What can change the minds of those in the throes of militarism?
There may be no single answer. But one approach that Butler highlights from time to time is that of soldiers who come in contact with individuals–people whose faces they come to recognize, whose names they learn, whose lives they gain some sense of. The more persons become real and no longer part of indistinguishable masses to soldiers, the more the soldiers are forced to acknowledge that what they are doing is not just in service of their commander-in-chief but is also an act that they are personally involved in–committing their use of force upon persons whom they know. In other words, military actions for such soldiers cease being impersonal.
It may well be that part of what has contributed to some instances of PTSD in military personnel has been the collapse of that firewall of detachment between their orders and the effects of carrying them out. From personal experience, I know that I have been haunted by the knowledge of persons I’ve known and hurt.
Today’s saint comes into Butler’s narrative as a soldier named Romanus who was dispatched by the Roman Empire to quell the rise of Christianity. One specific person he encountered was a Christian named Laurence. When, day after day, Romanus saw that Laurence did not return evil with evil, actually turned the other cheek when attacked, and chose to love those who persecuted him rather than to hate them (all of this coming right out of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, found in the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 5 through 7)–when Romanus saw that Laurence found a way to love, no matter how badly he was treated, Romanus voluntarily disarmed himself and refused to participate in persecuting Laurence (or anyone else) simply because he had been ordered to do so. He even asked Laurence to baptize him.
That of course came with a cost–Romanus was quickly seized and beheaded. After all, a military cannot last long if it suffers deserters who leave for reasons of conscience.
There was nothing militaristic in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Laurence modeled this in his life, and Romanus embraced this because he came to know Laurence. All three were killed, yes, but their stories live on to inform and, I might hope, instruct and perhaps even save us.