In light of headlines that dozens of kids and families were killed in US bombings of Afghanistan on Tuesday, this conversation seems as urgent as ever. God help us. It was a beautiful thing to join my friend and brotha Rob Bell, Baptist minister Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, former Secretary of State George Schultz, author and mega-church co-founder Lynne Hybels, and Southern Baptist leader Jonathan Merritt as we launched the Two Futures Project last week, an ambitious new initiative to abolish nuclear weapons. Several folks have asked for transcripts of the two-minute statements we made at the press conference (via phone). So we threw mine together here:
Forgive the background noise …. I’m sitting in an airport coming back from Taylor University, a typical Christian liberal arts college in the Midwest. But last night hundreds of students built a cardboard shantytown in the middle of the campus quad and slept out in the rain to remember the homeless, undocumented, and displaced people in the world. They will continue to sleep out as part of an entire week of faith and social justice, bringing attention to issues like nuclear weapons, immigration, and poverty.
It was one more sign of the changing face of evangelicalism in post-religious right America, where young Christians are not limited to the hot-button issues and stale debates of the past — but are convinced that our faith has to connect to the world we live in, that we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
And we are aware of the glaring contradictions – that the U.S. continues to try to be a credible voice for peace while maintaining the largest weapons arsenal in the world, with a military budget larger than the combined military budgets of the next 30 countries…
We are convinced that Dr.King was right when he said, “A country that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”
We have seen the mistakes. Harry Truman thanked God for the atomic bomb and prayed God would help us use it wisely, as he dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A new generation in the church is saying our God does not bless bombs. Our God is the One who lived in Jesus and said if we pick up the sword we will die by the sword… if we trust in the bomb we will die by it.
It is this Jesus who said we are to love our enemies, and we are convinced that it is impossible to simultaneously love them and prepare to kill them en masse. When I was a teenager we wore bracelets that said WWJD — What Would Jesus Do? Now young people in the church are taking that a step further, wearing T-shirts like the one I saw last night — WWJB — Who Would Jesus Bomb? And the answer is clear. It is time to imagine another future than the one doomed to us by nuclear arms — one that the prophets foretold where people beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, one where we turn the instruments of death into things that bring life. That is why I am excited to endorse and champion the Two Future’s Project… because I think it gets us one step closer to God’s dream for the world.
For more info and to join the movement, check out www.twofuturesproject.org.
Shane Claiborne is a Red Letter Christian and a founding partner of The Simple Way community, a radical faith community that lives among and serves the homeless in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. He is the co-author, with Chris Haw, of Jesus for President.


