The religious left has a long history of trying to appease aggressors and enemies of liberty around the world, while invariably condemning America's efforts to build up its own defenses or to confront its foes by military means.

Father Daniel Berrigan, a peace activist since the days of the Vietnam War, is the living embodiment of religious pacifism today. Throughout the 1970s, he spoke out against America's development of nuclear weaponry, charging that the nation was “quite prepared to thrust enormous numbers of humans into furnaces fiercely stoked.” In 1980, Berrigan helped launch the Plowshares nuclear-arms abolitionist movement -- vandalizing an arms-production factory in Pennsylvania and justifying that action as a biblical mandate. Since then, Berrigan has opposed U.S. military actions in Grenada, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Daniel Berrigan's late brother, Father Philip Berrigan, was also a longtime religious pacifist. On May 17, 1968, he and eight others forced their way into a Maryland draft-board office, stole some government records, and used home-made napalm to destroy them. 
Arrested for his role in that incident, Berrigan subsequently went underground before the sentencing phase of his trial and spent several months as a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. In 1973 he created Jonah House, a community of anti-war activists who used biblical scripture as the basis for condemning all armed conflict -- regardless of the circumstances. Professing allegiance to “the over-arching standard of nonviolence: love of enemies,” Berrigan and Jonah House saw the U.S. as “the world’s #1 terrorist” and implored the nation to “disarm now.” In a post-9/11 letter to President George W. Bush, Berrigan characterized the war on terror as “a colossal sham,” and America as “the supreme terrorist nation.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson, for his part, in 2004 depicted the Iraq War as one of America's many “wars of mass deception” and “a moral disgrace.” He further called the toppling of Saddam Hussein “an illegal and unjust act.”

Another high-profile peace activist of the religious left was the late William Sloane Coffin, a Presbyterian minister. In 1972, by which time he had become a cultural icon for radical politics and religious leftism, Coffin traveled to Hanoi as part of a major North Vietnamese propaganda operation against the United States. Ostensibly his mission was to “accept” the release of three America POWs. 
For many years, Coffin was president of the SANE/FREEZE campaign, a Soviet initiative whose ultimate goal was the total dismantling of the U.S. military structure. Coffin held that the proper response to terror attacks was to apprehend and try the perpetrators in a court of law.

This section of Discover The Networks examines the pacifist worldviews, objectives, and activities of these and many other luminaries of the religious left.