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The Nonviolent Jesus: A Conversation with John Dear

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 5 • Episode 6

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What if the center of Jesus' teaching isn't the cross but the Sermon on the Mount? Father John Dear, peace activist, author, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has spent four decades living out that claim and challenging the church to take nonviolence seriously. In this conversation, Dear shares his journey from witnessing jets drop bombs over the Sea of Galilee to facing 20 years of incarceration for hammering on an F-15 fighter jet. Now leading the Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus and hosting "The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast," Dear continues to build a community around Gospel nonviolence. We talk about his book The Gospel of Peace, the cost of his convictions, and what ordinary people can do to follow the nonviolent Jesus.

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Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. today's episode is a little bit different because it features somebody who is clearly a theologian, theologically interested, theologically motivated, whereas we normally are thinking about religion in the public conversation and how religion is considered, is thought about, and then affects the larger world. But I think that Father John Dear, the peace activist who we'll be talking with today, his work, has lots of implications for the world we live in today, for the way that we respond to the various crises that are coming our way, and is very much wrapped up in not only the Christian tradition, but a wide variety of interaction with policy, politics, war and peace, over the course of the last century. I first met John at the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, where he offered a keynote called non violence as vocation. And had the great privilege of sitting next to him through dinner as well that evening. And as you'll hear, he is quite a character, quite a storyteller, and it was very interesting to hear about the choices that he's made, that you'll hear him talk about, being arrested 85 times, facing down 20 year prison sentence that was thankfully much shorter than that in the end, but the choices that he made as a peace activist is somebody who is really sincere and absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause and the methods that he uses. We don't always run into that every day, and he certainly lives the things that he teaches. And as far as his teaching goes, he's written over 40 books, has spoken around the country, around the world, and has received such accolades as being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by none other than Desmond Tutu. I think you're doing something right if Desmond Tutu thinks you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. But his story is interesting in that it really emerges from the work of many others as he'll as he'll allude to that came before him in his ideological lineage, he of course, traces back to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, and Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton. And then his teachers actually were the Berrigan brothers, famous peace advocates Daniel and Philip Berrigan. His influence isn't only through those historical channels, though, he continues to do work through his beatitude center, as I mentioned, his written works as well, including the 2024 release the Gospel of Peace, which we talk about in this interview. And then he has a new book forthcoming called Universal Love - Surrendering to the Peace of God. He also has like others I know, reached out into the podcast world and hosts a podcast called The Nonviolent Jesus. And it is interesting, not only because of its teaching of non violence and its understanding of Jesus and what John Deere thinks Jesus is demanding of him, but also because of the wide range of theologians and entertainers and activists and so forth that he talks to on in that venue, Martin Sheen and Joan Baez and Cornel West, just a really wide variety of people who are interested in his work and want to share in his work using non violence as a mechanism. Now, John Deere himself is particularly interested in nuclear proliferation and the emergence of nuclear weapons more dangerous all the time, but I think more fundamental to our conversation are about the methods that he uses. And I think that this is a particularly useful conversation now. And you know why I think that this is a conversation worth sharing is that we, of course, are in a crisis in the United States, a crisis of governance, a crisis of leadership, and the resistance is building, and to this point in early 2026 that resistance has been peaceful, that resistance has modeled itself on the peaceful protests of the civil rights movement, for example. But I think that as the struggle continues, there will at least be the temptation for some activist groups to think about other means when federal agents bring violence into the streets, it takes a lot of discipline to remain nonviolent. And here we are, just a few weeks after the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr Day, who, of course, is the most prominent, the most famous of the civil rights. Its leaders who taught non violence and really introduced the concepts of non violence broadly into our society, that I think it makes sense. It pays to consider not only the history of that movement, but the legacy of that movement and why it developed, and what it's good for, and how it can be used, and why it has benefits beyond what historically has been the model of resistance. So one last caveat before we get started. As I've said, and as you'll hear for yourself, John Deere is a very outspoken activist who has very strong feelings about the world, and there are a few times where he'll say things you may very well not agree with, but I would invite you to think about those as a function of his worldview, as a function of what he feels that he's called to do, and as a part of who he is and what he does. I think that this conversation has something to offer all of us as we think about navigating the world we live in. So with that being said, you'll hear much more and learn much more about him and his career from his own mouth. And so I'm super happy to welcome John Deere to ReligionWise. Father John Dear, thanks for coming on ReligionWise. It's a great pleasure to have you here.

John Dear:

Thank you for having me, Chip.

Chip Gruen:

So we'll get into some of the details of this as we, as we move through the topics that I want to cover, but I just want to give you an opportunity to talk about how you came to this work. I mean, I think, I think I can predict a little bit from your perspective. You would say, How can you be a Christian and not come to this work. But you know what is a little bit of your biography about, about how you end up being a peace activist, and so, you know, outspoken on these, on these topics.

John Dear:

None of this was planned. And thank you for having me, Chip. I'm 66 I grew up in Nags Head of North Carolina, of all things. And then when I was about seven or eight, my father, I came from a newspaper publishing family. My uncle, who ran it, died, and overnight, we moved to DC. My father was the head of the National Press Club. Next thing you know, I was meeting senators and congressmen, and I was a boy in the National Press Club, spending the summers, roaming the halls, and I was appalled by what I saw, and I was very politicized. Knew all about the Vietnam War and everything. And I was also a spiritual seeker. I think I'm just really weird. I was really interested in God. I think I experienced the love of God at an early age and I just said, okay, that works for me. And because I was so politicized, I was a Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy fanatic, even when I was eight and nine years old. And when Dr. King was killed, my dad put me in the car and drove me down to see the riots in DC, and is lecturing me you're never to forget this. My life changed. And then, like a lot of older people, I got really concerned and interested in Bobby Kennedy's campaign, and then he was killed. I know this sounds dramatic, but I've said this all my life. I kind of went into an existential crisis for the next 10 years because I was very aware as a boy, well, what good is life then? I mean, these are the two best people our country has produced. The government clearly killed both of them because they wanted to keep the Vietnam War going and the whole system of injustice. I went to Duke to get away from the Catholic Church and not to believe in God, was a wild college kid, and then, Chip, one day, I always joke I was knocked off the fraternity bar stool, I realized I wanted to give my life to God, and my next thought was, well, I might as well just be a Jesuit priest. And in that thought, my whole life flashed in front of me. My intention was to be a nice, pious priest, and my parents were appalled, and I actually ended up working for Robert Kennedy's family as a 20 year old. And then, just briefly, I thought, with a little money I made, I was going to go and see where Jesus lived before I ended the seminary. So I flew off by myself, like a total idiot, 21 year old kid and hitchhiked through Israel for three months, lived on the streets in Jerusalem just to see where Jesus was, completely oblivious to the fact that Israel had just invaded Lebanon, and during that summer, orchestrated by the United States, we killed 60,000 people. And my goal was to camp out at the Sea of Galilee, and I did that illegally for two weeks. And there was nobody around, no tourist groups, nothing. And I'm totally reading the Beatitudes, visiting the Beatitudes chapel, which is really great at the ruins of Copan, and looking over the city to see you. And I was really, really, really pondering the words of the Sermon on the Mount, and I saw all these jets swoop down, break the sound barrier, set off sonic booms and fly right over the Sea of Galilee, right over me in the chapel the Beatitudes, and drop a whole bunch of bombs 15 miles away, killing a lot of people. And I thought, Oh, okay. Oh, like you're serious about this. So I decided that day that I would spend the rest of my life working for peace and the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount for Jesus, because that's what the poor guy wants. That's what he said. There Blessed are the peacemakers, hunger and thirst for justice, love your enemies. And I didn't, I didn't realize that, and I, you know, I knew all of that, but I didn't care about war. Who cares? There's there's nothing you can do, just be a nice, pious priest. Two weeks after ending the Jesuits, meeting the Berrigans, then I was kind of downhill from there, and Phil Berrigan is smoking a cigarette and saying, Are you interested about peace, kid? And I'm going, Uh huh, yeah. Well, go get arrested at the Pentagon and report back to me. It was like that with them. They were, there's nobody like that. Now, if you're serious, you want to follow Jesus, you got to go get arrested like he was. And I did. And now I've been arrested 85 times, and then I went and lived in El Salvador, and then I did a Plowshares action and faced 20 years in prison. I've been in all the war zones of the world, and I've written 40 books on nonviolence. I'm trying everything I can, Chip, to teach the nonviolence of Jesus, and I'm not making one bit of a difference, but I'm still here and kicking and still chipping away at it, and I think that's all we're called to do. Certainly, that's about how I feel.

Chip Gruen:

I want to come back to that point about, you know, is it a peaceful world than it was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? You know, when you were getting started? I want to come back to that. But before that, you mentioned the Gospel of Peace, which is your most recent book out. And I'll just say you've got another one coming out, Universal Love - Surrendering to the God of Peace, which will be out in February. So I'm excited to take a look at that one as well. But let's talk a little bit about the Gospel of Peace. Because what it essentially does for our listeners, I mean, you know what it does, but what it does is it walks through the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, pretty much line by line by line, and really centering, as you've alluded to here, you know, the Beatitudes, and Jesus' teaching when you did that. So I'm wrestling with my mind. In my mind right now, on the one hand, you had this, this experience, right? I think this religious, the spiritual, mystical experience, right at the Sea of Galilee. And now on the other hand, you know, You committed yourself to the Beatitudes, to reading through that, to matching up, right the words of Jesus. With this experience you had this project, what did you learn from it? I mean, did it just confirm everything that you thought about? Yep, that's exactly what I thought was going into it. Or did, did this really intentional deep dive through the synoptics show you more about about non violence and about Jesus,

John Dear:

Oh, yeah, a lot more. And I wish everyone could go through what I did, but I'm always all these books I've written. I'm really trying to learn myself, because I don't understand anything I'm, I'm not that bright. I'm just persistent and enthusiastic. So you know, when I was 21 I entered the Jesuits, and I go, Okay, there's Gandhi, Dr King, Dorothy Day, Merton, the Berrigans. I got to be like them. Okay, they all get arrested. So I got arrested. They all give talks. So I gave, I started giving talks, and I don't like giving talks, and they all wrote books. So at 21 I started writing a book on nonviolence, and I've written a book a year since, it's kind of wild. And so what happened to me, Chip was the pandemic. The pandemic came along, and I had just moved out here to Big Sur, California. I was living in a cabin right on the ocean. It was like the most beautiful place in North America. Somebody got it for me. And, I mean, it was really magical. But I had to bring in my own water and chop wood, and now we're in the lockdown. And all my great plans, I had a lot of plans for years of work ended. So I had really, I had this idea to write this book 10 years before, and I started writing five different books so I wouldn't have to write the Gospel of Peace. And none of that worked. I felt nudged. So my problem has been when I was 21 I found that quote from Gandhi, who said, which just kills me, Jesus is the greatest person of nonviolence in the history of the world. And I just find that so beautiful coming from the great Hindu, who's the greatest Christian who ever lived, in my opinion. And then poor Gandhi goes out and says, and the only people who don't know that Jesus is nonviolent are Christians. A lot of my life has been trying to teach millions and millions of people that Jesus is totally nonviolent, and this is all nice and good and church and prayer and blah, blah, blah. I could care less. It's all blasphemy if you support violence. If he's totally non violent, if Gandhi's right, everything has to change. By the way, if Jesus is violent, I want nothing to do with him, because I got that down. We got violent leaders. But if Gandhi's right and Martin Luther King is right, and Dorothy, Now we're getting somewhere. This changes everything. And we haven't even begun a theology or spirituality of non violence. We're just beginning to tap into the power of it. The word was only invented 100 years ago. Do No Harm, Ahimsa, in thought, word or deed. So okay, so I've always thought Jesus is meticulously nonviolent. I'd written four or five books on the nonviolence of Jesus. I give retreats on it. I've spoken to millions of people, but now I got all this time on my hands. My publisher said, Yeah, I'd love to publish it. Yeah, like, yeah, you're really gonna write a commentary. But, you know, he was so shocked, because after like 800 pages, I submitted. I hadn't gotten to the Gospel of John, yet. He stopped me and wouldn't let me add John. Can you believe my idea was a four volume work of 500 pages each. What's not to like, Chip? And I was gonna do it well anyway, but he was smarter anyway, so I was kind of saying, Okay, I'm going to read through every single sentence as if I'm with Martin Luther King and Gandhi. We're going to go through every sentence and say, see how nonviolent Jesus is there. Oh my gosh, Chip. It was such a revelation, every single sentence. And I was able to sort it all out in the introduction. And you know, we project onto Jesus, not only violence, and not only have we rejected his nonviolence, but presumed in support of war. We came up the just war theory, and we're all insane with racism and greed and but we project our anger onto him, our resentments. We think he's like us, and actually he's very gentle and nonviolent. Now I'll just try to give a brief answer to your question. I have studied this for so long, and I've read the I tell people only read the gospels for the next 30 years. Don't read anything else, and then report back to me, and maybe I'll let you read St Paul. St Paul never read the gospels. He never read the Sermon on the Mount. So don't get me started on Paul, but Gandhi is reading the Sermon on the Mount every morning and every evening the last 45 years of his life. And I know that because I not only wrote a book on Gandhi, but I went to India for a month with Gandhi's grandson, who was raised by Gandhi. So I heard the details of this. So I've been start trying to do that since my experience in Galilee, and I'm going through and you see, everything is totally about nonviolence, but a couple of things began to stand out for me. I don't have a problem with what everybody else has. Like some of the parables seem that Jesus is being violent. That's just not true. That's a misreading of them. And I don't have a problem with everybody thinks in Matthew 27 or whatever, Jesus is yelling at the Pharisees, you whitened sepulchers, you're a bag of dead man bones, You brood of vipers. You know that's projecting our violence onto Jesus. And I can say that, do you know, Chip, who the great Buddhist and master Thich Nhat Hanh was?

Chip Gruen:

Yes, yes, yes.

John Dear:

So he was my friend for 30 years, which is totally outrageous, but I got to know all the greatest peacemakers in the world, and I really knew him through Dan Berrigan, and I've been with him, you know, I used to have this campaign at Los Alamos calling for the closure and and I would be telling Thich Nhat Hanh, somewhere we would be visiting in the world. And I'd be saying, you know, there's 20,000 people, and they all go to church. The churches in Los Alamos are packed. And then on Monday, they build nuclear weapons all day long. And they're all millionaires. They're more millionaires per capita everywhere than anywhere in the world. You. And they all believe in Jesus and God. And he was, he said, and the listeners won't be able to see this, but I'm going to now imitate Thich Nhat Hanh. What I'm doing is whispering. For those who can't he spoke with such a soft voice, you had to lean in to hear what he was saying. So did Gandhi. They were so gentle. Anyway, Thich Nhat Hanh says they're insane. They're going to blow up the world they had. They're in love with death. In other words, he said really harsh things, but he was whispering it. It came across completely different. I think Jesus was like that. What surprised me was Luke 10. Now this is the what I ended up writing a whole other book about, which was not my intention either. It's coming out in February, called Universal Love - Surrendering to the Will of God. For me, the hardest line in the Gospel is Luke 10, which is Jesus always joke. And I'll end with this Chip. He thinks he's Martin Luther King or Gandhi. He sends the 72 out on a mission of peace. You're only to say peace. You give blessings of peace, and you heal everybody from the violence they've suffered. You proclaim the coming of God's reigns of nonviolence. And then they come back rejoicing. They're like, wow, this really works. And he says, Don't rejoice because it works in your name. Rejoice because your name is written in heaven. He turns the focus back on God, and then it says, And then Jesus started rejoicing. Now, as I've studied the Gospels, I've written a lot about it. It's the only time in the four Gospels where Jesus is happy, because they go, they are all like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. They go out into the world publicly on a mission of non violence, as I've tried to do every day for the last 45 years. So there's this line, then he's, he rejoices, and he turns it's in Matthew's version, and he starts praising God. God, I praise you because you have revealed these things to the childlike and hidden them from the learned and the wise. Such is your gracious will. That, to me, is horrible. You mean to tell me it's God's will that the human race doesn't understand nonviolence. You know, this book really forced me to come and in that page that actually write about this midway through the book, in, in Luke, I pause and say, this is personally the most important sentence in the Bible for me. And I had a long conversation with Archbishop Tutu about it in South Africa before he died, and that becomes the focus of my new book. He said, God is infinitely nonviolent. God is universal love, universal compassion, universal peace, therefore total nonviolence, therefore God has to, by God's very nature, give us total free will to reject love, compassion, peace and nonviolence. And so Tutu burst into tears and falls into my arms and says, every human being on the planet has rejected the nonviolence of Jesus and God, and yet God is so gracious that God does not force us to be nonviolent or peaceful and loving. Or if God showed up in Times Square, we'd all fall down and worship, because we'd actually die because our hearts can't stand the love of God. I mean literally, they can't hold it. So that's what Jesus means. And then I began to read the Gospels in a much deeper way about how Jesus is constantly inviting us into the will of God, and we keep rejecting it, so that in Gethsemane, He prays, not my will, Your will be done, and Peter takes up the sword to kill, to defend Jesus, the idiot. We're all idiots. We don't want his nonviolence. And that was what moved me the most.

Chip Gruen:

So, and this is when, when we first met, this was the question I had for you, and and I'm asking it on behalf of our listeners now, because I think a lot of them are thinking this, that you are an ordained priest in the Catholic tradition. A lot of people come and I think you know from, from what it sounds like you would imagine hypocritically, right to understand Jesus in kind of a different way, right, that through the sacraments, through His death and resurrection. You know in contemporary world, through his person. You know contemporary evangelicalism, through personal relationship, like there are a lot of people worshiping or paying attention to a lot of different Jesus-s is out there who's different from your Jesus. What do you think about that? Right? What when you offer the sacraments. What are you thinking about? You know, when you're when you're thinking about, I mean, from a surface level, looks, looks like violent interaction in the world, right?

John Dear:

Yeah. So it's a great, interesting question. All of that is beautiful. I love the sacraments. Like my whole life is living in relationship with the non violent Jesus. And you, you know, exploring his life and death and resurrection, and I've been involved in the church, and now I'm even involved in the Vatican. Unbelievable. Never thought that and but what I'm trying to say, which is what Gandhi tried to say, is we're missing the whole fundamental point if, that Jesus is totally nonviolent. So I don't, I don't, after all these years, still don't have the words to describe that. But let's just say Jesus draws a boundary line in the sand and says, You can't hurt people, you can't shoot people, you can't kill people, and you can't wage war and build nuclear weapons. It's the same as, let's say, Alcoholics Anonymous within that there's a boundary line. You just can't drink, but once you stop drinking, well then life gets a lot better. You relearn how to love and be kind, and you do God's will. Same with narcotic. It's the 12 step, the God, we're addicted to violence and death, and we don't even know it, just as the alcoholic or the drug addict doesn't know that he's on the path to death, Jesus's last words to the church are put down the sword and we killed him. We ran away from them because we don't want that nonviolence. I use this word more than love or peace because those words don't work anymore. And Gandhi said that, and Dr King used this word. So once you begin to realize that Jesus actually and literally means no more violence in your life, you have to be nonviolent to yourself. You can't beat yourself up. You have to be nonviolent to your spouses and your children, your parents and your neighbors and your friends and your co workers, and nonviolent to everyone in the world. And you have to follow me, into the world of violence and preach and proclaim a whole new countercultural vision of global nonviolence once you begin to see Jesus through that lens, everything else makes sense. Theologically, I think nothing makes sense if Jesus is willing to kill one person, one person. So I say the gospel is a call to universal, unconditional, non retaliatory, sacrificial love, the truth of our common unity. We're one with everyone. We allow God to disarm our hearts of violence and help us be instruments of disarming love in the world. We're going to stand up publicly and resist injustice. But there's this one bottom line with Jesus of Nazareth, there is no cause however noble, for which you or I will ever again support the taking of a single human life. We don't kill people. We don't kill people to show that you shouldn't kill people, or that killing is wrong. This is called insanity. The gospel, to me, could not be clearer. It's actually the most beautiful, incredible writing in human history. It's actually way beyond Shakespeare, if you understand what they're really trying to teach us. So once you enter into the mindset of the nonviolent Jesus, everything you look at through the lens of nonviolence, a theological word is hermeneutic. Through the hermeneutic of non violence. It's like putting on a pair of glasses. Well, if you're an alcoholic, you're not going to drink. The whole world looks different then. And the same thing for any human being to say, I'm never going to hurt anybody again. That's my primary thing in life. You know, you wake up and you want to be resentful to your wife or you want to yell at your kids, well, right there. The next thing to be silly, why not bomb everybody? Drop nuclear weapons. You're just a person of violence. Once you put on that lens, you see how insane the world is, that the news and its violence. You see how insane the church is justifying war and how we've rejected Jesus. And then you read the gospels, and you go, even as we get older, he's the greatest person who ever lived. Even if you remove the theological questions of his divinity, there's just spectacular humanities way beyond Gandhi and Dr King. So I'm saying in having grappled with this every day for 45 years, and then being ordained. The sacraments are all encouragements and experiences of God to live out the Gospel nonviolence of Jesus. Baptism only makes sense when you're saying, hey, our guys God, not your guy Caesar, it was a mockery of the baptism of the soldier and communion, oh my god, the Eucharist is spectacular nonviolence. And if you read my book, we are completely wrong about it. He goes, and I quote, This is my body broken for you. This is the cup of my blood poured out for you, shed for you, and so that all may be forgiven do this. He should have said, Go kill their bodies for me. Go shed all their blood for me. Do that in memory of me. Because I'm a general, I'm an emperor, I'm really Hitler, Clinton, Trump, Obama. Name anybody? I don't care. It's all war making. No! My body broken for you, my blood shed for you. Do this every time you enter into the Eucharist, you're entering into the new covenant of nonviolence. I could go on and on, and I have elsewhere. The death and resurrection of Jesus only makes sense in light of nonviolence. I mean, not only is he incredibly nonviolent in his execution, Gandhi wrote a lot about that, even resurrection only makes sense in light of nonviolence, because resurrection means having not nothing to do with death, which means not having a trace of violence within you. You can no longer inflict death on anybody. And so our journey is lifelong journey of discipleship to get ready for resurrection, which is the nonviolent life to come in the kingdom, the kingdom of God, is nonviolence. Gandhi said, so, I think we, we haven't even started a theology and spirituality of nonviolence. So I've been doing all this work and writing this, and I'll end with this, but I was at one point the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 90s, which is largest interfaith peace group in the world. And I met 10s and maybe hundreds of thousandss of activists around the world, but I've learned personally, one on one from thousands of activists from every major religion, and you're not going to like this, Chip, but your religion one, every religion is rooted in total nonviolence. I always used to joke, including Christianity, and everybody laughs. But Judaism is about noviolence. Islam is nonviolence. Hinduism is about nonviolence. Buddhism, of course, is about nonviolence, the indigenous spiritualities, and we're all rejecting it. And I'm convinced of that from first hand experience around the world. Isn't this exciting? See, then this stuff makes sense, and you're going to go, well now Jesus threw down the gauntlet before us, and said, Okay, go ahead and deal with that. And I'm saying, Okay, I'm gonna go for it, even though nobody seems to care or believe me or pay attention. And I'm, I'm just saying, Hey, folks, violence doesn't work anymore. Let's take them up on this nonviolence and do what the poor guy wants.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to circle back to something that you had mentioned earlier. And obviously, you know, you stand and people hearing you can, can hear this. You stand in this lineage of these extraordinary figures, Gandhi and King, Dorothy Day and the Berrigans and Thomas Merton you mentioned, and on and on. But here we are. You know, as you said, you're 45 years into this trek. You don't see a less violent world than when you started. And I think you know, King, with the witness of his own death, right, sees a violent, violent action is the last right. Is the last scene for King's life on Earth. How do they deal with this, right? Is there inspiration in how they deal with it and how you deal with, you know, looking pouring out your life for this cause, and not seeing the fruits of that labor, yet?

John Dear:

Trust in God and and following Jesus. Jesus was a complete and total failure. I mean, it's very hard to really, really go deep into this. And he leads up. He leads everybody to Jerusalem, and then he does civil disobedience in the temple. What I can tell you, if you turn over tables, he's nonviolent. He doesn't yell, he doesn't scream, he doesn't whip anybody, he doesn't kill anybody, doesn't drop any nuclear bombs. He's just not passive. He's saying, that's it. You can't make money off in the house of God, off the poor. You're going to be killed if you do that. I've been all over the world. You do anything public in El Salvador or South Africa, you get your head blown off. And I have friends, I know many friends who did. So, He goes to his death even more nonviolently, and he's trying to tell his community that, and they're terrified, and they don't understand. And he's in Gethsemane and tells him to put down the sword. And they all run away, and he's executed all alone, a complete failure, and he still trusts in God. He's forgiving under his last death into your hands, I commit my spirit. So the methodology of the nonviolent Jesus is the outcome is not in our hands. It's in God's hands. He shows us how to be non violent, how to be human, how to resist, how to love, even unto death, and to let the chips fall where they may, and to still be nonviolent till the bitter end, and he's, it's the most spectacular nonviolence in human history, his life and death. So Gandhi comes along, and, you know, I've studied these guys. I've been studying them all day yesterday. This is all I do, is live and breathe, nonviolence, Jesus, Gandhi, King, and anybody who's trying to make the world better. Gandhi knew his assassins. Did you know that, Chip?

Chip Gruen:

No, no, I didn't.

John Dear:

Yeah. For 50 years, he knew them personally. He debated the, the ringleader who funded his killing. So he knew he was about to be killed, and he spent the last couple years of his life struggling to to to reach the level of Jesus. Now I've read every word Gandhi wrote, so I know that, and it's pretty incredible. Martin Luther King, of course, knew he was going to be killed. And I just did a podcast last week about my friend, Reverend Jim Lawson, who was the guy who brought King to Memphis. And we used to talk a lot about that. And if one of the things that has helped me recently is that, and I knew like 15 of Martin Luther King's friends are my friends, I just also did a podcast with Andrew Young last week. King never talked about hope, if you really study. It's very weird. Why? Because everything he did worked, you know, he says, Okay, we're gonna boycott the busses. Oh, my God, we got rid of that. So let's do lunch counters, okay? And then interstate travel, okay, then we'll go to the worst city of all, Birmingham, Alabama, and they bring out the fire hoses and the dogs, and in a week, it's all gone. And then he says, Well, I'll go north. And you know, once you decide to take on the Vietnam War and see the Poor People's Campaign, his idea was to bring 50,000 poor people to sit in at the US Capitol and shut down the government, and then once they got out of jail, I don't know if you knew this, but they were all going to march across the bridge and shut down the Pentagon till the war ended. Well, you have to kill a guy like that, you know, if you're thinking like the state does, and he, he was not winning, everyone was turning against him. He's in Memphis a week before he was killed, for the first time in this life, he started to talk about hope, and he stood up and he said, Tonight, I'm announcing my definition of hope. And he said something shocking, which is not going to impress any of our PhDs who are listening. Hope is the final refusal to give up. And I think that is brilliant in every which way, including theologically. It means I belong to God. I belong to nonviolent Jesus, who they the Empire killed. So I'm doing this until they could finally kill me. And that's been very instructive for me. So then I was raised by the Berrigans, and they instilled that into me from day one. I knew them my whole life. And Daniel Berrigan said to me a million times, we do the good because it's good. We do, we speak the truth because it's true. He quoted Merton, we don't place our hope in results. We place our hope in God and do the good, because it's good, and we enjoy each other's company and relationships and friendships and community along the way. And that has sustained me. And I remember Dan said a million things to me. I mean, you can imagine it was like having Gandhi as your friend and teacher. It really was, Chip like once he said as a kid, John, if you want to be hopeful, you have to do hopeful things. That was helpful. And so I keep getting arrested and organizing conferences, and I'm too busy to be depressed. And he quoted what Dorothy Day said to him when he was a kid, we can't afford the luxury of despair. There's too much work to be done. And so, you know, after a while, you get way beyond fear, anger and despair, and you keep going, you're in another plane. Now I have yet to figure able to figure out how to talk about it, but I can testify from long term relationships that I saw this in Daniel, Philip Berrigan, Coretta Scott King, Mother Teresa, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop Tutu and others like Martin Sheen, who just, they're way beyond me. They're like, there's no question of giving up. Sure you get discouraged. Joan Baez, she just, she was taught. And Andrew Young, I asked him this question. He says, I sing. I start singing the songs of the ancient slaves, the Gospels, and that pulls me out of myself, and I go out there. So we all have to find the resources to keep going. But I want to keep going. I don't want to give up and I want to follow Jesus and I. Empire wants us to give up. Trump wants us to be depressed and angry and then be violent and start attacking the troops, then we're playing right into the hands and the church goes right into the hands of the Empire. Oh, and we're not going to speak out. We don't want to raise any troubles. Hello, folks. We're already in deep trouble. The flood is upon us. Start speaking out, God started saving lives. Shall I stop there for a moment? Let you.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, no, I mean, this is why I knew this would be such a wonderful conversation. I know, I know that you have the gift of eloquence around these, around these topics. So I just want to you know, while we're here, I just want to make mention of the podcast that you're referencing is The Nonviolent Jesus podcast that you know, people can find on their on their favorite podcasting app, but that's really amazing, right? It launched, what, a little over a year ago, I believe it was, and the the guests you have there are from a wide variety of walks of life, right? Bounded together, I'm sure, by your, you know, by the central premise of nonviolence, but there are theologians and activists and artists and politicians. Can you just talk a little bit about what that's been like the last year? And I mean, I've got to think, as you've alluded to, that's been a buoy for you, the community that's founded in in just producing that show,

John Dear:

Right, well, it all sort of happened within a month. I wasn't planning this, but I first when the pandemic started, and I started the Gospel of Peace. I started, I founded the Beatitude Center, and that's when we were all discovering Zoom, and I got a lot of invitations to speak on Zoom and I'm a technophobe. I cannot work my phone. I mean, it's scary. You can't imagine the depths, the horrors of my incompetence. But I can write, not well. I can churn stuff out well. Anyway, so I started doing Zooms, and I set up a little board and would do one or two Zooms a month with all the leading theologians in the country and activists. It's been fantastic. Folks can look it up at beatitudecenter.org and the board started saying to me, Oh, you need to do a podcast. And I'm fundamentally lazy and I'm 66 I should be retiring. Do I have to keep going? I live here by the ocean in Big Sur, and that's all a joke, because things are worse than ever, and I need to keep going. But I am kind of a lazy bum, and so it's all God, because all these things fell into place that I could never in a million years have done I found some local people who are professionals at this, and they became my friends, and they have a studio, and it just took off. And the first day I met with them, they said, Okay, you got to do it every week, and I was going to do it once a month. And I was like, okay, sure that that'll last a month, and then, and you got to do this, and you got to do that. So I just because I'm so old and I've been involved since I was, you know, 21 I've met everybody. That's the way I always say it. I shouldn't tell you this, but I recently met Obama at the funeral of friends, and he said to me, I've been following you for decades. Father John. I just couldn't believe that, but he walked away because he didn't want to engage me. I would have lectured him and said, Yeah, and you've been doing a bad job, Obama. That's what I would have told him. So, um.

Chip Gruen:

I have no doubt.

John Dear:

And I've told Clinton that many times, and once Carter invited me to come and give him a little retreat, and I'm an ex con. This is God what I'm saying anyway. So I invited Martin Sheen and Joan Shuster and Richard Rohr and Helen Prejean and Cornel West and Brian Stevenson. I was just like off and running. Joan Baez, Jamie Raskin, I just did Andrew Young, all the greatest activists I know, and I'm going to keep at it as long as I can. It's called The Nonviolent Jesus podcast. And I just want to ask people like you're asking me, what keeps you going? What are you working on? Tell us some of your stories. How is The Nonviolent Jesus inspire you? How are you living out the Sermon on the Mount. You know, I've had a number of Dr King's friends and assistants on Martin Luther King III is going to come on soon. And I did a zoom with Gandhi's other grandson, who was raised by Gandhi in New Delhi when he was 10, 11, and 12. Can you imagine? He was there when Gandhi. Was killed. He's a friend of mine, and he lives in Illinois, of all places, and just hearing stories like that has been life changing for me. So I go back and forth on the whole experience. I don't know what any of it means. Chip, you know, I'm so bombastic as you know, and I'm praying for the grace of humility. It hasn't quite arrived yet, so I keep thinking. I go from well, why aren't a million people listening to this podcast? Because it's so good, but I don't have money. I haven't organized it like it should be. There's no advertising. We get like 12,000 listeners each episode on nothing, from scratch, so I guess that's pretty good, but I'd love it if people listen in and also help promote it like you're trying to do, but it has been a real blessing just to connect with so many people.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. I mean, I you know we, are our listenership, and everybody out there share this episode and other episodes with all your friends, but our listenership is just a tiny fraction of what yours is. But I got to tell you, you can go down our list of people that I've had the opportunity to talk to, and it's just so it's so rewarding, right? I don't want to say it's a vanity project, just for my own good, because I think it does do good out there, but it is, it is super rewarding, and we're in a world now their technology makes it possible.

John Dear:

It's strange, isn't it, that we have learned zoom and these recording and that world has caught on to podcasts. But the point should be to help people renounce the Trump administration, the Republican Party, the culture of war, America, nuclear weapons, racism, white supremacy, corporate greed. How am I doing here, Chip? Any form of violence? Yeah, we have to turn away from that and take Jesus and the great Peacemaker seriously and become people of peace and love and compassion and justice. And all we have to do is do our own little bit to help out. We don't have to be Martin Luther King or Gandhi. In fact, we don't really even need another Gandhi or Dr King, because we still have them. They're so great. But we all have to get involved. And I wish every podcast was saying that. So I invite people to, you know, choose what you listen to. If you're turning off the news and turning off really bad TV, do the same with podcasts. Listen to Chip here and listen to those people who are encouraging us to resist the injustices that are happening and to welcome a more nonviolent world. Whether we make a difference or not? Is not the question. God is doing her part, but we are called to chip in and build a bottom up peace movement. The only way change happens is bottom up, people power, grassroots nonviolence. And a podcast should serve that. I think that's why, if I may, say that God has allowed us this new strange technology to speak that any ordinary person can speak to so many people? Now it's kind of amazing, but it should be to spread the good news about the power of nonviolence to change ourselves in the world.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to remind you of something that you said to me, and this is, this is something that sticks in my head. So just to set the scene,

John Dear:

Oh forgive me, I don't know what I said, But I'm sorry.

Chip Gruen:

No, I, so we, we were sitting in a conference room in San Diego together, and, of all things, when you looked out the window, you saw all the weapons of war, right? That it was aircraft carriers and battleships and all of that in the Naval Yard.

John Dear:

Well have you been to San Diego? It's like they're planning the end of the world there.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah

John Dear:

It's so many other places too. And everybody thinks San Diego is so beautiful, friends, that's what happened to me in Galilee.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah

John Dear:

This is insanity. You have warships that are planning there to kill millions of people, and we're going about our day to day. We're way worse than the people of Noah's time chip. Unless you interrupt me, I'm going to keep on talking like this. So go.

Chip Gruen:

Let me just remind you what you said to me. So you said to me, I mean, I think you gave me the challenge that you had received right once upon a time about going out and getting arrested, you said, what you need to do is you need to go out there and do what you can to sink one of those battleships right, like beat on it with your hands or whatever. And I, I got to tell you, I'm, I'm in, I'm inspired by you. But what I said at the time and and unironically, although I realize how ironic it was now. I said, Well, you know, maybe someday, right? But, but I've got kids in high school. I've got a family to take care of. And immediately, right? You reminded me of, you know, Jesus calling people to follow him. And he said, you know. And they said, Oh, I've got to go bury my father. Right? Let the dead bury their own dead. And so the question I have for you, right? And that will stick with me to the end of my days.

John Dear:

What did I say to you, though?

Chip Gruen:

But you said you, you said to me, You reminded me of that story of Jesus, right? That story about about people who've been saying that they are too busy, they have other, other things that they have to deal with first for as long as there's been the gospel.

John Dear:

During the Vietnam War, everybody would come up to Dan Baron, go, Father, I so admire you. I could never do what you do because I got five kids. He said, What will happen to your kids if you don't speak out against the war?

Chip Gruen:

Yeah

John Dear:

You know we, what will happen if we don't speak out against nuclear weapons and racism and the growing fascism, we're ensuring that the next generation or two are going to live not just in climate change, but climate change is going to bring 100 wars, and we're ensuring nuclear war. It's so beyond racism and white supremacy. It's the death of the planet. That's why everybody has to get involved and bring your kids along, by the way, form them and teach them how much fun all my friends do that. And those kids are all turned out to be the best ones and smartest, and they all get into Harvard because you're so smart and fearless. You were saying something.

Chip Gruen:

No, so, I mean, so this is my question, right? I used to this is, this is maybe a little disheartening. But this podcast on ReligionWise, I used to end every conversation by asking my guests, all right, you've informed us about, right, whatever this context is, whatever this what can individuals do? And I stopped asking the question because nobody had a good answer about what like the public can do, to be involved, to help heal this problem or that problem, like nobody had really thought about it, right? I have no doubt that you have an answer to this question, but I think, I mean, I'm hearing something a little different from you, from last time we spoke, that the answer is not necessarily to go hammer on a war jet with a hammer and get arrested. Right? This idea?

John Dear:

Well, if you're interested, please contact me. You know there have been 100 of our plow shares, actions. I faced 20 years in prison. It's a felony crime. All the movements in history need frontline people engaging in strict nonviolent civil disobedience that's risky. That's really if you study the abolitionists to the suffragists, the labor movement, even the civil rights movement, how the change comes when a movement is built and everybody is needed, lawyers, doctors, teachers, priests, everybody's got to be involved. But you do need some frontline, good people who break bad laws and accept the consequences to become a symbolic way to wake people up. But so I wouldn't necessarily say that, but I mean, I give you a short list of like 10 things, everybody, if you care, if you're a Christian, you got to go and study the nonviolence of Jesus and see if Jesus is right. And we you know, Gandhi is a Hindu, and reading the Sermon on the Mount every morning and every evening, I dare everyone listening to start doing that. And it's weird stuff. And it says, Blessed are the peacemakers, not the war makers. Love your enemies. Offer no violent resistance to one who does evil. Seek first the kingdom of God in everything, food, clothing, shelter, everything will be provided. And Gandhi said, let's go and experiment with these teachings like a scientist, and I've tried to do that. I found everything he said is true. It's all come true in my life. But, so Jesus is critical. Second, your contemplative practice. We're so sick now it's no good just to go to church or to be mouthing this or that, you got to take quiet time every time, and have an intimate relationship with your God. For me, that's the nonviolent Jesus, but it can be a mother, Godfather, I don't really care. Just go. Minimally, we should all be giving 30 minutes of quiet time, sitting with God each day and getting our marching orders like saying, What is your will for me today? That's the only question. Everything else is selfishness and ego. I want to do your will, not mine. Third, get with a group of friends. The churches were created originally to be communities of nonviolence and resisting the Roman Empire. Now they are institutions of the Empire. So we got to go back and form small communities of peace and love and nonviolence. If you don't have one, start one. Just get five friends read the gospel of peace together. You need a community. We can't do this on our own. Every one of my great saints that I've known and loved said that to me, from the beginning, Dan Berrigan had 15 communities going in his life, up till he was 95. No one knows that. There's a reason he was Daniel Berrigan, but all the great people were surrounded by friends. Jesus, the first thing he did. This form a community. And then, you know, I put your question to Cesar Chavez once, he was the head of the farm workers and a great hero of nonviolence, and he's told me, I said, if I'm talking to people, and anyone ever asked me, I was 29 at the time, what should we do? I said, Cesar Chavez, what should I say? Did you hear me say this before, Chip?

Chip Gruen:

No, no.

John Dear:

He started pounding his fist, and he said, John, for the rest of your life, tell everybody whoever listens to you, public action. Public action. Public action. Isn't that fantastic. He said you have to go and do some public action for justice, disarmament, creation. And he's like, pick your cause. You don't have to do everything. If you're passionate about homeless or fighting racism or I.C.E., great. If you're like me, passionate to stop the wars and nuclear weapons. Great, lot of young people are interested in the environment. Great, get involved and do public, take your action public. It's not even so much that we're political anymore. Was that we just taken our our universal love and peacemaking into the streets, and that's nonviolence. Jesus is out there in the streets and was killed in the streets, and that's what Cesar was trying to teach me. I could go on and on, but I've never forgotten that, that there's a combination of things the inner work we're constantly doing, always building community. People are going to walk away from you, really get angry, your family, starting with your family and your friends, that now you get to be nonviolent and love them. That's the way I always look it and forgive and don't nurse resentment or anger or moving beyond that into passionate public action. And you know, for the long haul, we need to make a commitment. Well, that's when, in the end, you're just like Jesus throwing all your all your trips on God, I place all my trust in you. But I'm sick and tired of the United States and the world. I'm tired of wars and nuclear weapons and racism, killing and 5 billion people starving. I'm done with the culture. I want to be a citizen only now of the kingdom of God. It really does help to hammer on a nuclear weapon, because then you you can't vote anymore, and it really clarifies your relationship to your government, Chip, and do you how? How much do you want to be for the kingdom of God versus the United States? Well, the United States doesn't want me anymore Chip, so I only got God. I'm trying to make you laugh. And do you see my goofy point that the kingdom of God, nothing else is worth pursuing, and money definitely is not worth pursuing. And I got news for you, and this is what turned me around at Duke. We're all gonna die anyway. Apparently, no one has gotten around that, and then we going to die, and we're going to appear before this infinitely loving God, and God's going to go, I love you so much. And what did you do to help suffering humanity? All this wisdom I gave you in Jesus and Gandhi and Dorothy Day? How did you practice non violence and work for an end to poverty and war and nuclear weapons. And I'm saying, Folks, let's get with the program. You know, that's what then you find out what it means to be fully alive and fully believing in God and really plumb the depths of universal love, really loving everybody, especially the people our country says you're not supposed to have I've been in 25 war zones, Chip. And I tell you, you know, walking down the streets of Baghdad, I had come from living in Manhattan, right on Broadway, with Dan Bergen. Now I'm in Baghdad. Baghdad, you know, I stuck out like a sore thumb, as like, you know, they were practically fighting over. Come into my house and have tea and food with me. No, come to my place. I want you. No, come. Whereas you walk down the streets of New York, you don't look into anybody's eyes, you don't talk to anybody. It's around the world I've discovered how to be human from the people we're bombing and killing. I've been in Kabul, Salvador, Nicaragua of South Africa, all these places way more loving and naturally nonviolent, because they're kind of forced to turn to God. We're in real bad shape. And my hope is that we can all renounce every form of violence and support for this unjust Empire that's moving in deeper into fascism. Really take up the challenge, the gauntlet of the nonviolent Jesus, and see what we can do with the little time we have left to welcome God's reign in our midst. That's my hope and prayer for everybody, Chip

Chip Gruen:

Father John Dear, thank you so much for coming on ReligionWise, I think you've given everybody a lot to think about, and your magnanimousness, and,

John Dear:

We're just getting going, Chip, come on!

Chip Gruen:

and good cheer as well. I had thoughts somewhere in the middle. I thought, we'll go for two hours and we'll break it into two segments. I want to be mindful of your time.

John Dear:

Some other day, I'll come again. If you're everybody's bored and you need some political punches, nonviolent punches. Thank you for having me, and thanks for all your good work, and thanks for giving my work a plug. And God bless everybody, okay.

Chip Gruen:

Absolutely. Thank you very much, John, pleasure. This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website, at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise, wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.