In August 1961, Time magazine ran a brief piece on religion with a headline that could have permeated through our culture, but instead faded away: “Gun Thy Neighbor?”
This unfolded during the backyard fallout shelter craze. Berlin was in crisis, the Soviets were preparing for new atmospheric tests, and American families were digging shelters into their lawns. Time quoted a suburban Chicago man who declared that, once his shelter was ready, he would station a machine gun at the door to keep neighbors out if the bombs ever fell.
That comment triggered a real national debate, and this is the part to pay attention to. That fall, Rev. L.C. McHugh, S.J., an associate editor at the Jesuit weekly America, published “Ethics at the Shelter Doorway.” He argued, based on the tradition of legitimate self-defense, that a Christian father had the right to use force to keep neighbors away from the shelter door. Letting them in, he wrote, would be “misguided charity.” Let that settle for a moment.
A priest, drawing on Catholic moral theology in a Catholic magazine, concluded it was permissible to shoot your neighbor to protect your family’s air. The debate grew so heated that Arthur Schlesinger later claimed it helped persuade Kennedy to abandon the push for private shelters.
Thomas Merton responded to him in The Catholic Worker that November, strongly rejecting the idea of every person for themselves. The timing was not a coincidence. The month before, the same paper had published Merton’s essay “The Root of War Is Fear.”
Set those two documents side by side, and the heart of the problem leaps out. This is not a story of villains making wicked choices. It is about anxious, well-meaning, churchgoing men and women who reason themselves all the way to a machine gun—and discover that tradition seems to bless it. Now think about how many times you see this today on the news.
Nations play out the same drama on a grander stage. The world brims with countries professing a love of peace, but what they truly crave is a piece of something—a border, a seabed, a mineral belt, a path to the sea, or even a neighbor’s dignity. Every empire in history has named its hunger ‘security,’ and often believed it.
What Merton wrote in 1961 feels as urgent today as if it were penned this morning. The essay’s title captures the whole argument. Merton first drafted it as a chapter in New Seeds of Contemplation, then sharpened it with bold new opening paragraphs for Dorothy Day’s publication in The Catholic Worker in October 1961. These lines were so pointed that Merton’s own censors soon tried to silence his writing on war.
He did not just argue that fear breeds aggression. His claim cut deeper: the root of war is fear ~ “not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” This means fear of being wrong, fear of being exposed, and fear so heavy we cannot carry it. So we cast it onto someone else, someone we can name, brace to fight, and try to overcome.
From there, Merton takes a path most peace writing sidesteps. He insists the true enemy of peace is not some distant power, but the “folly and blindness” within our own nation, our institutions, and our hearts. We are not innocent bystanders dragged into conflict. We are participants who have already, often silently and long before, decided our own violence is somehow justified.
So, we pray for peace. But Merton urges that our prayers must also seek the transformation of our society and its leaders. Otherwise, we are simply asking God to shield us from the consequences of a world we keep shaping.
A world war fought piecemeal.
Pope Francis expressed a similar idea in 2014 while standing in a military cemetery at Redipuglia. He called it “a world war fought piecemeal.” It is not just one war, but many, all connected, each having its own reasons, coming together to form something that no one involved would actually name.
Scan the map today: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Iran, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the simmering waters of the South China Sea. Piecemeal conflict is simply a phrase—it is a logistical reality. Weapons are built in one country, funded in another, and fired in a third, while shifts in grain prices and waves of refugees ripple out to people who may never know the conflict’s cause. Our global ties carry a moral weight we often overlook: no conflict is ever just someone else’s.
Merton’s disturbing question follows. Rather than asking, “Who started it?” he wonders what in our daily lives makes all this feel ordinary. Is it our investments? Our tax code? The entertainment that glamorizes violence? The language that calls killing “kinetic activity”? Or the way we have learned to scroll past suffering without a second thought?
Imagine, for a moment, a common curriculum.
Here is a thought experiment worth taking seriously.
Picture churches of every tradition—Catholic, Orthodox, mainline, evangelical, Anabaptist, Pentecostal—devoting a season to the same material. Not just another joint statement, which is easy to draft and easier to forget. Instead, a shared curriculum: homilies, sermons, adult classes, seminary lectures, and small groups all struggling with the same questions together.
The shape could follow the arc of conflict itself:
Conflict prevention means rolling up our sleeves for the unglamorous work of spotting what makes violence possible before it erupts. This means noticing dehumanizing words, the movement of weapons, and festering grievances with no outlet. Prevention is, above all, a spiritual discipline—more than just a policy. It is the practice of refusing to let a neighbor become a mere idea instead of a living person.
Conflict transformation draws on John Paul Lederach’s wisdom, echoed by Merton: you cannot “resolve” deep conflict as if it were a squabble over a fence. Instead, you must reshape the relationships and systems that keep sustaining it. Peacemaking unfolds over generations; the work is mostly about relationships, often local, and usually invisible.
Post-war reconciliation begins with truth and only then moves toward restoration—always in that order. It means remembering, grieving, making amends, and slowly daring to ask if former enemies can share life again. Churches have sometimes led the way and sometimes failed spectacularly. South Africa and Rwanda show the same institution in two different lights. This is why reconciliation must be woven into spiritual formation, not just tacked onto press releases.
All three stages are held up by real Christian peacebuilding in action. The Community of Sant’Egidio helped end Mozambique’s civil war. Christian Peacemaker Teams travel to places where presence itself is the main act. Parish networks in Colombia stand with displaced communities. The Mennonite tradition has quietly supplied much of the intellectual backbone for this work. These are not simply illustrations tacked onto doctrine. They are doctrine, alive in the only form that ever persuades.
Nonviolence as askesis
The piece most often overlooked is the very one that makes everything else possible.
Merton did not treat nonviolence as a trendy tactic. He saw it as askesis: ascetic discipline, training, and the deliberate reshaping of a self that might otherwise reach for a weapon. In Greek athletics, askesis meant practice. It is not a feeling, but a habit built through effort.
What does this training look like? It starts with silence, since someone who cannot bear silence will never hear an enemy. Then comes examining your conscience, focusing on your personal complicity rather than just personal tidiness. Next is the art of holding contradictions without letting them harden into anger—the core skill of de-escalation, whether in Geneva or at home. Fasting, giving, and prayer follow, training the desires that drive us to want more. Finally, when the moment arrives, it means accepting suffering rather than passing it on. This is where nonviolence stops being a preference and becomes a true commitment.
Merton also warned how easily this can go astray, and his words cut deep: nonviolence practiced from self-righteousness is just violence dressed up in civility. If I aim to prove I am the good one, I have missed the mark. The discipline must meet my own fear, not my opponent’s guilt.
Would it change anything?
The honest answer is that it might not, and it might.
But consider what the shelter debate truly revealed. Father McHugh’s argument was not foolish; it was carefully reasoned. He had tradition, distinctions, and logic on his side. What he lacked was the kind of formation that could withstand the fear he felt. Good doctrine without trained courage leads to conclusions that end at the barrel of a gun.
Formation is slow work, and its results are hard to count. No sermon has ever halted a missile in flight. Yet the notion that hearts change only through debate, laws, or exhaustion is thinly supported. What sincerely lessens the appetite for violence, time and again, is when people are trained to see it as unthinkable. That training must happen somewhere. For many, the last place it can still happen is in a congregation on Sunday morning.
Four steps follow, each small enough to begin this very week.
Examine yourself as closely as you scrutinize the world. Ask whether the policies, institutions, and purchases you support quietly make war more likely. Do this not just in theory, but in concrete, specific ways.
Learn nonviolence as a craft. Civil disobedience, accompaniment, moral protest, negotiation, sanctuary—these have their own literature and masters. Approach them as you would any skill you hope to use.
Lift the idea of one human family. This was Merton’s phrase, and it is why he reached out to Buddhists and Sufis even from his monastery. Cross-cultural and interfaith engagement is not an add-on for peacebuilding; it is key for tackling poverty, inequality, and fear at their roots.
Pray, and let your prayer demand something of you. For Merton, peace was never only political or only spiritual. If prayer does not eventually change how you vote, spend, speak, and forgive, it is unfinished.
In this vision, peace is not simply what arrives when fighting stops. It is a living practice, sustained by those willing to be trained and who have chosen to face the real front line: the fear inside themselves.
This is not passivity. It demands more courage than the alternative, which often only requires money.
The man in Chicago with the machine gun at his shelter door was no monster. He was afraid, and no one had ever taught him another way to respond. As it turned out, neither had his priest.
Sources
Thomas Merton, “The Root of War Is Fear,” The Catholic Worker, October 1961; also New Seeds of Contemplation(New Directions, 1961), ch. 16.
“Religion: Gun Thy Neighbor?” TIME, August 1961.
L.C. McHugh, S.J., “Ethics at the Shelter Doorway,” America, 30 September 1961 — see America’s later retrospective and “The America editor who ruined nuclear fallout shelters forever”.
James G. R. Cronin, “Fear Thy Neighbour: Merton and the 1961 Shelter Scare”, The Merton Journal.
“Churchmen Debate Ethics of Fallout Shelters,” Christianity Today, 10 November 1961.
“Kennedy, Rockefeller, and Civil Defense,” U.S. National Park Service.
Pope Francis, homily at Redipuglia military cemetery, 13 September 2014.
If I have ever shown wisdom in my life it is by reading Thomas Merton most of my long life and taking it personally.