The following are my comments from an interfaith press conference in Dallas this morning....EF

Good morning, and welcome.
My name is Eric Folkerth, and I am the senior pastor of this church, Northaven United Methodist Church. We are very pleased that you have all come here this day.

It is my job to bring you greeting and welcome, and then to make a few brief comments of my own on the issue of the day: Remembering, and lamenting, the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq.

We’re honored to host this press conference today, and we want to thank all the clergy who have come to be here this day, to share their thoughts and feelings. I especially want to thank the Dallas Peace Center for being a cosponsor, and the Rev. William McElvaney, who really put all of this together. Through his deep connection to the Dallas religious community of over forty years, and his own deep commitment to peace, Bill was able singlehandedly to gather us all here today...and Bill, for this we are deeply grateful.

This morning, we are pleased to have with us a variety of esteemed religious leaders --Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish-- from our city.

While there are various ways to mark the “anniversary” of this war, it is our belief that religious leaders have a unique, moral perspective to add to our public debate and understanding of the war and its implications. We hope you will be informed by their statement this morning. And after we are done with this gathering, we invite you to our church Atrium, just outside these doors, where each of these person will be available to talk to one on one.

Each of our great religious traditions teaches us that we must remember, and learn from, our past. A part of what our religions teach us is that through remembering our past, we can somehow redeem it through a sense of understanding. And we trust that if we learn from it, we can avoid repeating our mistakes.

 Peace is also a major theme of each of the world’s greatest religions, and collectively we clergy here today most certainly lament the lack of peace in our time. As the war drags on, and as human life continues to be lost almost each and every day, the costs of war become staggering and tragic.

As we sit here today in this sanctuary...

-- Almost 4,000 brave American men and women have lost their lives.
-- Tens of thousands have received wounds that will scar them, and challenge them, for the rest of their lives.
-- Countless more American civilians have also died and been wounded too.
-- No less than 80,000 Iraqis have lost their lives.
-- Hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of refugees have been displaced.

The bottom line is, from a human perspective, this war’s toll is staggering.

So, we are here to look back, to offer our spiritual counsel, and to do our best to reflect on what we can learn and what we can do as individuals and people of faith.

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With that introduction, I would like to offer my own thoughts for the day. And as I began to prepare for this day, my thoughts went back to the beginning of the war and our response then. Northaven Church called its members, and our greater Dallas community, to 48-hours of fasting at the beginning of the war.

Almost 200 people from all over Dallas joined us that night to lament the war, and be thankful for a group of faith-based people they could share their grief with. We broke the fast with a gathering of prayer and lament for the loss of human life.

We grieved the start of the war because so many of us knew, even then, that the war was likely to not only be a strategic mistake, but was already a moral one too. We saw our country making this mistake, and despite our protestations, and the protestations of millions, our country made the mistake anyway.

And this gets to the first major point I’d like to make this morning.

There is a commonly held misconception that all of America supported this war from the start. That is simply not true. Many in our congregation were opposed, as were many other people of faith and conscience across the land. In fact, I would remind us all that barely a month before the war began, Dallas saw the largest peace rally in its history; when almost 5,000 people march in solidarity through downtown to protest the rush to war. That day, I was pleased and honored to march with no less than 200 self identified United Methodist who opposed this war.

To the media and to our citizens: we should carefully listen to the voices of those who have reservations. We should not allow the drum beat of war, the zeal of patriotic songs, to cause us to lose our hearing. Within our government, and certainly in our religious communities, many expressed their grave doubts about this war from the start.

One of the great spiritual truths of all of our religious traditions is this:
Violence begets violence. This is a simple, elegant, and horrifying truth. It is flows out from one of the bedrock religious principles in all faiths: that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
That religious truth is really more like a law of nature: Others WILL do unto us as we do unto them.
Violence begets violence....love begets love.

The violence of the war in Iraq has fanned the flames of terrorism in ways that are completely unsurprising to people of faith. People of faith are saddened, but not surprised, that terrorism has risen to all time high levels, and that Iraq itself has become a breeding ground, a nursery if you will, for the next generation of terrorist. All of this was completely predictable by religious wisdom available five years ago (in truth, centuries ago): violence begets violence.

Many Christians, including myself, believe that there is such a thing as a just war. But this war, from it’s inception, was not a just war. There was no aggression that justified it. There were other diplomatic means that could have avoided it. Just war theory, and our faith, tell us that if there are any other options besides war, we should take them.

Another religious-based truth we have learned from this war is that the mere talk of war causes governments to conceal the truth. We know now that our country had some intelligence which should have slowed the march to war. We know now that Saddam Hussein covered up the fact that his Weapons of Mass Destruction were gone, because he was afraid. He was afraid of losing his power as an evil dictator.

Friends, religious faith teaches us that fear will drive us to do terrible things. We knew this ahead of the war as well.

The fears of some in our nation collided with the fears of an evil dictator, to truly tragic ends. Religious faith teaches us that we should never make major decisions based on fear, but on faith.

I say all the previous points not out of a sense of false pride, or moral self-righteousness, but as a desperate plea to our nation to take note of what we can learn from this war.

So, what do we do?

Certainly, we must pray for our troops, and pray for the people of Iraq. We must use our sense of faith and hope --our sense that peace is possible-- to build bridges that have collapsed.
The way to peace the way of prayer. It involves a confession of our failures, and a willingness to move a new direction. We must rebuild trust the trust of other nations.

I call on people everywhere to pray. Pray for peace. But turn your prayers into action. Let those in our government know that, on religious grounds, on moral grounds, you want to see this war end. Support our troops through charities that aid wounded veterans.

For us Christians, here in Holy Week, approaching Easter, we hear the message that life can come from death. Therefore, by working to prevent future unjust wars; by giving generously to help wounded veterans; by giving generously to support the displaced people of Iraq; by calling on our political leaders to end this unjust war; and finally, by learning from our past, we can still redeem the suffering of this war and prevent the sin of future injustice.