Courage to Dissent
A Review of
Grace over Guns: Pursuing Peace in a Militarized World
Ben Daniel
Paperback: Herald Press, 2026
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Reviewed by Leroy Seat
In Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, he said, “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.”
Ben Daniel, the author of Grace over Guns: Pursuing Peace in a Militarized World, would agree. He is a Presbyterian minister who serves as pastor of the Montclair Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California. Although Presbyterians are generally supporters of “just war,” this book makes clear that Daniel is now a pacifist. His earlier books were published by Westminster John Knox Press, the publishing house of the Presbyterian Church (USA); his new book, however, appears under the imprint of Herald Press, the publishing house of the Mennonite Church USA, a shift that aligns with the book’s pacifism as revealed in its subtitle.
Daniel first writes about “just war” in the fourth chapter, which is titled “The Prayers of Nagasaki.” As an American who lived in Japan for 38 years, I was most interested in that chapter, and I think it was the best of the book’s seven chapters. In his discussion of the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, he succinctly explains the “Christian just war theory.” He then asserts that there is no way the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 can be justified by using that theory. Despite all the ways Americans from President Truman to many war historians up to the present have sought to justify it, Daniel concludes that “the bombing of Nagasaki and of Hiroshima was evil, at least according to the ethics of Jesus” (97).
The author ends that chapter by telling how he attended a soccer match in Nagasaki in the new stadium that opened in October 2024. He was impressed that that new facility “is called Peace, not in Japanese, but in the language of those who dropped the bomb” (108).
Daniel’s seven chapters were written in five different countries, the first two in Costa Rica. He accompanied his daughter as she was going to Costa Rica to work as a volunteer in the summer of 2023. He stayed there for a while, enjoying being back where he had gone with his high school Spanish club in 1986. There he wrote the first chapter, “Patriotism and the American Military Fetish,” and there he contrasts the prevalence of military adulation in the U.S. with only one brief statement about the situation in Costa Rica: it “doesn’t have a military” (31).
The second chapter is “Who Needs a Military?” and Daniel writes about how Costa Rica decided in 1948 that it did not (need a military), and they have not had one since. This chapter covers the meritorious political career of Óscar Arias, who was the Central American country’s president twice, in 1986-90 and 2006-10, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. The following year, using the monetary proceeds of his prize, he created the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress. Its purpose is to promote more peaceful, just, and equitable societies, both in Costa Rica and internationally. It is said to be one of the most influential peace-building NGOs in Latin America. In formal terms, Arias may not be a pacifist, but in practical terms he has long been aligned with the anti-war, “grace over guns,” stance that is at the heart of Daniel’s book.
Interestingly, it seems that only two chapters of the current book were written in the U.S. The first of those is the fifth chapter, where Daniel wrote first about the North Coast, the idyllic environment in northern California. But he came to realize that that region carries two layers of historical trauma: indigenous genocide and anti-Chinese persecution. After its introduction, the chapter, titled “Crimes Against Humanity,” shifts to the injustices against the Chinese people who came to this country to live and work. But through the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Chinese were forced to leave their homes and work in different parts of the state, especially on the North Coast, or in Chinatowns in San Francisco, Oakland, or Los Angeles. Daniel goes on to write about the crimes against the Japanese living in the U.S., beginning early in 1942.
“The Cost of War,” the sixth chapter, is about the enormous amount of money spent on the military in the U.S. and how just a small percentage of the military budget could house every homeless person in the country. Here is part of one of his most powerful paragraphs:
“From the perspective of Christian ethical traditions, prioritizing military spending over the needs of those who are hungry, unhoused, or lack access to healthcare or education is profoundly immoral. No biblical passages suggest that virtue should be ascribed to a nation that spends the abundance of its wealth on the capacity to kill while its citizens fester in preventable poverty” (142).
In the concluding chapter, “Opting Out of Empire,” Daniel explains why such opting out is good and necessary: “empires are awful.” He also asserts what few citizens in the U.S. realize: the U.S. is an empire, and as such, it “shares the moral failings of all empires.” He closes the book with his main point: “We can choose grace over guns.”
Having finished Grace over Guns, I am looking forward to reading Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer’s book, also issued in 2026. It is titled On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Perhaps most of us need greater courage to dissent—peacefully and effectively—from the evils enacted by the armaments of empires, as Daniel writes in his conclusion.
Leroy Seat
Leroy Seat, Ph.D., was a Baptist missionary to Japan and a full-time professor of Christian Studies and theology at Seinan Gakuin University from 1968 to 2004. He is now retired in his home state of Missouri. After 65 years as a Baptist church member, he joined a progressive Mennonite church in 2012. Find him online at: https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/
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