Building a Culture of Peace: A Strategic Direction for the D.L. Dykes, Jr. Foundation

The Dykes Foundation’s board of directors recently adopted “Building a Culture of Peace” as an organizing framework and conceptual focus for its ongoing work. We wish to offer a brief rationale for choosing this direction in hopes of inviting discussion and critique among our friends and allies. 

Through its Faith & Reason program of publications and conferences, the Foundation’s mission for many years has been to bring a scholarly lens to bear on how Western Christianity was captured by Roman imperial values in a way that effectively canceled the nonviolent heart of Jesus’s teachings. Violent dominion formed the core of the Roman way, and from the 4th century forward the church blessed wars of conquest and genocides perpetuated by a series of “Christian” empires, including this American Empire. 

Our commitment to helping build a culture of peace draws on this scholarly work, but it goes further. It grows from alarm about the parlous state of our politics and the rise of a violence-laden totalitarianism. And it grows from recognition that the culture of violence we inhabit is more deeply rooted and more virulent than we commonly recognize. This violence goes beyond our catastrophic levels of gun violence and domestic violence, horrific as these are. It goes beyond our country’s staggering expenditures for military and policing functions; it even transcends the violence we do to other living creatures and to earth itself through industrial farming methods and reckless consumption of precious non-renewable resources. 

The culture of violence is embedded in our economic system and in our politics, but it is also embedded in us. It infiltrates how we think and act, even in progressive political circles, whenever we conceive our primary task as defeating or even destroying those who oppose us. It even infects the language we use, which is littered with words and phrases originating in warfare and other systems of violent domination. 

Put simply, an all-pervasive culture of violence is rapidly bringing us to a literal dead end, with a deadlocked politics and a deadened sensitivity to the pain of others. Dr. King predicted this result when he warned us more than 50 years ago that spiritual death awaits a “thing society” in which racism and cruelty and greed are allowed to metastasize.

The good news – and it is truly good news – is that a great many of America’s young people are awake and alert to how things have gone radically wrong in a radically unequal and violent culture. And these restless young are joined by a cohort of elders, some of whom marched with King, who never gave up on the dream of Beloved Community and who are likewise fully committed to a Big Change in how we operate. Today we also have powerful Indigenous voices bearing witness to different ways of living on earth: ways not rooted in white supremacy and violence and an endless struggle for dominance. 

The Dykes Foundation hopes to join hands and hearts with people and groups everywhere that are already showing us the path to a lasting culture of peace. We aim to work in a way that leans into the spirit of this restorative culture–to work, that is, with modesty and humility and in the realization that we are not initiating this movement but catching up to what is already happening. 

Our primary analytic focus will continue to be Christianity & Christian institutions because that is our area of cultural competence. But we recognize that the work is wider – much wider – than advancing the critique of “Jesus & John Wayne” Christianity and bringing to the fore vital alternative Christian voices. We will also seek to amplify the peacemaking testimony of other spiritual traditions, Eastern and Indigenous traditions especially. We will bring all of the tools in our communications and networking toolbox to bear on moving toward a culture of peace. And in everything we do, collaboration will be our watchword. We are a small organization. We simply want to do our part to bring to birth Dr. King’s long-awaited revolution of values in a world with too much needless suffering, too much unjust power, and far too much ungodly violence.