over the United States today, people will be taking to the streets to protest the looming war in Iraq. Here in New York, hundreds of religious leaders will be marching on the United Nations. Over 50 are expected to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. The religious leaders will be challenging the morality of another war with Iraq.

Today we’re going to have a discussion on the role of Christian teaching and the church in the peace movement. We’re joined by two people from the United Methodist Church, the church of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. David Wildman is with the human rights and racial justice group of Global Ministries. He plans to engage in the civil disobedience today.

And we’re joined by the Reverend James Lawson, a longtime peace advocate and civil rights leader, considered one of the leading architects of the civil rights movement and a personal tutor on nonviolence to Dr. Martin Luther King. His activism began during the Korean War when he was jailed as a conscientious objector. In 1957, Reverend Lawson first met Martin Luther King, and they soon joined forces to realize their dream of starting a nonviolent mass movement. That same year, Reverend Lawson went to Nashville to teach the mechanics of nonviolence to budding civil rights activists. He continued to work with King until his death but has never given up their shared dream. For 14 years he served as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by King to end racial segregation by nonviolent protest. Reverend Lawson is currently the pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

We welcome Reverend Lawson and David Wildman of United Methodist Church to Democracy Now!

REV. JAMES LAWSON: Thank you, Amy.

REV. DAVID WILDMAN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t we start off with David Wildman. You’re planning to engage in civil disobedience this morning?

REV. DAVID WILDMAN: Well, actually, I’m not planning myself. There’s many religious leaders. There’s another international human rights event in the afternoon that I’ll be a part of. And I think it’s a symbolic effort of religious leaders to say Christians are part of the problem here in terms of who’s waging the war, and we need to be out front with our brothers and sisters of other faiths to take a stance to say no to war.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Lawson, yours is the church of the president and vice president?

REV. JAMES LAWSON: Yes, they both claim membership in the United Methodist Church. But, of course, they have to be — it has to be said that they are both people who are in complete disagreement with both church understanding of war. The official social policy of the United Methodist Church says that war is incompatible with the spirit and the mind of Jesus, who we call the Christ. So, this support of war means that they are incompatible with Jesus in every fashion.

But, of course, it has to be said that our problem with war in the last 60 years has been the fact that it’s Christian people who have supported their states in war, especially the United States, more than any other group. We ignore entirely the fact that Jesus was a nonviolent warrior. Everyone knows that except the Christians, to quote from what Gandhi said.

But any kind of study of the four Gospels of the New Testament, which represent the best information we have about Jesus, would indicate that he clearly insisted that violence and war are sin, are evil. He told Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Peter drew his sword and cut off the ears of one of the — cut off the ear, rather, of one of the people who came to arrest Jesus — Jesus said to Peter, “Put up your sword, for they who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Not even the biblical scholars have been able to indicate that Jesus did not mean by that, that in his own self-defense. Love and truth and standing with them, even in the most difficult and perplexing situation, was the way forward, and not to engage in then the imitation of killing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk a little about the history of nonviolence in this country?

REV. JAMES LAWSON: Oh, you are asking me a question that’s almost impossible to do in — I’ve lectured and taught it at Harvard Divinity School. I’ll be teaching at UCLA in Los Angeles again in the spring of next year. I’ve taught it in a variety of places. It’s one of the hidden secrets of American life, in American history, because you don’t find it in the normal history books, even though it was a huge item.

For an example, you have to say that it began with — in the colonies in the 17th century, because the original agitation for independence came basically through nonviolent efforts, petitions to the king, letters to the king, agitation in the colonies by small groups of people, button-holing one another and talking to them about it. Then, of course, this escalated to the place of boycotts of British goods, of refusing to pay taxes, refusing to give hospitality to British soldiers in their homes. It included major marches and demonstrations of all kinds. So, the agitation which led to July 4th, 1776, and the declaration of the equality of all of life, coming not from governments but from the creator, had its — the preliminary movements for that were fundamentally nonviolent efforts.

Then the abolitionist movement is another example. The efforts on the part of Black people in Pennsylvania, in New England, to not allow the trains and the carriages to become segregated, that was beginning to take place in the country on the railroad trains going south and coming north, for an example. The first Freedom Ride was 1840, not 1947, as an illustration. The abolitionist movement, many of them called themselves nonresistors. Many out of the churches called themselves Christian resistors.

The Quakers, in the state of — in the colony of Pennsylvania in the 17th century, who for 80 years not a Native American was killed, not a settler was killed, because for 80 years the Quakers controlled the colony. When they lost control of the colony, then the first Pennsylvania Native American wars began in western Pennsylvania. For 80 years, wars reigned against Native Americans in New York and Delaware and New Jersey, but in the colony of Pennsylvania, William Penn and John Woolman and others said, “We will treat them like we treat ourselves.” And so there were no wars for 80 years. It’s an extraordinary story. It was not called nonviolence then, because it is Gandhi who insisted that this is not pacifism, as in the Western Christian tradition, but this is active, militant reaching out to resist evil, on the one side, and to dismantle it and then to replace it with liberty and with justice for all.

So, one of the gifts of the 20th century, like the gift of physics, is the gift that all over the world millions of people engaged in nonviolent revolution, making it impossible for governments to manage certain things. Perhaps one of the most exciting illustrations of that would be 1980 with the emergence of Solidarity in Poland, the organizing of 10 million workers in that union, their nonviolent struggle, that threw many of them in jails, caused torture and repression. But by 1988, the communist government, the authoritarian government, knew it was finished. And, of course, then it collapsed. That happened in Czechoslovakia. It happened in East Germany. So, the history of nonviolence is a superb message that Gandhi called the secret of the human race, because it’s so prevalent and so overwhelming outside of Christian circles, outside of America, inside America, literally all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Lawson, you also speak a lot about — when I heard you at Union Theological Seminary last year talking about the Christian right. I mean, you have Bush and Cheney in the Methodist Church. And then you have the Christian right’s support for war. Can you talk about people like Pat Robertson now?

REV. JAMES LAWSON: Yes. One has to remember that Trent Lott and Pat Robinson are both people of my generation who in the '60s were adamant about the fact that the Bible dictates segregation of the races. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, a whole range of today's conservative voices, so-called, were leaders against desegregating our society, breaking down the apartheid. The episodes in the paper today about Trent Lott’s statements about — about —

AMY GOODMAN: Strom Thurman.

REV. JAMES LAWSON: — Strom Thurman are not accidental statements. This is where he was as a student at Ole Miss engaging in the riot to keep James Meredith, a Black man, in 1962, from going into the law school at Ole Miss. He has not changed those statements.

We have within the United Methodist Church a religious right, that is not interested in Jesus or theology or the reform of the church, but they’re interested in basically white supremacy. They want management and domination of the United Methodist Church. We have similar forces in the Presbyterian Church, in the Lutheran Church and a number of other of the major Protestant denominations.

The religious right does not, basically, have an understanding of the Bible or an understanding of Jesus. It has imposed upon the Bible a totalitarian, closed intellectual and ideological system, so that it cannot, for example, see in the Scriptures the extent to which, over and over again, Moses, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, all insist that major responsibility for religion is care of the neighbor. And that means, among other things, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the prisoner, seeing to it that the widow is cared for. I mean, that happens in almost every book of the Hebrew-Christian Bible. But you do not hear — Pat Robertson represents — does not represent that perspective at all. He sees, instead, that he must become a multimillionaire. He sees the Bible as authorizing him as a white man to be in charge of places in Africa, as well as places in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: In the Congo.

REV. JAMES LAWSON: In the Congo, precisely. So, the religious right is an enemy of our authentic religion. It is far more a representative of the 500 years of western expansion and search for gold, conquest, with the Bible in the other hand. It’s far more representative of that than it is of Jesus.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for stations to identify themselves. Reverend James Lawson with us. We’re also joined by David Wildman, and we’re going to find out about United for Peace in just a minute. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: The sounds of the funeral procession through the streets of Baltimore yesterday as people followed the coffin, that was being carried in a pickup truck, of Philip Berrigan. He was buried yesterday. He was 79 and died of cancer last Friday night. You are listening to Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. And we’re joined by the Reverend James Lawson of the Holman United Methodist Church and David Wildman, executive secretary, human rights and racial justice group of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church, which is the church also of the president and the vice president of the United States. Now, 89 Methodist bishops went to try to meet with Bush over his stance on war, David Wildman?

DAVID WILDMAN: Well, in early October, the bishops wrote an incredibly powerful letter about preemptive war. And they said in that that the preemptive war by the United States against a nation like Iraq goes against the very grain of our understanding of the Gospel, our Church’s teachings and our conscience. And so they were quite clear that in no circumstances could the church support preemptive war. They’ve been trying to meet with the president since February, and his office has not responded.

AMY GOODMAN: For 10 months.

DAVID WILDMAN: For 10 months. And in October, there were eight or nine United Methodist bishops in Washington, D.C., the very same day that the vote took place, and the very same day that the Christian Coalition had a demonstration in support of Israel. The president chose on that day to inform the bishops that they would not — the White House would not meet with them, and yet had the time to send a videotaped segment to the Christian Coalition of greetings and support. And I think that shows the theology of empire that he espouses, and that Pat Robertson and others.

And I’d like to read just from Micah, a quote that refers to the religious right, from many years ago: “Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry 'Peace' when they have something to eat, but they declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths.” And I think what we’re seeing now is the war of empire, that there are gates in this world, and the Bush administration are saying, “We inside the gates call the shots and call the tunes for everyone, and the poor and the marginalized that are outside the gates, it doesn’t matter.” So, in terms of the sanctions in Iraq, it doesn’t matter. In terms of casualties, children that will die, like the early Christmas story of the slaughter of the innocents, it doesn’t matter to the empire. It certainly does to the people.

And St. Augustine, long ago, made a comparison about the violence of pirates in the Mediterranean during the rule of Alexander the Great, which today we might say are the violence of terrorists. And in the city of God, St. Augustine said, “The answer which a captured pirate, or terrorist, gave to the celebrated Alexander the Great was perfectly accurate and correct. When the king asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea by terrorizing civilians, he boldly replied, 'What you mean by warring on the whole world. I do my fighting on a tiny ship, and they call me a pirate, or a terrorist. You do yours with a large fleet, and they call you commander-in-chief.'”

AMY GOODMAN: David Wildman of the United Methodist Church. Reverend Lawson, what do you think is necessary for a successful peace movement in this country today?

REV. JAMES LAWSON: I think we must adopt slogans like “Saddam did not close my health clinic.” And we must get into the streets by the millions and millions of people that will demonstrate to the mayors and the governors and the president and Congress that government for war and violence is not manageable, and that they will have to deal with the legitimate concerns of the people. Consistently for over 60, 70, 80, 90 years, the American people have said we want our tax money for healthcare for everybody, for education, for housing. That will of the people has never been followed, except in periods like the New Deal, the efforts on the part of Kennedy and Johnson in the movement for peace in the ’60s, in the — what I call sometimes the King movement for liberty and justice.

Well, we have to emulate those movements again, learn from them, build upon them, and do them in a fashion that was never done in the 20th century, so that we essentially start a nonviolent warfare, a protracted struggle, in which many of us must be prepared to sacrifice life and limb and position, and to keep doing it until such time as we can turn the tide of the corporate politics and the politics of violence into the politics of democracy and nonviolence.

AMY GOODMAN: David Wildman, finally, before we go to listeners around the country who have called in to talk about what they’ll be doing on this day, where there will be more than 100 protests in the country, what is United for Peace?

REV. DAVID WILDMAN: United for Peace is a new and growing coalition — it started in October, though it certainly had precedents to that — of over 100 organizations from around the country that are committed to peace, committed to human rights, committed to civil liberties, to say we need to unite for peace and say no to war. It has a website, www.UnitedForPeace.org. And there’s over 100 actions that will be taking place just today, International Human Rights Day, from human billboards to candlelight vigils, ecumenical services, walks in the malls, saying, “Drop toys, not bombs.” It’s really — I urge everyone to go to the website and just get a flavor of the range of things. And these are things happening today.

But the movement is much more beyond that, of people reaching out to one another. There’s an Iraq pledge of resistance, which is part of this. So, civil disobedience is happening not just here in New York but in many cities across the country today. And people are signing pledges to say, in the event of war, this is a growing movement of civil disobedience to say we will oppose this. We will stop paying taxes, in some cases. So there’s many exciting things going on in this united, uniting for peace movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both, David Wildman and Reverend James Lawson, for joining us.