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Virtues

War & peace

13 May 2025

9 min read

Who’d be a peacemaker these days?

I’m no longer sure we properly grasp what peace is all about.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

Graffiti of a tank with a peace laurel coming out of its barrel.

Graffiti, Kaunas, Lithuania.

Aliaksei Lepik on Unsplash.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’

You can’t really argue with that, can you? It is a truth universally acknowledged, that is deeply embedded in our cultural identity. Like the inherent value of family, fairness and a decent cup of tea, being in favour of peace is of the essence of virtue. After all, who’s going to want to sign up and aspire to an ethic of ‘blessed are the conflict creators’?

But I have begun to wonder whether it’s as clear as all that, and if our intuitive assumptions stand scrutiny.

Of course, we all want ‘peace on earth’, to live peaceful lives in peaceful communities and, at least sometimes, to have some ‘peace and quiet’. Peace is a good thing. We desire it, we embrace it, and we honour those who make it.

But I’m no longer sure we properly grasp what it’s all about. I’ve been on a bit of a journey of late. I’ve come to conclude that it is all a bit murky when you dig beneath the surface.

For a start I have realised that I’m not tuning into the news as much as I used to. OK, to be completely honest I have always been something of a news junkie, and from the Today programme on Radio 4 to various news platforms online I still consume quite a lot. But not as much as I used to.

The relentless stream of violent conflict from Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere to our increasingly polarized political debates, the othering of those we don’t agree with in identity politics and the vitriol of wider culture wars: it gets too much. It seems I’m not alone. A recent report from the Reuters Institute maps a ten-year trend towards disengagement with the news.

I yearn for some breakthroughs on the peacemaking front. In their absence it seems that there is only so much I can take.

Then, my attention was drawn to a piece on the Axios news platform. The headline read, ‘Trump's deep obsession: Winning a Nobel Peace Prize’. That sent me down a rabbit hole.

Now I did already have a half-memory that in his first term President Trump had been a little resentful of the fact that Barak Obama had received the prize while he hadn’t. But it seems it’s more of a thing than that.

Axios reported that he has been ‘obsessed’ with winning the prize for years and that his present administration ‘is aggressively pushing him for a Nobel’. They even suggested that it was the subtext to the Oval Office blowup with Ukrainian President Zelensky.

In fact, President Trump has been nominated for the prize on numerous occasions since 2016, with lawmakers from the US, Scandinavia and Australia putting his name forward.

Awarded 105 times since 1901, while Dr Martin Luther King jr, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa might seem to epitomise such an award, there have also been controversies.

The awards given to Mikhail Gorbachev, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat were particularly controversial. But it was the 1973 award to Henry Kissinger that caused the biggest stir leading two of the five members of the selection committee to resign in protest and howls of derision from the press.

Finally, home alone one evening, I stumbled across Monty Python’s Life of Brian as I surfed the streaming platforms for something to watch. It’s years since I watched it, but it contains one of my favourite scenes of all time.

Jesus is pictured delivering his ‘sermon on the mount’ from atop a small hillock. The camera pans out to the back of the crowd where they’re finding it hard to hear what he’s saying. The conversation goes something like this:

What was that?

I think it was 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'

Ahh, what's so special about the cheesemakers?

Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

It was chuckling to myself to this familiar pun that provoked a deeper dive. What was Jesus actually wanting to say? What did the crowd hear him say?

A quick look back to the Sermon on the Mount confirmed that ‘the blessings’ that start it off are mainly to those in a seeming position of disadvantage: ‘the poor in spirit … those who mourn … the meek … the merciful … the persecuted’. Why does Jesus include peacemakers who ought to be acclaimed by everyone? They’re the ones doing good stuff with positive benefits. They should be universally acclaimed, why do they need a special blessing?

From the angelic ‘peace on earth’ that heralded Jesus’ birth, to his final gift to his friends, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you,’ peace is at the heart of what Jesus is about. Receiving peace, giving peace, making peace, ‘peace be with you,’ ‘go in peace,’ peace is littered throughout the gospel stories.

Of course, for Jesus this is shalom or, back in the Aramaic of his mother-tongue shlama. While an everyday greeting the idea infused in the word is far deeper and richer: it is about wholeness and well-being and harmony. Rather than just the absence of noise and conflict, this kind of peace has substance and depth.

Maybe that’s why it has to be ‘made’.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus doesn’t say ‘blessed are the peace-lovers’ who merely experience and consume the life of peace. Neither does he major on ‘blessed are the peacekeepers’ who police its boundaries. No, it’s ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, those who’ve got their sleeves rolled up and are actively forging an environment of wholeness, well-being and harmony.

No problem here then. Who’s not in favour of wholeness, well-being and harmony? Well, no-one, until we stumble across what Jesus goes on to say later in this iconic sermon:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

According to Jesus, peacemaking is about wholeness, well-being and harmony and its scope extends to, and embraces, even our enemies. And why, because that’s how God does it:

“He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

This is the benchmark that informs the kind of peacemaking that Jesus is talking about.

Peacemaking always has to start with the existing situation. It is not about restoring how things used to be.

Now you could make an argument that peacemaking is a generational process. That it is about curating how we live together – as individuals, in neighbourhoods or even internationally – where we embody and model these kinds of principles. This is not achieved overnight.

We make peace and build communities in which we flourish over time. Afterall, as African Ubuntu philosophy articulates ‘I am because we are’. The well-being of each of us is dependent upon the well-being of all of us. This is a way of life, not an off-the-shelf remedy. But what about peacemaking in the middle of conflict?

This is where the peacemaking process gets to be a murky one, especially when you dig beneath the surface. Altruism on the part of people, communities and nations in conflict is rarely front and centre to what they bring to the table.

To even contemplate an authentic peacemaking process, both sides in a conflict have to want it. If this isn’t the case the peacemaker will either fail or be in danger of being manipulated as a puppet in the hands of bad actors.

To genuinely have reached the point of entering a peacemaking process, the parties concerned have to have reached the realisation that the cost of the continuing their conflict exceeds any realistic benefits they can achieve.

Peacemaking always has to start with the existing situation. It is not about restoring how things used to be. Neither is it about accomplishing the future that has been dreamed of. It is about a cold, hard grappling with how actually things are.

This is why it’s unpopular, especially with those who have being pursuing the justice of their cause, accomplishing their objectives and seeking victory rather than peace. The peacemaker is a real time and unwanted reminder that they have failed.

Then, as the peacemaking shifts into gear the one in the middle, the peacemaker, cannot take sides. Yet, inevitably, both sides will see them as partial insofar as their aspirations are traded off in the process of negotiation. The peacemakers are easily dismissed as appeasers or even as traitors to justice.

Peacemaking is always about compromise. It is about accepting how things are and trading off concerns to reach the best achievable balance. Commenting on the peace negotiations over Ukraine, Wolfgang Münchau recently wrote,

“The purpose of the peace talks is to fill in the blanks. The two sides may trade off one piece of land against another. Money will buy stuff. But peace deals are never about who is right, and who is wrong. They are not about historic claims.”

Pragmatic rather than principled, compromise is easily portrayed as a dirty word. Appearing spineless, weak and morally flawed, peacemakers are subject to both being misunderstood and misrepresented by all sides.

According to the American political scientist R.J. Rummel, who specialised in the study of war and collective violence with a view to their resolution, it is a mistake to think that ‘making’ peace is like a design, construct and build project. While he sees such a view as seductively attractive, it is misplaced to believe that peace can be centrally planned and constructed.

Rather, peace ‘emerges’ as an equilibrium establishes itself between what the parties involved honestly believe, actually want and really capable of achieving. This mutual self-knowledge cannot be mapped by an external third party and may only be partially comprehended by themselves.

The art of the peacemaker is to enable an evolving process of reciprocal adjustments. Along the way they must ensure that rebalanced relationships are supported by an ‘interlocking of mutual interests, capabilities and wills’. Peacemakers are far from being centre-stage messiah figures, it is never about them and their ideas or grand plan. Rather, they’re facilitators who must know when to self-effacingly get out of the way.

He concludes:

“Peace is a structure of expectations, a social contract. It will be kept only as the parties, for whatever reason, find it in all their intersecting interests, capabilities, and wills to do so.”

Hard-won peace can remain exceedingly fragile.

Who’d be a peacemaker?

Who would willingly open themselves up to being manipulated by bad actors. Who would subject themselves to the rejection of being unwanted, unpopular, misunderstood, misrepresented and portrayed as appeasers and traitors of justice.

To boot, they have to be self-effacing and understand that their best efforts may only ever result in precarious outcomes, if there is any fruit at all.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’

I guess that’s why.

In the meantime, 338 candidates have been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Among them is the late Pope Francis,

"… for his unstoppable contribution to promoting binding and comprehensive peace and fraternization between people, ethnic groups and states."

The winner will be announced in October.

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How to navigate a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.”

We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne).

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time.

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed…

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it.

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised.

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. It can make sense of both of them. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.”

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition.

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder) £25.

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.
If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.
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