Violence
G. Gordon Liddy
I once heard G. Gordon Liddy speak to a college audience in Missouri. Throughout the evening this former White House aide, who had been only a short time earlier released from a prison sentence for his part in the famous Watergate episode, urged upon us the idea that only force, strength, ruthless use of violence and an iron will could earn the respect of friends and foes in this “real world which is, in fact, a very tough neighborhood.”
I am enough of a “Christian realist” in the tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr to at least appreciate an element of his thinking. After all, the government’s role is the use of force. And in a fallen world it is needed. But Liddy seemed to mean more than this: force and a strong will for him were not provisional answers in a fallen world; they were the answer.
One of my colleagues on the faculty rose to timidly pose the question: “But in our country, most people…after all…do base their ethics on…like…the teachings of Jesus…and” (finally he got it out with a rush) “this-doesn’t-sound-much-like-the-teachings-of-Jesus.” He sat down.
Liddy glared a moment, took in a breath, and bellowed: “Yeah—and look what happened to Jesus!” He flailed his arms outward, holding them as if on the crossbeam of a gibbet: “They crucified him.” To Liddy, the case was closed. The audience reacted, briefly, as if stunned, astonished—and then with thunderous applause. After all, Liddy only said out loud what everyone else had already concluded: “Failure, persecution and pain, instead of success, appreciation and a good retirement—that’s no way to end up.”
A. J. Conyers, The Eclipse of Heaven, (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois), pp. 100-101
Violence in the Home
Of all married couples, 30% have at least one violent episode during their marriage. Each year some 1.8 million wives are severely attacked by their husbands, and almost the same number of husbands are assaulted by their wives. In 1975 it was estimated that nearly 2 million individuals faced a mate wielding a gun or knife. Nearly 2 million children a year (almost 4% of all children between the ages of 3 and 17) are victims of parental abuse and neglect. More than 2,000 die as a result. According to national averages, every household in America is the scene of family violence at least once a year.
Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, Behind Closed Doors, Violence in the American Family, Family Violence Research Program, University of New Hampshire (1980).
Resource
• The Moral Catastrophe, David Hocking, Harvest House, 1990, pp. 174ff
Quote
• A recent survey on marital violence reports that approximately one in every seven American couples has used some form of physical abuse during an argument within the past year.
National Institute of Mental Health, in Homemade, June, 1990