TOKENS PODCAST: S5E4
The commodification of almost everything is one fact of life in the late modern capitalist world in which we live in the west. But commodification even of war? Systematic destruction for the sake of profit? Justin Bronson Barringer joins us to discuss the business of war and the US military industrial complex. Plus, perhaps surprisingly related considerations on on mental health and friendship.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Justin Bronson Barringer recently defended his PhD dissertation, Protest and Politics: A Biographical Theology of Bayard Rustin, Friendship, Charity, and Economic Justice at Southern Methodist University. Justin is a pastor, consultant, writer, editor, and now adjunct instructor. He is a recipient of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, CM Cares Religious Scholars Award, the John Wesley Fellowship with AFTE, the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, and the Cary Maguire Fellowship, as well as the Jenzabar Foundation Student Leadership Award. Perhaps best of all, Justin is the husband of Rachel and father of Israel and Zoe.
Justin is currently co-editing The Business of Modern Life Series which explores the ways that neoliberal global capitalism has infiltrated and come to dominate virtually all spheres of modern life. The series already has several books in the works, and the first one, The Business of War, is now available.
Along with his wife, Justin hosts the Rogue Ministry Podcast, a show dedicated to helping people create and sustain faithful ministries.
Justin and Rachel founded Diapers, Etc. a ministry which "exists to provide diapers, feminine hygiene products, and other important goods not typically covered by government programs or other service providers." They recently handed that work over to a guest-turned-host who attended an early distribution, then began to volunteer, and who has now taken the reins. Over the course of about four years, the ministry has served hundreds of families with around 800k diapers in partnership with Hope Supply Co., over 100 tons of food provided by the North Texas Food Bank, and a variety of medical and other services via over a dozen partner organizations. This work is housed at Owenwood Farm and Neighbor Space/White Rock UMC, where Justin served as Director of Social Outreach.
Justin has a BA in Oral Communication from Lipscomb University, and an MDiv from Asbury Theological Seminary, with a focus on Christian ethics, and he studied faith and public policy in Washington, DC. He has been a missionary in Greece and China, worked extensively among homeless people in cities as varied as Nashville and Los Angeles to Lexington and Little Rock. Justin has served at mercy and justice organizations like The Dream Center and Sojourners. He was also Outreach Pastor at Embrace Church for three years.
Justin writes and speaks at academic and lay levels on topics such as war and peace, wealth/poverty, sexual ethics, and the triad of friendship, hospitality, and community.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Justin: Years ago, I was in D. C. And we had a meeting at the U.S. Senate.
Lee: That's Justin Barringer, one of my former students, and now the holder of a brand new PhD from SMU, recounting an experience he had while studying faith and public policy in Washington, D. C.
Justin: And this person comes in and says, probably not supposed to tell you about this, but I was working in intelligence during the George W. Bush administration, and one day Dick Cheney came in and said, we're going to war in Iraq. Now find me a reason.
Lee: Justin is the co-editor of a new book entitled The Business of War.
Justin: We decided that it really seemed important to kind of just ask like a simple question, like, the old adage follow the money, like where, are our market values driving war-making?
There's a certain group of people that's making a lot of money
Lee: All this, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Justin Barringer has a newly minted PhD from Perkins School of Theology at SMU, along with other books he's authored and edited. He's the editor along with Matthew Tapie and James McCarty of the recently released book, The Business of War, which we'll be discussing today. And I am proud to say he happens to be one of my most colorful and adventuresome former students of mine.
Welcome, Justin.
Justin: Colorful and adventuresome.
I, I'll take that. That’s as almost a high compliment as, you gave, Lindsey Glenn Krinks when you interviewed one of them a while back. So, I'll take it. I'll take it.
Lee: Well, welcome.
And just finished off that PhD in April, a few, a few months previous from when we were taping.
Justin: Yup. I graduated a few weeks ago.
So, thank you.
Lee: Dr. Barringer.
Justin: Yep. It's on a baseball hat. Listeners can't see that, but my wife got me a baseball hat and that's how you know it's official.
Lee: That’s a pretty sweet, pretty sweet to have that.
My wife never got me a Dr. Camp hat. So, yeah.
Justin: Well, you might need to talk to her about that so people know that it's official.
Lee: So, this recent book, The Business of War, is coming at the question, I guess typically in Christian ethics, anytime the question of war gets on a syllabus, it seems like that typically the conversation almost immediately goes to pacifism, just war, or crusading sorts of models, historically, right?
Justin: Yeah. Absolutely.
Lee: But you guys are doing something different here. You're trying to address a set of considerations that typically have not been addressed in the subject. So, tell us a little bit about kind of the big agenda of the book.
Justin: Yeah. So, the idea is that war is a business, but it's a particular kind of business.
As I think we quoted one of the chapters that filmmaking is a business and occasionally artwork comes out of it, right? War-making is this particular kind of business that is, about destruction. I mean, ultimately that's what it is. And so, the fact that there seems to be so little moral reflection on the fact that a lot of war-making is driven either by, you know, people who make the equipment necessary for war, so weapons other things like that. They're profiting, but then also resources that a given country is trying to protect and profit off of.
So, it's really just consistently, it's built around business and it's a growing business. And so, we decided that it really seemed important to kind of just ask like a simple question, like, the old adage follow the money, like where, are our market values, market ideas, driving war-making? There's a certain group of people that's making a lot of money.
And so, that was a really important thing for us to ask. And then that could inform questions around just war and pacifism. So, we talk about like one of the chapters that Tobias Winright, who was a former classmate of yours or colleague of yours back in the day, and Nathaniel Hibner wrote on “the costs of just war”, like what would it look like?
That should be a consideration when entering into a war. Like, how much is this going to cost? You know, who's benefiting from those costs, like who's that money going to? Questions like that. And then a question that they talk about, that I think just in general should be talked more about in just war tradition, is what do you do after a war? Like, what are the costs to clean it up, to rebuild a society, to rebuild, you know, all of that. And so, those questions then inform kind of all the other pieces that we might more regularly talk about when we talk about war in Christian ethics.
Lee: Yeah. You guys talk about neoliberal global capitalism and you talk about the military industrial complex a bit. So, just for those who are unfamiliar with those kinds of terms, why don't you first start talking about neo-liberal global capitalism, what you mean by that and how that informs this particular set of questions?
Justin: Yeah, so, we talk about, neo-liberal global capitalism, and really for that we would just shorten it to neo-liberalism. And the way that, that I think we've talked about is the movement of like money, goods and capital across borders. Um, and then because of that rapid expansion, the logic of the market, the logic of growth, the logic of profit, all of that sort of invades every part of our lives.
And so basically a way that we could also kind of summarize that, a part of that is privatization, deregulation, and then also, the establishment of liberal political orders. And of course, by liberal here, we don't mean like, what is often thought of as conservative, liberal. You had addressed this in your recent book.
My advisor called them, conservative liberalism and liberal liberalism, right? But we're talking about the idea of really focusing on the individual over the community, these kinds of things. And so, you know, we can see this in the military industrial complex when, so, another chapter in the book addresses private military contractors.
Like, this nation hires mercenaries and pays them significantly more than soldiers. And, in fact, there's a whole industry where people go into the military for a period of time so that they can then move on to being some kind of private military contractor and thus make a lot of money.
And then those private military contractors, for instance, don't have something like a government might impose in the same way, like rules of engagement. There's even questions about like what counts as a war crime. If, this isn't committed by uh, official government actor, you know, there's all kinds of these sorts of questions that roll around with that one.
But then if we were to look at neo-liberalism related to other areas, and, we were doing this in this series. For Profit Prisons is a good example that, there's a financial aspect that's driving considerations about the common good. Charter schools. This has been another debate where privatization, so, I guess you could sum up that one is sort of when the private is taking over the public or when market values overtake or replace values that surround the common good.
Lee: Yeah. So, liberalism has an emphasis upon liberty, obviously, but a liberty defined as freedom from restraint, freedom from constriction of any sort.
And so, the way, for example, doing an interview here soon with Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame on his book, Why Liberalism Failed, but you know, he points out how, the left liberals want that liberty particularly expressed with regard to social questions, whereas the right liberals want that especially expressed with regard to the market, the so-called market.
And, and what he says is that, both of those didn’t want to restrict those other areas in certain ways, but he says that what's happened is that both of them have been immensely successful in expanding liberty in the area they want it, and very unsuccessful in limiting it in any other area. So, both of them have been terribly successful.
And, so, we have this sort of, then, I think you're pointing to this issue that given the prevalence of liberty in commercialized terms, or, individual liberation, we might say, or liberalizing individualism in the marketplace, it means that everything gets commodified, right?
And here even war-making gets commodified.
Justin: It does. And we look at freedom and liberty increasingly in terms that are even more defined by the market. So, we look at liberty as comfort, convenience, you know, these kinds of things that we're willing to pay a premium for, right? And we've all experienced this over the past, or most, many folks have experienced this over COVID and all, but like the convenience of being able to go on your phone order food and have that food delivered to your house and you know, all of that.
But then, you know, my wife and I have done that, certainly several times, and we look at it and I'm like, we're paying 15 more dollars or something for a meal for the convenience of that. And I get that during this time there's a safety element to that, but that idea that we're willing to pay extra money to be comfortable and to have things that are convenient, and not only are we willing to pay, and this is the important part I think, we're not willing just to pay money.
We're willing to pay in people's lives for comfort and convenience. I think we're going to talk about this later, but I'm also writing some on country music right now, and there's a, line in a Zac Brown song, Zac Brown Band song, song that I generally like, but he's like, basically, thank God for all the soldiers who've gone abroad so that I can have, you know, my chicken fried and my comfortable blue jeans and my beer.
And I was like, man, he really was onto something. Like, he recognized what they're actually fighting and killing and dying for, and it's so that he can have his comfortable blue jeans and his beer and his fried chicken, right? That was more insightful than most, any commentary I've heard on the way that Americans talk about and think about freedom.
Lee: That's pretty remarkable. I mean, I remember after 9/11, there was this highly controversial speech that George W. Bush made following 9/11 in which he encouraged everyone that one of the ways they could make their contribution to America was to go shopping.
Justin: Go buy stuff, yep.
Lee: Yeah, so, again, yeah, so the sort of mix there between war and commercialization or commodification of everything, it's troubling.
Justin: And you can look at how there's been a difference in attitude. And this is why neo-liberalism is important, which we trace back mostly the rise in, in the eighties, were precursors to it before that, but really the eighties, Reagan, Reaganomics, all this kind of stuff.
But you look at the difference in say a World War II, when what the populace was asked to do was to sacrifice and ration food, and they had freedom gardens. And so, they were asked to sacrifice and make contributions…
Lee: A shared sacrifice among the population, yeah.
Justin: … to social life. And of course, I had problems with this, but women entered, I don't have problems with women entering the workplace. Let's be clear about that, but I have problems that they were pulled into war-making industries, but everyone, or most of the society was like, if this is something we're going to do, then we need to put in sacrifice and effort for it.
Whereas now, most Americans are really concerned about again, is that comfort and that convenience and, there's not a willingness to sacrifice by the average American for whatever conflict or, or whatever.
Lee: Yeah. Or, or maybe it might be more charitable to say whether they are willing to do that or not.
They're not asked to do that.
Justin: Yeah. Well, yeah, absolutely. And maybe, maybe if they were asked then, but yeah, there's not that expectation. And even Jimmy Carter gave a speech. I think somebody, maybe it was me, somebody mentioned it in this book, I believe, but he gave a speech that's often known as the malaise speech where he called Americans during peace time.
He's like, you're willing to make these sacrifices during war time. Why are we not willing to make similar sacrifices during peace time for common goods, you know? And, I think it's a beautiful and a brilliant speech and it got widely panned and, and it was one of the things I think people would point to, and I'm not a presidential historian, but it seems like that'd be one of the things people would point to for his not having been reelected.
Lee: But it seems that that's precisely one of the things that liberalism doesn't have the capacity to do, namely to teach us the virtue of sacrifice for our common good, right?
Justin: Precisely. That's precisely the problem with the liberal order.
Lee: Because the whole point of liberalism is for me to be free from burdens, right? That what it means to be free is to have a maximum amount of liberty defined as freedom from burden.
Justin: Yeah. Freedom from burden. And in some cases, in a slightly better version, maybe freedom from domination. But Christians should find that especially troubling, given that for most of the church's history, freedom was understood as simply the, the ability to do the good. So, freedom is a virtue in the sense that you are free to do what God wants you to do, what God has called you to do, how to live a good life. And that idea of freedom, we still have some idea in our mind of it, I think, but there's no way that our social order can train us to do that, to really be concerned about the good first and foremost.
Lee: Military industrial complex. So, there's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, but how do you see that? Or what's the history of that sort of notion?
Justin: As far as I know, the first time it was used, uh, I believe was by Eisenhower. And it’s an economic subsystem, or the industrial complexes in general are, and they're dependent on private actors shaping public policy.
And so, we're also in this series, we're talking about, the business of missions and the business of church and worship, things like that. So, it could also be how those economic subsystems, private actors are making policy within the church for the sake of financial gain.
Um, and so that's kind of how we've talked about the military industrial complex and it's, it's especially apparent in this particular one. It's easier to see here than maybe some other industrial complexes, but where defense contractors just, as an example, can charge the U.S. government, you know, a trillion dollars to develop an aircraft that ultimately doesn't work. And who's going to do anything about that? There's no way of that being repaid. There's no punishment. It's like, well, we're mad at you, but next time you're ready to develop a weapon or a plane we'll come right back and we'll, throw money at you again.
Lee: I can be skeptical, nay even cynical, along with the best of them. But this claim didn't ring true to me. A trillion dollars to develop an aircraft that doesn't really work well, or according to its promises? A trillion? A trillion is a thousand billion. It's a million, million. And if you're paying attention to American politics these days, you likely know that the recent hotly debated infrastructure bills are in the roughly $2 trillion range, which would be for all manner of roads, bridges, public transit, transit safety, along with climate change mitigation and more.
I knew there had been lots of failed multi-billion dollar military development projects.
So, really? A military project that cost more than a trillion dollars that didn't live up to its promises?
Numerous outlets report that the Lockheed Martin F-35 is a bloated, failed project, which will cost taxpayers, get this: more than $1.5 trillion.
Justin: Unlike most other things that we would consider public goods, like, let's take school, for example, the government is eventually going to say, this is how much funds we're giving to this.
But when it comes to like military contracts, there seems to always be money for it. And modern monetary theorists might think that, you know, printing money as an acceptable and a government can do that. And economy can still function. That's a whole other discussion, but the point being that there always seems to be money for more war making equipment.
When we're constantly told there's not enough money for infrastructure repair or schools, or, you know, these other public goods.
Lee: I used to view in class a number of times, this documentary called Why We Fight that actually opens up with Eisenhower’s speech, which I think it was his farewell speech that he makes when he's leaving the white house, where he talks about the dangers of the military industrial complex.
And it is remarkable given that here he is a decorated general, right? But he's leaving cautioning America about the dangers of the military industrial complex.
Dwight Eisenhower: “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Three days from now after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office. This evening, I come to you with a message of leave taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you ...
Threats, new and kind or degree constantly arise ...
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex...
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist...
We annually spend on military security alone, more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence economic political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government, we recognize the imperative need for this development.
Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”
Lee: It’s incredible, it's an incredible sort of speech. And in, in Why We Fight, they go on to play out a lot of this military industrial complex, but they, I think as I recollect, fill it out as the military industrial congressional lobbying complex.
Justin: Yeah. We’ve done that in some of these chapters where people have combined it in different ways. And, it's all, networking and connected. And even in this series, it was kind of like, do we want to do a volume that's like a reader, that's this critique of neo-liberal capitalism.
And that's essentially what this series will be. It'll just be separate volumes cause there's discreet enough, blank, industrial complexes, but they're all tied together. I mean, just one to go back to this book. So, the U.S. defense industry, the military, is the largest polluter on the planet.
Lee: Wow.
Justin: And so, then that's got to make us think about questions around climate change and all that, but then it also then affects things like, we've got one coming out on the agricultural industrial complex. Well, environments are changing. And if high production and profit is a key, then they're having to change all that because the environment's changing. And often the ways that they do that tend to be, if not destructive to the land, often destructive to communities.
One thing I really want to say, I think it’s really important. The nexus of neo-liberalism and these industrial complexes. One of the key problems I see is the way that it causes us to relate to other human beings. So, we end up often relating to other human beings, thinking of them in categories like entrepreneur, consumer producer, and, in the U.S. one of the very first questions you ask people when you meet them is, what do you do? And by that, you don't mean what do you do with your life, what do you do for a job?
How do you make money? And then we make a judgment on that person based on how prestigious or how wealthy that job might make them. And so, we look at people through this eye of producer consumer relations, rather than a more faithfully Christian way. And just, a better human way of friends, neighbors, community, right? And the destruction of that is fundamentally dehumanizing. And so, the way that we end up treating other human beings, and viewing them as less than human, which then causes all kinds of other problems down the road.
Lee: One example that I think, I had a friend when I was an early rookie faculty member and this friend was the head of our HR department on campus. And I used to just mercilessly tease him and I said, Matt. You're a Christian. You cannot have a department called human resources because humans are not resources, right? They're human beings. And so, I nagged him, I nagged him about it. I mean, you know, being able to talk about the kingdom of God and seeing people as people and so forth. And I nagged him enough that one day I called over to his office and he picked up the phone and he said, kingdom support office.
Justin: I love that, but you're right. And but it's interesting too, that unless humans are viewed as commodities, going back to this idea of neo-liberalism, unless they're viewed as commodities, it's much more difficult for humans to cross borders than, goods, unless they're viewed as somebody who will come in to labor or something like that.
So, you know, you've got a mess load of…
Lee: You’re saying, if you see them as commodities, then you open the doors because you need labor?
Justin: Yeah, exactly. If you, if you see them as, as somebody who can be used for financial gain, then you don't make a big deal about migrant laborers when you need your fruit pit, you know, but when.
Lee: They're refugees needing shelter as human beings.
Justin: Exactly, exactly. And so, that's a huge issue too. So, like all of this just comes down to just really dehumanizing people. And most Christians would look at like say prostitution and we would generally recognize that that's morally wrong to buy another person for sex. Right?
But is it also not morally wrong to buy another person for some other type of labor? And I'm not saying it's wrong to pay people for labor, but for that to be the only reason that you let them into your country, your community, your life, is because they can offer you something you can pay for, is a problem.
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This is our interview with Dr. Justin Barringer about the book The Business of War. Coming up, we'll hear more about surprising realities surrounding the military industrial complex, as well as the parts which traditional Christian values, such as justice and friendship, may have to play in finding alternative solutions to social, political, and ethical conflicts.
Part two in just a moment.
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Justin Barringer.
So, what do you make of those who see concerns for matters like this as just something those pacifists worry about?
Justin: Well, I mean, for this book, I would point out that many, maybe most of the writers wouldn't consider themselves pacifists. I mean, Tobias Winright who, I mentioned earlier, I mean, he's a well-known just war scholar. And frankly, I think he's one of the best living just war scholars. But we have several folks in this book who would not label themselves as pacifist or, they might say they're kind of right on the edge of that, but we've, definitely got, you know, just war folks in here. And then we even have, so Stan Goff would consider himself a pacifist or committed to nonviolence, but his career was as an army ranger.
And that was one of the reasons we were interested in getting him involved in this project, because he could see and speak to some of the awful things that he, and he's done this elsewhere. Some of the awful things that he was asked to do. And so, this isn't just a bunch of, I don't know, liberal hippies or a bunch of pacifists or a bunch of, some terrible pastor said, you know, we're limp wristed pacifists, or whatever.
It's not that. This is just a simple realization that treating other human beings as less than human is a problem. And if we first and foremost make war a business, then it inevitably leads to this is why we use the language of, oh gosh. Why did my mind just go blank? Collateral damage. Thank you. You know, we, even in that, we, euphemized this because we, don't want to face the fact that, we have taken human life. We, whoever we is, and there's various ways in which we're all implicated in this, I think.
But so even in war itself, but then when you think about the business aspect of it. You combine two pieces that, both, are inherently dehumanizing, then it just exacerbates that fact. And so, I think that is one of the things that we think is important. And then we just want people, you know, we write about theology, but this would apply to any person of good will. That, we want them to, to ask honest questions about why it is that the United States has this massive defense budget that dwarfs every other defense budget in the world. Or, why it is, one of the chapters that Won Chul Shin wrote.
Why it is that we view North Korea as the threat when South Korea’s military spends exponentially more on weapon systems and on, you know, military technologies, training, all of that. And then on top of that is provided with tons of money from the U.S. and tons of technology and weapons systems and all of that.
And in a way, certainly they could do more destruction. If there were to be a war between North and South Korea, it would be over quickly. I don't want to pretend to know the mind of a terrible dictator, but he probably recognizes that. Right? And so, we often are not really asking honest questions.
So, another one that is a huge problem that Bradley Burroughs covers in here, is this history of the business of war in Latin America. So, during the Cold War, when the U.S. was so interested in liberal order and, you know, often that's put under democracy, but they're related.
Lee: But capitalism more so in Latin America, right?
Justin: Yeah. And, and so the, the liberal order has always been in the U.S. focused on protection of property and, we have things like the castle doctrine in most states, right? Just because somebody walks in your house, you can say they were a threat and you're off the hook, right?
But, you know, all the way back to slavery. Um, so the point I was making, about Bradley's chapter in the book is right now, I've been to the border in fairly recent times. And I've seen the tent camps in Matamoros across the border from Brownsville, Texas, and there is just mass human suffering going on there.
And I've been to Honduras recently. And so, I saw the other end of the mass human suffering that's going on. And we should ask, why is it these folks are coming? Why are they leaving their homes to try to come here? And a lot of people will say, well, we need to fix their countries. And then they can say there, well, it was American intervention in Central America that set off this whole chain of corrupt governments.
And so even this, business of war, even though we didn't really have like official wars, we had we'll call them military incursions or interventions. And we even euphemized that stuff, and that has had several generations of implications, that now the U.S. doesn't want to face up to. Or, the fact that the most bombed country in the history of the world is the country of Laos. And that all happened during the American war with Vietnam, which when I was in Vietnam, I loved that they had a museum called the American War Museum. Cause we always call it the Vietnam War. Right? Um, like it was their fault or something, but Laos was bombed, even though it was not officially, even part of that war, war was never declared on them.
And then that has consequences today. There are literally thousands and thousands of unexploded munitions all across that country. And I don't know the numbers, but I do know that people get killed every year that are out in their farms, doing whatever. And they step on a munition that was unexploded. Or, they hit it with hoe or something and they die because these munitions are still there. So, all that to say is that this has reverberating effects that Americans, and not just Americans, but that's, I mean, given the current state of who has big military and all need to ask, like how is it that this is affecting human life and flourishing?
Lee: Yeah. I've got a colleague who worked for 17 years in Guatemala, married a Guatemalan woman. So, you know, he's been deeply embedded in the life of that country. And he speaks of the ways in which, you know, he says what we call the Cold War wasn't cold in Latin America. It was quite hot.
Justin: Oh. In fact, one of the things Bradley Burroughs points out, and I find this really compelling, is he said, that American military intervention there directly led to Christian martyrs. Folks like Oscar Romero and others who were killed. Because they were viewed as either sympathizers with America, or they were viewed on the other side, you know, they got caught in this political this, this, you know, and, and they, most of them were just trying to faithfully preach the gospel and serve.
And so, we can point to the fact that, the American military industrial complex has created Christian martyrs. And that should really make Christians think about what our commitments are and what we're doing. And we should be aware of these histories because these histories influence our present decisions.
Lee: One of the things that's fascinating to me, that all of this is pointing to is that, I do think that the just war tradition, and, you know, for those who are listening and are unfamiliar with this kind of language. Just war tradition doesn't mean a dismissive, well, it's just war.
You know, it means there are criteria by which the use of violence, or the use of war, is thought to be justifiable, but it's a very stringent set of criteria, right?
Justin: It is. It would make most just war theorist’s functional pacifists.
Lee: Right. Because, the given realities of conflict on the ground typically can't meet those criteria.
Justin: Yeah. And nor can, most of the realities that come at the front end of just war thinking of, deciding of whether or not to enter the war. There are so many complications there.
Lee: And there's just all sorts those criteria that if you began to look at just, you know, single ones of them makes the issue of contemporary war making quite problematic.
So, for example, if you look at, the criteria and of last resort, right? So, the idea there is that one should invest an equivalent amount of effort into nonviolent resolution of conflict as one would into a violent resolution of that. And then you guys are pointing to this humongous financial expenditure of resources and wealth on prepping for war.
But we don't have anything close to that in our commitments to nonviolent resolution to conflict, right? Or if you look at the criteria of proportionality, right? That there should be some sort of recognizable proportionality between injustice that's being addressed, the oppression that's being addressed, the violence being addressed.
And then what one does in war-making. And, you know, this is one that, it always surprised me that this got so little conversation in the press, but, following 9/11 and the start of the second Iraq War. One, a lot of the population assumed falsely, due to the rhetoric of the administration, that the Iraq War was linked somehow to 9/11, but then there this is later denied.
It didn't have anything to do with 9/11. But the numbers of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan. There was a study that came out by The Lancet several years ago, right at holy week it was ironic. So well-respected British journal and they were saying that somewhere like 1.1 million people had been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 800,000 of those in Iraq.
And you know, when you think about that, it's just mind boggling. And again, there's this ease of dismissal and this refusal to take the struggling of people seriously, I think, that can allow us just to not pay that much attention to that story.
Justin: Yeah. And its other consequences in, in Iraq that folks don't talk about, it's driven out most of the Christian population of Iraq, in part, because some people think of the U.S. as a Christian nation.
And so. They see an attack by Christians on Muslims, and then naturally, you know, folks want to retaliate different things like this happen. And also, there's some issues with the fact that sometimes it can be easier to go to another, Western country, to Europe, to the U.S. if you're a Christian, in fact, some people will get baptized, to get a certificate, to show that in certain countries, as yeah, I'm sort of, I'm one of y'all or, you know, whatever it might be.
And so, there's that thinking about it? But I'll just go ahead and tell this story real quick. I've written about it publicly, so I don't know if Secret Service or CIA is going to show up. But years ago, I was studying faith in public policy in D.C. And we had a meeting at the Senate, the U.S. Senate.
And I was sitting, I remember this, she's not relevant to the story exactly. But I was sitting in Senator Gillibrand's chair. I remember that because there was a little plaque there. And we were talking to some people from like the intelligence industry, like, how they view what they're doing.
And moral question, just, kind of conversing with them about that as we're learning. And one of the people said, I'm probably not supposed to tell you all this. And I was like, oh, this, this is going to be good. And my wife, when she hears this, she's going to be annoyed cause I've told this story a million times.
And she jokes about it. But this person comes in and says, probably not supposed to tell you about this, but I was working in intelligence during the George W. Bush Administration, and one day Dick Cheney came in and said, we're going to war in Iraq. Now find me a reason.
Lee: A brief interruption here to note that it's not possible for us to independently verify Justin's account.
Justin: And I, always thought that it probably went down something like that. Right? But to hear somebody who was part of that say that, preface it with, I'm probably not supposed to tell you that, that really struck me you know. Going back to the earlier commentary, he had both sort of personal motivations for sort of a revenge retaliation, but he also got a financial interest in a number of ways. That military encouraging there would benefit him and people he knows financially. And so, this is the kind of stuff that some of it is behind the scenes, but a lot of it, if we just pay attention, we can see these realities there and you're right. Some of these things should just be covered.
The press is a whole other, right, that's often put in with this complex. The such and such media industrial complex, because the press is, owned by a small handful of very wealthy individuals and wealthy individuals…
Lee: Slash global corporations.
Justin: … and global corporations. But, I mean, those are led and managed by wealthy individuals who then have, friendships with other, you know, rich people.
And, so you can just see how influence is working in these systems. And, you know, I'm not some kind of like conspiracy theorist about the press that thinks all of the mainstream media is completely unreliable or anything like that. I think that we just need to be aware that the stories that that are shared are chosen. And this is something that Christian preachers need to be aware of when we preach, we choose text, right? Unless you're in a denomination that uses the lectionary or something, but we choose text.
Lee: Which we could probably use more of those.
Justin: Yeah, we, we, we choose the text. And so, the same thing with the news story. There could be a thousand news events that happen in a day, whatever the number is and you choose which ones you're going to share and not share.
And that itself, even if it's not intended to be nefarious influences the way that the wider world sees things.
Lee: It’s the inescapable subjectivity of the system, of media, even when you have the most well-meaning folks who are seeking to be fair and objective in their storytelling, you have the inescapable reality of subjectivity at the levels the stories that we choose to tell.
I want to shift gears for a second towards an unexpected term for those who are listening perhaps, but you've talked a lot publicly about mental health. And one of the reasons that I, as I was preparing for this, thought, I might want to raise this issue with you is that I know when I was a young, newly minted PhD myself, I was immersed in reading a lot of things like, you know, about the Berrigans or Dorothy Day or, historic atrocities and injustices and so forth.
And, years later when I'd be sitting, I remember this day where a therapist one time said to me, I can't figure out where your grief comes from. And after some time, I think he and I both kind of realized it came from books.
And that there had been such a heavy laden reality of reading history and reading of the tangible horrors of oppression, that it created a sort of anxiety, lack of place, you know, sort of placelessness perhaps, a lack of feeling at home in a world, in which so much of this sort of violence was either overlooked or in some cases celebrated, right?
And in time that stuff, fueled a sort of unhealth in me, emotionally. And so, I'm wondering, given your own public conversations about mental health, and given that you're investing a lot of attention and energy to these questions, and a lot of people just don't want to talk about. How do you see those things sitting alongside each other?
Justin: So, I often semi joke that I wish I had decided to study chemistry or something else, because at the end of the day, I could leave my lab set and go home and not have to think about it. But studying ethics, studying theology, I constantly am coming across new ideas and things where I have to think about, okay, what do I need to do?
Like, how does this relate to me? My family, my church can be like, this stuff. It does, it weighs on you. Not only the sort of grief of the atrocities and lots of frustration and anger I've had over the years at how did I miss some of this stuff for so long?
And then now how are church communities and stuff I'm a part of missing things that now seem very obvious to me? And, how did we go from a group of people for several centuries that celebrated martyrs, to a group of people that celebrates killing? All of that, and then, you know, studying things about economics has been a big question about, why is it that we have people who are starving to death or dying of common diseases that are easily treatable in a lot of places in the world? Now all of that kind of stuff. And yeah, it does. It weighs on me a lot. And short version of my story is I pretty much had mental health issues my whole life.
I was first hospitalized at 13 for suicidal ideation, but then when I came to a PhD program, I think the burden of just the stresses for anybody who's not done a PhD, it's very demanding.
And so that combined with the fact that everything I was studying had to do with questions about how to live a good life.
And so often that meant looking at how people have lived very bad lives and done very terrible things. But then often that also meant looking at people who had lived really good lives and saying, I want to live like that, but that then requires stuff of me.
Here I am writing about all this stuff at, really significant, I think critical moment in in U.S. history and in global history, and I'm not participating in doing stuff out there, whatever that might be.
And so yeah, all of that weighed on me. And also, I could have probably chosen other pieces of ethical, moral life to study, but this is kind of why I was drawn to.
And yeah, it does. It weighs on you heavy. And so, I had about a four-year deep depression at the beginning of it, um, if I had been in any other ethics PhD program, I probably would have had to drop out, but I had such an incredible supportive faculty.
My advisor would call me regularly and say, I'm praying for you. He and I had talked a lot about mental health. And the program director at the time, I was having a hard time getting an appointment with the psych services on campus. And she was like, well, give me 30 minutes.
And 30 minutes later, I had an email with an appointment time. And so, like, they just looked out for me. And all of my professors, like, whatever we need to do, we'll switch your workload around whatever we need to do to help you get healthy.
And so, while I'm still very much on a journey towards better mental health it's going to continue to be a journey but I'm in a better place.
But I don't know. I would tell folks if they've ever had any issue with mental health, they really ought to think long and hard about doing a PhD in you know, something like psychology, ethics, anything where you're going to have to deal with…
Lee: Heavy realities of life.
Justin: … yeah, difficult subjects like that. You really need to consider, and I tell all of the incoming students at SMU at orientation, go ahead and set up an appointment with the health center now, because even if it doesn't end up you need it, you should be connected there.
Lee: Yeah. So that we don't end on such a down note on Christian ethics. I think that, and I know that you wrote on this in your dissertation, but one of the ways in which the discipline of Christian ethics in some ways has kind of helped save my life, is in the notion of the virtue traditions.
What ethics is always ought to be about is about what does it mean to live a good life? And what does a flourishing life look like or what it is, I tell my students, right? The whole point of this is to try to figure out how to live a life that's happy in which we rightfully define happiness, you know?
And so, you know, these days I can look back on all that kind of stuff and the grave difficulties. And I could never say that I'm grateful for the pain, but I can definitely say I'm grateful for the goods that have come to me through the crucibles, right? And again, I think that's one of the things that's beautiful about the Christian virtue tradition, or all the virtue traditions, is that one only gets to the places of flourishing through one's own story or communal stories of struggle, right?
And then the part I know that you've written about some is the notion of friendship and the crucial, crucial nature of friendship. But why don't you end with us just talking a little bit about things you've learned in your writing about friendship?
Justin: Well, one thing is that friendship, like some of these other words, like happiness and stuff has been so distorted in current language.
Right? You know, I've got 2,812. I don't know, I'm making up a number of Facebook friends. But we call them friends and 2,700 and some of them I've never met. And so, we now look like when somebody said, oh, you're, studying friendship. Like, I'm going to put out a cutesy little book with fun quotes and pictures of, you know, puppies or something like that, you know, talk about friendship. But really friendship is probably the single most, if not the single most, one of the most, influential pieces of our moral lives. Our friends, either they teach us a good way of living life, or they teach us a bad way of living life.
And of course, a lot of this tradition has talked about, you know, if they're teaching you to live a bad life, then they're not really friends, even though we use that language, but those people that are showing you, how to live a good life.
And so, what I kind of learned there is when you have friendships with virtuous people and you build up virtuous lives, then this affects the way you think about like issues of money. When you have friends that are significantly poorer than you and like friends, I'm not talking about just like some folk you know, but like friends.
That should make you question your own purchasing decisions. What is need, what is excess? What is all of these kinds of things?
And so, friendship is just, absolutely central to just about everything in Christian faith, the whole gospel of John is more or less about friendship. Aquinas you know, has, several things on this, but he says that the purpose of human life, our end goal, our telos, is friendship with God.
That is what we're headed for. That, Jesus says, I don't call you servants anymore. I call you my friends. The greatest love there is, is laying your life down for one's friends. And then of course, Jesus does this on the cross, which I think has massive theological implications that, the cross is an invitation into friendship.
He's either dying for the people who are currently as friends or using that as an invitation into friendship. And when he's called friend of sinners, he doesn't call himself that he's called that by other people. And they're using it as an insult. And what they mean by sinners are the outcast, the unpopular, and Jesus showed us a much different way of doing life and politics by befriending these outside folks, because they should be deeply influential in our moral lives. And this is something that for most of the Christian tradition, it's there, you can read this throughout so many writings in the Christian tradition, and yet at some point, along the way, like a lot of Christian virtues and practices, they've been pushed aside for a variety of reasons.
And so, I think we not only need to regain the language of friendship, but really the practice the sincere practice of being intentional about building friendships with people who help us be more like Christ.
Lee: I've been talking to Justin Barringer about friendship, about mental health and about the recent book he edited along with Matthew Tapie and James McCarty entitled The Business of War. Justin been great to be with you today. Thanks for stopping by to be with us here in Nashville.
Justin: Thank you friend. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
Lee: Great to be with you. Thank you.
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
If you would like to hear more about war, theology, and non-violence, then check out our episodes with Diana Oestreich who reflects upon her own deployment to Iraq and how that led her to an unanticipated change of conviction; or our colorful and delightful interview with Stanley Hauerwas; or our interview with poet and Irish peacemaker Padraig O'Tuama.
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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jakob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, and Tom Anderson. Engineers Patrick McDermott and Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White and Blue Dot Sessions.
Dwight Eisenhower: “We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations may have their great human needs satisfied. That all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity. And that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made disappear from the earth.
And that in the goodness time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
Thank you. And good night.”
Lee: The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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