Mennonite Weekly Review

Every generation fights its own battles, but some struggles outlast us all. Quests for peace and for the rights of conscience don’t hold the promise of quick success. Perhaps that’s why the late Marian Franz’s persistence was so inspiring.

Franz led the National Cam­paign for a Peace Tax Fund for 24 years before her death in 2006. Passage of the bill remains a distant dream, but her vision lives on. Some of her best col­umns for the campaign’s newsletter are collected in A Persis­tent Voice: Marian Franz and Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation (Cascadia, 2009).

To read Franz’s writings is to relive the ebb and flow of improbable events from the latter days of the Cold War to the first war in Iraq to 9/11 and the long wars that have followed. Her words remind us that today’s voices of conscience build on a history of prophetic words and courageous actions. She finds threads that connect the movements against slavery, for civil rights and women’s rights with witnesses for peace over more than two centuries.

Today, as U.S. leaders decide whether to escalate a war by sending more troops to Afghan­is­tan, Christian pacifists and others who oppose the conflicts there and in Iraq can heed the lessons Franz taught and draw hope from the stories she told.

• Our silence in the face of war can be taken as consent. Speaking up empowers others, because conscience is contagious. People of faith must resist the tides of war that would pull us all into situations we will regret. Franz’s advice would have served the nation well in the run-up to the Iraq war.

• War itself is the enemy. Franz writes of a childhood experience when German prisoners of war worked on her family’s farm in Kansas. The “enemy” ate at her table. One day the German prisoners roused a sleeping American guard when officers arrived for an inspection. Later they laughed together about the close call. She saw the men making common cause against the real enemy — the system of warfare.

• Turning swords into plowshares isn’t just a pacifist vision. In fact, the architects of the Pentagon envisioned that the building would be converted into a hospital when World War II was over. That plan to realign national priorities toward peaceful pursuits did not materialize. But dreams can be reborn.

• The true cost of war is counted not only in lives lost and money spent but in what the money didn’t buy — housing, health care, education. “Our bombs are smarter than our kids,” Franz wrote. Today, with budget deficits and war expenses running out of control — $1 million per year per soldier in Afghanistan, according to The New York Times — the scales have tipped farther out of balance than ever.

The principles of peace Franz taught on Capitol Hill over nearly a quarter century of historic change are not at all out of date. Conscientious objection to war taxes remains a concept consistent with American ideals of religious freedom. Voices for peace are rising as Ameri­cans count the cost, human and financial, of eight years of war with little to show for the sacrifice.

Besides the imperative of conscience, Franz’s peace witness connected war’s human tragedy and its fiscal irresponsibility. She liked to point out that it wasn’t that war-tax resisters wouldn’t pay for war, it was that they couldn’t. Their consciences wouldn’t allow it. The time may yet come when America’s wars weigh so heavily on the nation’s collective conscience that we must end them.