A Renewed Call to Nonviolence
This blog is published in the wake of the escalating conflict between Hamas and Israel over the weekend.
Context: For My Fellow Well-Meaning Outsiders
I am not an international political expert. I am not Palestinian nor am I Israeli. I am a pastor and a theologian concerned for the wellbeing and reconciliation of all Creation—an attitude all Christians are called to embrace (2 Corinthians 5:16-21). I am concerned with the ways Christians and my fellow White liberals discuss the current situation in Palestine and Israel. I say this not with cynicism but with deep care for the ways in which we create community together. If you’re like me, you have Jewish friends who fear for their lives as antisemitism escalates and as Hamas killed 900 Israelis (as of last evening, October 9th) in a surprise attack over the weekend. You also probably have friends or have partnered with organizations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank who also fear for their lives as Netanyahu’s right-leaning government continues to forcibly evict Palestinians, plans massive expansions of settlements in the West Bank (Palestinian territory), and has retaliated by killing over 500 Palestinians as of this evening. Some on social media are quick to defend Hamas’s acts of terror as justified by Netanyahu’s continued colonization and occupation of Palestine’s territory, and others are quick to unquestioningly support Netanyahu’s government with whatever means they deem “necessary.” I find it necessary to speak a pastoral word to my fellow well-meaning outsiders, that is, those of us who are neither Palestinian nor Israeli nor Jewish, but who recognize that injustices are occurring and are trying to thoughtfully respond to the prophetic call to be in solidarity with the oppressed in such a time as this.
I do not believe in the fable of a “just war.” There is war. There are persons and governments who take up arms against another for the sake of expansion, wealth, prestige, and power, and there are persons and governments who take up arms to defend themselves. There is violence and often violent resistance, but I do not believe there to be a just war nor a war that can be justified. In my understanding, violence is antithetical to the Gospel’s pronouncement of “abundant life” (John 10:10)—though many Christians have used the Gospel to justify violence. Jesus proclaimed “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God (Matthew 5:9). There is something holy about peace—not a peace that ignores injustice (the prophet Jeremiah condemns such a false peace: Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11), but a persistent peace that takes root—even amidst the broken concrete of bombed cities—whenever injustices are named and corrected and relationships, like a torn tapestry, are mended with care. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words remain strikingly—and unfortunately—relevant for our situation today (and I cite his thought not as a “model minority” but as a philosopher and activist),
Hate is rooted in fear, and the only cure for fear-hate is love. Our deteriorating international situation is shot through with the lethal darts of fear. Russia fears America, and America fears Russia. Likewise China and India, and the Israelis and the Arabs. These fears include another nation’s aggression, scientific and technological supremacy, and economic power, and our own loss of status and power. Is not fear one of the major causes of war? We say that war is a consequence of hate, but close scrutiny reveals this sequence: first fear, then hate, then war, and finally deeper hatred.
From King’s Sermon “Antidotes for Fear,” in A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings
A Pilgrimage of Nonviolence
So, with wars raging around the world, and with continued racist and antisemitic acts of domestic terrorism in the U.S., I believe that Christians have a responsibility to reexamine the life and work of Dr. King, to continue his pilgrimage to and of nonviolence. To do so is to embody the Gospel for our time. So let us begin by asking ourselves, What would it mean to continue Dr. King’s pilgrimage to and of nonviolence today? Why a pilgrimage? and while we’re at it, Why nonviolence? and What does nonviolence mean exactly—what does it entail?
Why a Pilgrimage?
As United Methodists/Protestants, we don’t often talk about pilgrimages. A pilgrimage is a holy journey—it’s an intentional commitment to traverse all sorts of terrain—both physical and spiritual. A pilgrimage is a commitment to take an extended journey, which is spiritual in nature; it interrupts our daily lives, requiring us to follow a different, countercultural path. And by countercultural, I mean counter to the objectification, oppression and false divisions sown by Western capitalism (people and Creation are to be valued over profit, and persons are not to be distinguished by economic status). Unlike war, one doesn’t make money on a pilgrimage. It requires sacrifice, both financially and physically. But one makes this sacrifice willingly, placing their privileges on the altar of holiness, knowing that the pilgrim’s journey is a holy one. It is important for us to take in this context for the meaning of a pilgrimage, with all of its weight and difficulties in mind, because it’s with the acknowledgement of the arduousness of this journey in mind that the meaning and demands of Dr. King’s philosophy become more fully apparent.
Like Christian pilgrimages of the past, Dr. King’s pilgrimage to nonviolence was neither a directionless journey nor was it a straightforward path. Before reaching the pinnacle of this holy way, the love that is both the telos and the trail itself, Dr. King knew that all pilgrims must learn how to be a pilgrim. One does not start in New York, traverse the routes of Jesus in Palestine and Israel and return unchanged. The journey transforms the pilgrim. So too does the pilgrimage to nonviolence, becoming a daily pilgrimage of nonviolence. Dr. King laid out six specific principles, which a good pilgrim on this journey toward justice must abide by—principles that I believe ought to orient us as we discuss and engage in the tragedies around us.
King’s 6 Principles of Nonviolence
1) “nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist.”[1] This pilgrimage to nonviolence is not a pilgrimage toward nonresistance. Nonviolent resistance, as we shall see, is an active journey toward justice.
2) Nonviolent resistance “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win [their] friendship and understanding.”[2] This journey toward justice must be a just journey itself because what it leaves in its wake, unlike violent resistance and war, is not bitterness but the creation of the Beloved Community.[3] Reconciliation and community are its byproducts, not profit from military spending, destruction, or despair.
3) Logically flowing from the second principle comes the third, which is that in the pilgrimage to nonviolence, “the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing evil.”[4] The love ethic of Jesus, practiced by Gandhi, and central for Dr. King’s pilgrimage will not allow the pilgrim to view persons as enemies—even those people who are participating in or perpetuating oppressive systems—because the consequence of this pilgrimage is reconciliation, the creation of the Beloved Community.
4) The pilgrimage to nonviolence “is a willingness to accept suffering without [violent] retaliation.”[5] Dr. King and Gandhi framed the narrative of their nonviolent resistance movements by identifying the dissonance between the values that wealthy and middle class White U.S. residents and British society claimed to hold dear and the reality that poor U.S. residents, Black Americans, and the Indian people faced (and continue to face). King embodied the issue of anti-Black racial aggression, placing himself on the front lines of marches where police brutally attacked the demonstrators. America valued freedom and Britain civility, yet when the world watched the beatings of non-violent protestors, they were faced with a reality that did not correlate to their values. Essentially, their privilege was checked. They were faced with a reality from which their privelege had previously protected them. Though white Americans and the British public remained at a distance from the systemic injustices of their societies, in Dr. King and Gandhi’s willingness to suffer without violent retaliation, their societies were forced to face a clear violation of their values. As Ronald Heifetz writes, Dr. King and Gandhi were “lightning rods.”[6] They took the counter punches as the system fought back to maintain equilibrium. Their pilgrimages of nonviolence were successful because of their strict adherence to this fourth principle.
5) Nonviolence “avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.”[7] Here, the influence of Dr. King’s time at Boston University (BU), where personalism was developed, clearly directs the pilgrimage.[8] To hate another person, even the oppressor, does internal, spiritual violence because it is depersonalizing.[9] Howard Thurman, who was the dean of Marsh Chapel at BU during King’s studies, described hate as one of the “hounds of hell,” arguing that the
“logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral values.”[10]
The pilgrim on the journey of nonviolence must embody the love ethic—not through a “sentimental” love of those who participate in oppressive systems—but through love as “understanding” and “redemptive good will”—through agape.[11] Agape love is love of neighbor; it is the “love of God operating in the human heart,” which emphasizes our need of each other.[12] And this love “is not a weak, passive love,” it is an active love, “seeking to preserve and create community.”[13]
6) Finally, the sixth principle that Dr. King articulates is that nonviolence “is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.”[14] This principle implies a faith on the pilgrim’s part in the possibilities that the future holds—and this faith in the future encourages the pilgrim of nonviolence to persevere through present suffering.[15] Nevertheless, while the moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, Dr. King is clear that
“[h]uman progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of [persons] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”[16]
The pilgrimage of nonviolence is an arduous one, one that requires tireless effort from the pilgrim on the journey toward justice. White moderates, to whom Dr. King addressed his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (from which the previous quote was lifted), too often interpret this sixth principle as inevitability and, accordingly, caution oppressed people to wait or slow down.[17] We are experiencing this temptation now in so many contexts: folks who want Palestinians to patiently wait for freedom while more territory is annexed by Netanyahu’s government; folks who want Israel to wait patiently as Hamas, funded by other governments, terrorizes its citizens and fails to provide a stable government for Palestinians. However, Dr. King’s sixth principle ought to reorient our pilgrimage as we engage with these injustices: history, and therefore God (as the God of history), is on the side of justice, so we all ought to be on the side of justice, doing all that we can to realize the reign of God here and now, spiritually and materially, personally and socially as we co-labor with God.
Conclusion: Why Nonviolence?
Reflecting on how his pilgrimage to nonviolence became a pilgrimage of nonviolence, King writes that
“living through the actual experience of protest, nonviolence became more than a model to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”[18]
As he found himself amidst the Cold War and escalating threats of nuclear annihilation, the choice seemed clear that either humankind could choose nonviolence or face the reality of nonexistence.[19] For King, the pilgrimage of nonviolence was the only pilgrimage capable of saving humanity from itself because it refuses to allow the pilgrim to depersonalize the other; it is a process of radical relationship building and reconciliation, the result of which is the creation of the Beloved Community.
Today, we must re-commit ourselves to this pilgrimage. I’ve briefly shared Dr. King’s pilgrimage to nonviolence, and hopefully his story and this time exploring it together, becomes part of your own intellectual pilgrimage of nonviolence so that together we can commit to the spiritual, material, and social pilgrimage of embodied nonviolence. Today the pilgrimage of nonviolence looks like the Ukrainian hotline that provides information to Russian families about their children in the army even while Ukrainian people die at the hands of Russian soldiers.[20] Today, the pilgrimage of nonviolence looks like the unarmed Ukrainian citizens who came together as a community and stood, unarmed, in front of Russian tanks,[21] and like the thirteen thousand Russian citizens who were been arrested in the weeks following Russia’s aggression for nonviolently protesting the war.[22] Nonviolence today looks like the Palestinians who join together through large-scale protests to the forced evacuations, who condemn Hamas’s militarization of their struggle, and who have used tax boycotts and other nonviolent strategies to resist occupation. Nonviolence today looks like Israelis and Jewish organizations, like the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, who stand in solidarity with Palestinians and work toward peaceful solutions and co-existence.
At home in the U.S., the pilgrimage of nonviolence demands that our political parties not demonize and depersonalize one another so that understanding and good will can be fostered—this necessitates accountability as part of the reconciliation process. This journey requires massive protests against the anti-abortion bills in Texas and several other states,[23] against the anti-Trans bills in dozens of states, against the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida and similar bills in other states,[24] and against the banning of books that tell the cold hard truth about U.S. history.[24] The pilgrimage of nonviolence, for all of these issues, requires greater solidarity from the church with people of African descent, with Indigenous persons and nations, with queer and trans persons, with persons from Latin America, with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, with Jewish persons facing antisemitism and with Palestinians being evicted from their homes in Jerusalem, with persons with disabilities and with other marginalized communities. The pilgrimage of nonviolence is a call to deeper compassion, empathy, and shared humanity.
Notes
[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), p. 102.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 102.
[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 102. See also Martin Luther King, Jr. “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” December 24, 1967, in which he asserted that “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”
[4] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 102.
[5] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 103.
[6] Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 224.
[7] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 103.
[8] See Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 100.
[9] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 106.
[10] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), p. 77.
[11] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 104.
[12] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 105.
[13] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 105.
[14] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 106.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” p. 352.
[17] King writes, “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’” Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” p. 349.
[18] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” p. 101.
[19] In his final speech on April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple in Memphis, TN, Dr. King said “We have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”
[20] Sebastian Shukla, Alex Marquardt and Christian Streib, “'He said he was going towards Kyiv.'
Russian families turn to Ukrainian hotline in desperate search for lost soldiers” on CNN.com, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/europe/ukraine-hotline-russian-soldiers-intl-cmd/index.html.
[21] Alisha Rahaman Sarkar, “Russian tanks made to retreat after Ukrainian civilians form human shield to block road” on Independent.co.uk, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russian-tanks-ukraine-human-shield-b2024709.html.
[22] “More than 15,000 Russians have been arrested in anti-war protests” on Economist.com, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/22/more-than-15000-russians-have-been-arrested-in-anti-war-protests.
[23] The Guttmacher Institute provides an updated list of abortion bans and other restrictive measures: https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2022/03/2022-state-legislative-sessions-abortion-bans-and-restrictions-medication-abortion.
[24] Freedom For All Americans provides a legislation tracker on a variety of legislation, including anti-trans bills and anti-LGBTQ bills: https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/anti-transgender-legislation/.
[25] Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S. Challenges to books about sexual and racial identity are nothing new in American schools, but the tactics and politicization are,” in The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/books/book-ban-us-schools.html.