Can a pacifist conscientious objector join the military and participate in a war while still being true to his or her principles? The film Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson, attempts to answer this question. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, the film tells the true story of Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist and pacifist who nevertheless volunteers for the US Army during World War II, serving as a medic (spoiler alert).
Doss’s pacifist convictions arise through a combination of religious principle and personal anguish. As a child, his family is caught in its own cycle of violence. His father, traumatised by his own participation in the World War I, deals with his anger by physically abusing his wife and two young children. Mimicking their father’s violence, Desmond and his brother Hal get in a fight, ending only when Desmond nearly kills his younger brother by hitting him on the head with a brick.
Desmond is shaken by the incident, and seems to take in his mother’s teaching about the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. Yet his father responds to the near death of his younger son by threatening to beat the elder.
Later, as a young man, Doss finds his father menacing his mother with a gun. Doss manages to take the gun from his father and threatens to kill him. Recoiling at the thought of himself as a murderer, however, he renounces violence and vows never to take up a gun again.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, both brothers enlist in the army, against the wishes of their father. As Doss later explains, they felt a duty to their country. During his training, however, his unit discovers that he is a conscientious objector when he refuses to pick up his rifle. Unsure how to deal with this oddity, the unit’s officers try to drum him out of the army, first by declaring him mentally unfit, then by encouraging the other soldiers to beat him, and ultimately by attempting to court martial him. Doss perseveres, however, and is shipped off to the Pacific with his unit.
For the rest of the film we see Doss’s unit attempt to take a ridge (“Hacksaw Ridge”) held by the Japanese on the island of Okinawa. Previous units had been repelled by the Japanese, and Doss’s unit takes heavy casualties too. After a particularly devastating Japanese counterattack, Doss stays on top of the ridge while the rest of the unit escapes down its slope, and he manages to rescue 75 wounded soldiers by sliding them down the slope with a rope. (This feat earned Doss the Medal of Honor.) Joined by reinforcements, the Americans defeat the Japanese and take the ridge.
Does Doss’s paradoxical service as a soldier and conscientious objector make sense? Perhaps surprisingly, Doss could find support in the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on war. In Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the Council Fathers say that “governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defence once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted”, and likewise “Those … who devote themselves to the military service of their country should regard themselves as the agents of security and freedom of peoples.”
The bishops also say, however, that: “We cannot fail to praise those who renounce the use of violence in the vindication of their rights … provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or of the community itself.”
Despite renouncing arms himself, Doss serves as a medic alongside his fellow soldiers, themselves fighting in a just cause. But Hacksaw Ridge also illustrates the inherent tensions in this position.
In the film, we are asked to admire Doss not so much for his non-violence, but rather for his commitment to his own personal convictions in the face of persecution and hardship. Although at times we are presented with horrors such as soldiers’ bodies flying through the air or set on fire, the film gives no indication that Doss’s fellow soldiers are in any way wrong for taking up arms.
Indeed, Doss carries out his duties as a medic in support of his unit’s mission and depends on them for protection. Given the opportunity, he refuses to condemn his comrades’ willingness to take up arms, instead justifying his own convictions in terms of the power of his commitment to them.
The film presents us with an essentially individualistic approach to the morality of war and peace. What matters is the sacredness of Doss’s conscience, not the social and political implications of his non-violence.
Interestingly, although the film gives a great deal of attention to the cycle of violence within Doss’s family and his breaking free from it, the film does not give any attention to the conditions that led to the war in which Doss and his companions find themselves caught up.
Nor does Doss’s witness provide any real break with the violence of war. If anything, he collaborates with it. Doss’s commitment to non-violence does at first arouse the opposition of his unit, but we soon see this is not because his lifestyle poses a fundamental challenge to military culture or American war aims, but rather because of the closed-mindedness of his fellow soldiers, who later come to accept and respect him.
The Christian commitment to peace ought to inspire more than just a personal conviction, but also efforts at social transformation. As Gaudium et Spes says, Christians ought “to join with all true peacemakers in pleading for peace and bringing it about”. Even those who believe that in our sinful world the limited use of force may be justified in defence of the vulnerable must recognise that the commitment to peace will sometimes run counter to the violence and vindictiveness prevalent in our culture, and therefore call forth efforts to transform those tendencies.
To its credit, Hacksaw Ridge breaks the Hollywood mould and presents us with a leading character committed to non-violence, portrayed in a sympathetic light. Doss’s pacifism does not make him cowardly or weak, but rather requires of him great strength and perseverance. And he draws on his non-violence to be of service to his country out of a sense of patriotism. Catholics should find much to appreciate in this vision.
On the other hand, the film avoids some of the ambiguities of peacemaking in a violent world. In a world where it remains necessary for Doss’s companions to take up arms, what sense does his own personal commitment to non-violence make? Does his own non-violence break the cycle of violence in which they are all caught up? Or does his collaboration in what is ultimately a violent enterprise render his non-violence ineffective at best, hypocritical at worst?
It is these broader, social questions that the film leaves unaddressed, but which remain central for any Catholic trying to live out Jesus’s call to be peacemakers in a world marked by violence.
Matthew A Shadle is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia
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