NOTE: Much of this material first appeared in “The Spiritual Roots of
Restorative Justice,” by Pierre Allard and Wayne Northey in
“Christianity: The Rediscovery of Restorative Justice” (Michael Hadley,
editor. New York: SUNY Press, 2001)
Introduction
An exchange in a forthcoming novel set during the Vietnam War era reads:
******
“You want to know why I believe Europe so quickly secularized and is so
incredibly resistant to the Gospel today? It’s not all that unlike
Muslims.
“You North Americans are so hung up about the Enlightenment and its
disparagement of the ‘foolishness’ of the Gospel. But you fail to
understand that Western Europe simply became utterly sick of the
endless and horrendous bloodshed blessed or instigated by the church:
the Crusades; the Inquisition; the (what’s that word in English?)
pogroms against Jews; the Holy Wars; the witch-hunts; the burning of
thousands of heretics by the Catholics; the drowning of similar
thousands of Anabaptists by Protestants; the incredibly retributive
penal justice system modelled after church canon law, and universal
support of the death penalty; the church’s blessing both sides of every
war in Europe since Constantine; and on and on and on ad infinitum, ad
nauseum.
“If
I just had majority church history to go on, I’d be a raving atheist
too. There has been arguably no more bloody institution in Western
history than the church since the fourth century! If this is what Paul
meant by ‘Christ, the power of God’, then frankly, ‘the revolt of
atheism is pure religion’ by contrast. (I heard an American theologian
named Walter Wink once say that at Wheaton.) Ironically, however, that
very revolt is instigated in the first place by biblical revelation.
Jesus first elicited the Western atheistic philosophical tradition with
his cry from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
Jürgen Moltmann, and I’ve also heard him say this, observes that this
indeed is either the end of all religion, and therefore the atheists
are right, and likely the anarchists too, or the beginning of a whole
new way of understanding ‘the executed God’.
“There’s a line from a German poem, I forget by whom, that goes: “Die
Gerechtigkeit der Erde O Herr hat Dich getötet!” The moral
righteousness of the Earth, O Lord, has killed You! The blood spilled
on the ground in the name of Christ for nearly two thousand years is by
far the strongest counter-evangelistic argument I know. Why should any
morally sensitive person want to align with such an insatiably
blood-drenched institution? I’ve never thought of this, but it would be
like, like evangelizing for membership in the Mafia!
“And it continues. To this day, missionaries either follow the gunboats
as Hudson Taylor did in evangelizing China, or they benefit from the
violence of the colonizing powers. One reason that missionaries in this
century came to be hated in so much if the Third World was their
complete identification with Empire – British or American, these past
two centuries. Hudson Taylor’s ‘spiritual secret’ was in reality a
‘military not-so-strictly kept secret’.
“Contrary to all that, I argue in my paper, if Christ is the
foolishness of God in response to the Enlightenment, but really God’s
ultimate wisdom, he is likewise the weakness of God in answer to
violence and war, but really his is the way of self-giving, nonviolent
sacrificial love which is truly God’s revolutionary power. Jesus the
(Other) Way, right?
“A lot of what I’m saying now comes from my paper, which gets quite technical, sometimes. Sorry….
“I’ll stop now.” He did. Noises of dishes and pots came from the
kitchen. There was muted conversation. Andy asked: “How can you
appraise the Enlightenment so positively, calling it God-ordained?”
Gary added, “Hans, I learned at Bible School that the Enlightenment was
the real enemy today of Christianity. Yet you paint it as almost from
God.”
Hans responded: “The Enlightenment was in part an understandable
reactionary celebration of the brilliance and goodness of man over
against a church perceived to exist to glorify violence through its
belief in ‘god’ and a doctrine of ‘original sin’ that leads directly to
a hell of eternal conscious torment and the ultimate degradation of
man. ‘Wretched worm’ theology is handmaiden to a hell of eternal
conscious torment. How does the King James go?: “Where their worm dieth
not, and the fire is not quenched.”
*********
“Violence is the ethos of our times,” begins one writer’s robust
assessment of contemporary Western culture (Wink, 1992, p. 13). By
“violence” is meant the deliberate infliction of harm upon another as
an end in itself. This is of course also what “penal” (from the Latin
poena – pain) means: the purposeful infliction of pain upon another as
an end in itself: ‘pain delivery like milk delivery’, as Nils Christie
aptly catches its quintessence and banality (1). Violence in Western
culture is bar none the dominant spirituality of our age. It is and has
been the driving spirituality of Western penal law as well.
Centrality of Western Christian Spirituality for Criminal Justice
The defining religious ethos of Western spirituality historically has
been Christianity. Christianity has also been the reigning ideology in
the West until into the nineteenth century. While it is salutary to
discuss other world spiritualities with reference to Western penal law,
no other religion or spirituality has remotely impacted the formation
of the Western legal tradition like Christianity. Harold Berman’s
magisterial Law and Revolution (1983/1997) describes this interaction
of law and Christianity as centrally formative to the Western legal
system.
The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice (Hadley, 2001) points
towards a vision of penal abolition and transformative justice. It
presents a religious pluralistic vision and is highly recommended! But
given the unmatched dominance of Christianity in influencing the
development of the Western penal law tradition, I shall concentrate my
attention on Christian spirituality and penal abolition (2).
While one cannot wish away the past, can it be too much to hope that
the twenty-first century for Christian spirituality world-wide will be
marked by a profound renewed impulse towards peacemaking? Such a
world-transforming spirituality has never been more needed! (3) It is
the contention of this paper that the Christian story offers a
dramatically alternative narrative to that of resort to violence, seen
unfortunately so predominantly in Christianity’s long history. The
story the Christian faith tells is eternal wellspring for the
spirituality of nonviolence and penal abolition, however massively
unfaithful Christian adherents have been to the plot-line down through
the ages (4).
Some Western Church History
In March, 1773, in England, an eighteen-year-old youth, John Wilkes,
was sentenced to death for a break and entry into a house and later a
robbery of a watch and money from a man on the public highway. He
appealed to Rev. Joseph Fletcher, an Anglican divine, for help in
having the sentence commuted. The youth’s parents had both died
earlier, and Wilkes was in many ways pitiable, a fact fully known to
the Anglican priest. Rev. Fletcher was universally considered an
18th-century St. Francis, “the holiest man this side of eternity,” by
contemporary John Wesley’s account. In particular he was renowned for
his commitment to caring for the poor. Nonetheless, he adamantly
refused to intervene on Wilkes’ behalf. After the youth’s execution,
Fletcher published a letter he had written Wilkes, which had urged him
to “confess your crimes, and beg the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ,
to intercede for you, [for] it is not too late to get your soul
reprieved.” He continued by promising that God Almighty “will deliver
you out of the hands of the hellish executioner” and “will help you to
die the death of the penitent (quoted in Gorringe, 1996, p. 3).”
According to Fletcher, Wilkes died a convert, a fact gloriously
published by him after the youth’s execution.
Both Charles and John Wesley, famed founders of the Methodist church,
were deeply committed to caring for the poor, including responsiveness
to Jesus’ powerful words of solidarity with the imprisoned: “I was in
prison and you came to visit me.’ (Matt 25:36)” Nonetheless, we read
this account by Charles Wesley of his visit to Newgate prison, July,
1738, on the morning he accompanied nine prisoners to the gallows:
“They were all cheerful, full of comfort, peace and triumph, assuredly
persuaded that Christ had died for them and waited to receive them into
paradise…. I never saw such calm triumph, such incredible
indifference to dying.” He returned home and wrote: “Full of peace and
confidence in our friends’ happiness. That hour under the gallows was
the most blessed hour of my life (Gorringe, 1996, p. 4).” (5)
The Wesley’s, Father John Fletcher, and their followers, were genuinely
concerned for the poor. One Christian historian therefore plaintively
asks: “What was it, then, which prevented them from seeing what the
editors of the Spectator so clearly perceived [- ‘that law grinds the
poor’ and ‘rich men make the law’]? How was it that they could see
people like Wilkes, whose hopeless background they perfectly
understood, go to the gallows for offences which were trivial and which
involved no violence against the person, without exerting themselves to
have the sentence commuted?… How is it that the question whether the
law might be wrong, or even wicked, does not arise for these good
Christian people? How could they come away from scenes of judicial
murder feeling that this was ‘the most blessed day of their lives?’
(Gorringe, 1996, p. 5)”
One might similarly ask, with regard to contemporary Western law: How
is it that the question whether the law might be wrong, or even wicked,
does not arise for people committed to Christian spirituality? How
could harsh sentences to penal institutions and the death penalty be
embraced as quintessentially Christian by followers of the One who
said: “[God] has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners… (Luke
4:18),” and “I desire mercy, not sacrifice (Matt. 12:7)”; and who
himself was executed by the best legal system of the day (Roman), and
by guardians of arguably the high point of then contemporary religious
spirituality (Judaism)?
Something happened to Christian spirituality between the Cross,
originally premier symbol of resistance to and negation of abusive
state power, and the Cross, throughout most of Christian history,
supreme upholder of unbridled state power. Christian spirituality
initially had a profound political subversion dynamic at its very core.
It also represented an unprecedented anthropological thrust that broke
with dominant contemporary cultural scapegoating patterns. In honouring
and worshipping an executed criminal, early Christians became irksome
dissidents to the dominant mythology of culturally and state-sanctioned
scapegoating violence.
René Girard, historian, literary scholar, and anthropologist, about
whom we talked past week, has for over forty years developed this
understanding of Christianity brilliantly, and has studied scapegoating
violence across a sweeping interdisciplinary landscape. In turn, his
publications have inspired an enormous body of published research that
similarly discerns a scapegoat mechanism in most human cultures
throughout history, contemporary Western no less (6).
As a large body of scholarship demonstrates, what “happened” to Jesus’
and New Testament teaching was the legalization and embrace of
Christian worship and Church by Roman Emperor Constantine in the early
fourth century (7). One writer dubs it a “Judas kiss.”
The same historian comments on the Constantinian era: “But there is one
conquest made by Constantine, the effect of which still continues to
the present day, his most surprising yet least acknowledged… He
conquered the Christian church. The conquest was complete, extending
over doctrine, liturgy, art and architecture, comity, ethos and ethics.
And this is the greatest irony, that Constantine achieved by kindness
what his predecessors had not been able to achieve by force. Without a
threat or a blow, and all unsuspecting, the Christians were led into
captivity and their religion transformed into a new imperial cult….
But this achievement, unheralded then, unrecognized now, represents
Constantine’s greatest conquest, the one which has persisted largely
unchallenged through the centuries in Europe and wherever European
Christianity has spread (Kee, 1982, p. 154).” The writer adds that “the
reign of Constantine is a fundamental turning-point in the history of
Europe, and not only Europe. From that time the imperial ideology, with
all its implications for the accumulation of wealth and the exercise of
power over the weak, was given religious legitimation by the church
(Kee, 1982, p. 168).” The persecuted Church too easily became the
persecuting Church in its response to pagans, Jews, other outsiders,
and eventually criminals.
This past century, a large body of biblical scholarship (8) upon
rereading the founding texts has discovered the truth of Gandhi’s
statement: “The only people on earth who do not see Christ and his
teachings as nonviolent are Christians (quoted in Wink, 1992, p. 216).”
Gandhi also wrote: “The message of Jesus, as I understand it, is
contained in the Sermon on the Mount…. Much of what passes as
Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount (quoted in
Stassen, 1992, p. 33).” This much at least may be stated unequivocally:
there is “a great irony of history that the cross, symbol of the
ultimate triumph of peaceful means to peaceful ends, has been used as a
standard in battle (Anderson, 1992, p. 104).”
A Short History of Christian Violence (9)
I will now give you a quick bird’s eye view of some of the church’s
most violent moments. I am purposely centering out the violent aspects
of that history. That is not the whole story by any means! Thankfully,
there is also lots of good news throughout this sad tale. Hindsight is
20/20 as is said. It is always easy to critique other eras through
lessons painfully learned from humanity’s passing through that history.
We should be very careful about throwing stones, we who live in
incredibly violent times…
1. As Christianity expanded into the Roman Empire during its first
three centuries it met with significant resistance from the
governmental authorities, which often took the form of direct
persecutions resulting in Christian martyrdoms. During this period,
Christians were, generally speaking, the recipients of violence rather
than the perpetrators of it. After Christianity became a tolerated and
then an official religion, however, it became much more common for
violent acts to be carried out by Christians. This change began in 311
AD, when Emperor Constantine first declared Christianity a legal
religion.
2. Priscillian was a Spanish ascetic. His enemies in the Spanish church
lobbied the Emperor Maximus, and succeeded in obtaining his
condemnation for heresy. Priscillian and one of his followers, the
noblewoman Eucrotia, were beheaded in 384. This was the first case in
which heretics had been formally tried, convicted, and executed through
the cooperation of church and state, foreshadowing the extensive powers
of the Medieval Inquisition (Megivern, 1997, pp. 30-31). The
intractable problem of the Church’s dealing with the religious heretic
that began with this case, continued during all subsequent centuries.
The Church’s resort to massive violence and capital punishment in
response to religious heretics, became model for all Western States to
treat social heretics – criminals – in the same way. Had earlier
Christian intuitions of mercy, love, and forgiveness been dominant,
Western criminal justice history might have turned out dramatically
differently!
3. In the year 390, the people of Thessalonica murdered the military
commander of the city. The Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered a
massacre of the city’s inhabitants, which resulted in more than 7,000
deaths. Under pressure of excommunication, exerted by Ambrose,
Theodosius publicly repented of his sin (Dowley, 1995, p. 151).
For centuries afterwards, the church generally shrank from endorsing
violence as a means of achieving justice. But this all began to change
in the 11th century, when Saint Anselm wrote his treatise on the
atonement, during what is called by some the “Papal Revolution.” It was
so-called, because of the explicit move by the Church to be the
ultimate power in Europe. More on this follows.
4. The Crusades were a series of military expeditions organized by
Western European Christians, during the 12th and 13th centuries, in an
effort to recover the Holy Land from the Muslim “infidels.” The first
Crusade was very successful militarily, achieving several victories
over the Turks as the Western armies advanced toward Jerusalem. On July
1, 1097, one of the main Muslim armies was defeated and almost
completely decimated by the Crusaders. Two years later the Crusaders
reached Jerusalem and captured it after a relatively brief siege. In
the course of taking the city they massacred most of the
inhabitants—men, women, and children. Jerusalem was described by
observers as being “awash in a sea of blood.” The Crusaders saw their
actions as being an expression of God’s righteous judgment on the
Muslim “infidels” who deserved to die for their rejection of Christ and
their “desecration” of the Holy City. Various subsequent Crusades were
carried out during the next two centuries, most resulting in military
failure or short-lived Latin kingdoms in the East. The net result of
the Crusades was to further separate the Eastern and Western branches
of Christianity from each other and to ensure the alienation of the
Muslim world from Christianity — an alienation which to a large extent
has continued up to the present day (Dowley, 1995, pp. 278 – 279).
Between 1209 and 1229 a Crusade was organized against the Albigensian
heretics in southern France. Because a significant portion of the
nobility of that region had sided with the Albigensians, the fighting
was long and drawn-out, resulting in tremendous loss of life. The Roman
Catholic bishop of the city of Bezier, when asked by the besieging
soldiers how to tell the heretics from the orthodox, is reported to
have said: “Kill them all, God will sort them out.”
5. The Inquisition was the internal European institution which
corresponded to the external Crusades. Its main function was to
identify and punish the “infidels” within the Western world who were
perceived as a threat to society. The Inquisition was organized in the
first half of the thirteenth century, largely in response to the
Albigensian heresy in France, but its power was soon extended into many
areas of Europe. Typically, the Inquisitors would enter a city and
establish a court. They would summon all heretics to come forward and
confess their heresy. Those who did so were treated with relative
leniency. Those who were accused of heresy by others and found guilty
were punished more severely, sometimes with death (at the hands of the
civil authorities, not the Inquisitors themselves). In 1252 Pope
Innocent IV officially approved the use of torture by the Inquisition
to extract “the truth” from defendants. Justification for this
procedure was found in the tradition of Roman slave law. Methods of
torture included the rack and placing hot coals on the soles of the
feet. At the close of the court proceedings, the sentences of those
found guilty were announced publicly in a ceremony referred to as an
auto-da-fé—an ‘act of faith’ (Dowley,1995, pp. 321-324).”
In 1478 a relatively autonomous branch of the Inquisition was
established with papal approval in Spain. It carried out a campaign
against Jews and Muslims whose conversions to Christianity were thought
to be insincere, against “witches,” and in later decades against those
accused of Protestant leanings. Tomás de Torquemada, the notorious
Grand Inquisitor of Spain, burned at the stake thousands of alleged
heretics between 1487 and 1498. The Spanish Inquisition was not
formally dissolved until 1834 (O’Malley, 1996).
Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century taught that the Church hoped for the
conversion of the heretic, thus allowing him to respond to a first and
second admonition. But if he remained unrepentant, then the Church
ceased to hope for his conversion and looked to the salvation of others
by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and
furthermore delivered him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated
thereby from the world by death. Aquinas quoted Jerome in support of
this course of action: “Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy
sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole dough, the whole
body, the whole flock burn, perish, rot, die (Aquinas, 1988, p. 256).”
6. The magisterial reformers, Luther and Calvin, were not much
different from the Roman Catholic leaders of the day with regard to
their attitudes toward violence. Luther’s teachings had indirectly
contributed to the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany in the 1520s. Luther
called for suppression of the rebellious peasants in these well-known
words: “Let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or
openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or
devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog
(Porter, 1974, p. 86).” In 1525, about 50,000 peasants were slaughtered
by the German princes, urged on by Luther. The Consistory in Calvin’s
Geneva burned at the stake the anti-Trinitarian heretic Michael
Servetus in 1553. Calvin is reputed to have favored beheading as a more
humane form of execution in this case. Nevertheless, he approved of the
Consistory’s decision, and said that Servetus “cried like a Spaniard”
as he was being burned.
7. The Catholics and the Protestants, especially the Reformed groups,
were united in their fear and loathing of the Anabaptists, who had the
audacity to proclaim that Christians should not be in the business of
killing. For teaching this and other “heresies” they were killed. The
following record of the execution of Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler
conveys the atmosphere of the time very effectively:
… The judges having returned to the room, the sentence was read.
It was as follows: “In the case of the attorney of His Imperial Majesty
vs. Michael Sattler, judgment is passed that Michael Sattler shall be
delivered to the executioner, who shall lead him to the place of
execution and cut out his tongue, then forge him fast to a wagon and
thereon with red-hot tongs twice tear pieces from his body; and after
he has been brought outside the gate, he shall be plied five times more
in the same manner….”
After this had been done in the manner prescribed, he was burned to
ashes as a heretic. His fellow brethren were executed with the sword,
and the sisters drowned. His wife, also after being subjected to many
entreaties, admonitions, and threats, under which she remained
steadfast, was drowned a few days afterward (Hunston, 1957, pp. 141 –
144).
Scenes such as this were repeated many times during the sixteenth
century, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Anabaptists, who were
perceived as dangerous heretics attacking the very foundations of
Western Christian culture.
8. Violence between Catholics and Protestants occurred sporadically
during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, erupting finally
on a grand scale in the Thirty Years War from 1618-1648 (Dowley, 1995,
p. 427). During this period the Catholic armies of the Holy Roman
Empire entered into battles with the Protestant armies of Bohemia,
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Success and defeat ebbed and flowed for
both sides for many years. Most of the fighting took place in Germany,
resulting in widespread devastation. Historians estimate that the
overall population of Germany was reduced by fifteen to twenty percent.
9. The American Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865. Historians
estimate that 620,000 persons died in the war (Litwack, 1996). On both
sides there were Christian soldiers ministered to and encouraged by
chaplains who claimed that God was on their side.
10. In the 20th century, about 110 millions were slaughtered in two
Great World Wars, and hundreds of lesser conflicts. Christian chaplains
were found in all countries with Christian origins fully supportive of
their nation’s war efforts. When for instance President Truman watched
the detonation in the Nevada desert of the world’s first nuclear bomb,
he declared it was the greatest event in the history of the human race!
Truman was a Baptist Sunday School teacher who also believed in the
Resurrection… Shortly after the first test explosion, two atomic bombs
were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, under Truman’s
authority, and with subsequent full blessing of American Protestant,
Evangelical, and Catholic churches, instantly killing about 120,000
civilian men, women, and children in those cities. A few months
earlier, with similar support by Allied Christians the world over,
100,000 civilian men, women, and children had been slaughtered in one
night of an incendiary bombing raid on Tokyo, Japan.
Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain with the US Army air
force who blessed the men who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945. He said this in an interview: “The mainline Christian
churches still teach something that Christ never taught or even hinted
at, namely the just war theory, a theory that to me has been completely
discredited theologically, historically, and psychologically.
“So as I see it, until the various churches within Christianity repent
and begin to proclaim by word and deed what Jesus proclaimed in
relation to violence and enemies, there is no hope for anything other
than ever-escalating violence and destruction.”
A theologian writes: “One reason that the world finds the New
Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is
that the church is so massively faithless. On the question of violence,
the church is deeply compromised and committed to nationalism,
violence, and idolatry (Hays, 1996, p. 343).”
If the essence of the “law” – of how we should live -, according to
Jesus is justice, mercy and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23), the church
stands overwhelmingly guilty of massive injustice, mercilessness, and
faithlessness on the issue of violence.
ENDNOTES
(1) See his 1982 publication.
(2) René Girard, whom I will
discuss below, also indicates that “Christianity” in the academy is the
“last politically correct scapegoat (Hamerton-Kelly, 1994, p. xi).” My
teen-aged son once observed that in our culture any spirituality is
readily acceptable – except Christian versions. There are good
historical reasons why Christianity has been so eschewed, for it has
often shown the world an ugly, oppressive face so contrary to the way
of Jesus, given its long Western cultural hegemony. Further, no
attitude is so disliked ultimately as self-righteousness (often in
religious guise). Ironically, however, this is an attitude more
strongly critiqued by Jesus than any other world religion founder –
perhaps with due premonition! Alistair Kee’s historical study,
Constantine versus Christ (1982) addresses the first concern, the
Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 23, illustrates the second.
(3) The early church’s watchword, almost universally , was: “Ecclesia
abhorret a sanguine.” – The Church abhors the shedding of blood. This
was applied to abortion at one end, war at the other, and all else in
between. Though such comes as a complete surprise to most Christians
past and present, the teaching was first promulgated and exemplified by
Christianity’s Founder.
(4) “Stanley Hauerwas has suggested that the only thing that makes the
Christian church different from any other group in society is that the
church is the only community that gathers around the true story. It is
not the piety, or the sincerity, or the morality of the church that
distinguishes us (Christians have no monopoly on virtue). It is the
story we treasure, the story from which we derive our identity, our
vision, and our values. And for us to do that would be a horrible
mistake, if it were not a true story, indeed the true story, which
exposes the lies, deceptions, and half-truths upon which human beings
and human societies so often stake their lot (Marshall, 2000, p. 13.)”
(5) James Megivern (1997) in his massive historical-theological study
of the death penalty describes this kind of sentiment as a
centuries-long “gallows pietism” that argues a “celestial-security,”
atonement or expiation, undergirding of capital punishment. He says:
“When it worked, it was obvious to all that the gallows was a special
work of God, a providential occasion where proper dispositions for a
good Christian death were ideally enacted in a grand public liturgy
from which all could learn important lessons in both living and dying
as good Christians (p. 162).”
(6) See Williams (1996) for an extensive introduction to, bibliography
on, Girard. See Bailie (1995) for a contemporary cultural application
of scapegoating theory. See Williams (1991) and Alison (1993, 1996,
1997) for sustained theological presentations of scapegoating theory.
Finally, see Girard (2001) for a complementary anthropological
presentation of scapegoating theory with reference to the New
Testament.
(7) See Miller and Gingerich (1992) for an extended discussion of this and related issues.
(8) See “Notes” in both books cited this paragraph for examples.
(9) Much of this is based on Bellinger (2001). I am repeating this
survey from another paper by the author: “Is Violence Master of Us
All?: Fight, Flight, or Just Peacemaking” (see in two parts on this
website)