by Ken Butigan
From the time of the biblical story of the Hebrew midwives who committed the first recorded act of civil disobedience by refusing to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill Hebrew babies, to the innumerable movements for nonviolent change taking place around the globe today, human beings have used the power of active, creative, audacious and relentlessly persistent nonviolence to change themselves, their communities and their world. As Christians, our faith calls us now more than ever to join with one another to take powerful nonviolent resistance to end war, to fashion economic and racial justice, to protect the earth and to champion the well-being and inclusion of all.What is Nonviolent Resistance?
Nonviolent resistance, broadly defined, is a form of embodied social change that actively and persistently challenges violent and unjust conditions, structures or policies through non-injurious means. It is the process in which “people power” -- the power of ordinary people -- is mobilized to withdraw support from unjust policies and to create the moral and political conditions for change by “leading the leaders.” The following recent example conveys the power and importance of such nonviolence in action.
Nigeria is the world’s sixth largest oil producer and the United States’ fifth largest supplier, yet many Nigerians do not share in this teeming wealth. Intent on changing this disparity, this summer hundreds of unarmed Nigerian women of the Ugborodo and Arutan communities dramatically occupied ChevronTexaco’s key oil terminal in the country, bringing petroleum production to a sudden halt. After ten dramatic days, the women reached a landmark pact with the company to provide jobs, infrastructure, and economic empowerment in villages long mired in poverty.
As an editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune commented, “In the best traditions of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, several hundred Nigerian women took a nonviolent stand for their country. Ranging in age from 25 to 90 -- some with infants strapped to their backs -- the women held a successful sit-in at ChevronTexaco’s Escravos facility in Nigeria's oil-rich delta. Without firing a shot or injuring a soul, they shut down an operation that produces a half million barrels of oil a day. In the end, they accomplished what their men could not, and what their government should have done long ago (“Nigerian women / Protest wins oil company attention,” July 20, 2002).Over the last one hundred years, this people-power has been witnessed throughout the world. Nonviolent resistance has fueled and guided India’s independence, Aung San Suu Kyi’s democracy movement in Burma, the movements for change in Eastern and Central Europe that led to the demise of the Soviet Union, the collapse of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and the tireless work of the Mothers of the Disappeared that contributed to the end of military dictatorship in Argentina. In late July, 2002, Samdhong Rinpoche, Tibet’s prime minister, announced that the Tibetan leadership is in the process of planning a nationwide campaign of Gandhian nonviolent resistance to Chinese rule.
In the United States, virtually every meaningful social transformation has resulted from nonviolent resistance. Women's suffrage, the eight hour work day, ending legalized racial segregation, environmental safeguards, ending the Vietnam War, limiting nuclear testing -- these and many other changes were the direct consequence of ordinary citizens clamoring for a better world and translating that longing into embodied moral and political resistance. From the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad to the dramatic nonviolent campaign that led to the passage of the historic American Disabilities Act, innumerable people have exercised the power of nonviolent resistance to change our society.
Christian Nonviolent Resistance
As these historical and contemporary examples suggest, nonviolent resistance is an inward and outward journey of transformation of violent patterns, policies and practices. Violence -- any verbal, emotional, physical, institutional or social-structural behavior or condition that dominates, dehumanizes, diminishes or destroys ourselves or others -- is a pervasive and daunting reality for the earth and its inhabitants. It is experienced in our inmost being and in the systems and structures that shape the world, including economic exploitation, cultural destruction, racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism and ecological devastation. Rooted in deep inward impulses of fear, hate and greed, these systemic forms of violence and injustice endanger both our survival and our profound hunger for wholeness and integrity.
Nonviolent resistance is a crucially important way to respond to the contemporary pervasiveness of violence. This epidemic represents one of our greatest spiritual crises. But an even deeper crisis may be our pervasive faith in violence, our acknowledged or unacknowledged belief that violence ultimately is just and necessary. "The myth of redemptive violence," as scripture scholar Walter Wink names it, permeates our consciousness and our culture. (Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium [New York: Galilee/Doubleday, 1999], p. 50.) Hence our age’s greatest temptation: to cling to a belief in the effectiveness and preeminence of violence, the conviction that it is “the bottom line,” that violence is the final answer. This temptation is rooted in will-to-power or despair, but either attitude repudiates the nonviolent God who longs for our liberation from the scripts, patterns and spiritualities of violence. Nonviolent resistance is a process for challenging violence, but even more deeply it is an embodied practice that helps to free us from our faith in violence -- forged in the furnaces of either ambition and self-interest or resignation and capitulation -- by opening us to a deeply-grounded faith and trust in the God of compassionate nonviolence. Nonviolent resistance is a spiritual practice and a way of being at the service of conversion, the transformation of our selves, our communities and our world.
For two thousand years, Christians have engaged in nonviolent resistance rooted in the vision and practice of Jesus who comprehensively and lovingly resisted violence in its innumerable manifestations. Biblical scholar Nancy Schreck, in her study “The Faithful Nonviolence of Jesus,” identifies three foundational dimensions of Jesus’ ministry that grounded his nonviolent resistance to violence (Nancy Schreck, “The Faithful Nonviolence of Jesus,” From Violence To Wholeness, Ken Butigan with Patricia Bruno [Berkeley, CA: Pace e Bene, 1999], pp. 54-55.) First, the inclusive love of God that deems any exclusion as a form of violence. Second, a vision of universal healing. Third, an understanding that God is not a God of vengeance but of radical love who calls us to a spirituality purified of violence at its very roots. Jesus’ engaged teaching, practices, and willingness to offer his life were powerful dimensions of his active, creative and deeply nonviolent resistance to all that violates and separates.
Calling this nonviolent resistance may strike some as odd, given that Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “Do not resist an evildoer” (Matt. 5:38-42). But as scripture scholar Walter Wink has documented, the meaning of the original Greek is quite different. While the verb antistenai has been almost universally translated as “resist,” it is a military term that actually means “resist violently or lethally.” Rather than exhorting us to passivity, Jesus urges us to repudiate violence in our response to the evildoer.
This helps make sense of the three teachings which immediately follow this text: the call to turn the other cheek, to give our cloak if someone takes our coat, and to go the extra mile. Instead of enunciating a doctrine of submission, these admonitions exhibit the fundamental dynamic of loving, nonviolent resistance. In a context where his audience would have had firsthand experience with being degraded and treated as an inferior -- including being cuffed with the backhand by a master or social superior -- to stand one’s ground and offer one’s left cheek creates in the cultural and political context a dilemma for the perpetrator. As Wink writes, “By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand: his nose is in the way... The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship... By turning the cheek, then, the ‘inferior’ is saying, ‘I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I am a child of God. I won’t take it anymore.” (Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium [New York: Galilee/Doubleday, 1999], p. 102.) Wink reveals how the other saying -- about the cloak and going the extra mile -- also demonstrate this “third way” between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other. As Wink suggests, Jesus calls us to practice a nonviolent resistance that is active, not passive; creative, not choreographed (Wink, 98-111). It seizes the moral initiative. It explores a creative alternative to violence. It asserts the dignity and humanity of all parties. It seeks to break the cycle of dehumanization. It faces the consequences of one’s action. In proclaiming the love of enemies, it longs to transform “us vs. them” thinking. It works tirelessly for the mutual transformation of the oppressed and the oppressor. By remaining nonviolent -- even in the face of severe provocation, intimidation, and threat -- such resistance contributes to social transformation in a profound way. In contrast to the coercive and dominative power of violence, nonviolent resistance can unleash the power of truth, love, compassion, justice, and creative collaboration to change lives and whole societies.
Contemporary Christian Nonviolent Resistance
Christians have engaged in nonviolent resistance to injustice and violence since the time of Jesus. In our own era, Dorothy Day, A.J. Muste, André Trocme, Rev. James Lawson, Cesar Chavez, Bishop Leontyne Kelly, Daniel Berrigan, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Shelley Douglass, Jim Douglass, Bishop Melvin Talbert, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others have exemplified the spirituality and practice of Christian nonviolent resistance in their faith-based work for genuine peace and justice. No one in our time has modeled this more clearly than Martin Luther King, Jr. In the midst of the modern Civil Rights movement, Dr. King articulated the vision of the Beloved Community -- where no one is excluded -- and the role of active, dramatic nonviolence in helping to create this.
Enunciating what he termed “the theology of the sidewalk,” King envisioned the process of dismantling structures of injustice as a crucial dimension of the contemporary life of faith. As he wrote, “There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light... Or when a [person] is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed... Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience [New York: Harper & Row, 1967]).
Like King, we face the worldwide emergencies calling for “brigades of ambulance drivers.” Today, countless Christians number among many “brigades” of nonviolent resistance. These include Jubilee 2000, a worldwide effort “to break the chains” of Third World debt; School of the Americas Watch, an international effort to close the U.S. Army’s training center in Columbus, Georgia (which, documents show, has trained soldiers from Latin American countries in torture); Soul-Force, a faith-based gay and lesbian rights organization working for justice in a variety of denominations; the Abolition 2000 campaign to fashion a nuclear-free future; many organizations using nonviolent strategies to support immigrant rights and, in the current climate, to respond to anti-Muslim hate campaigns; and the emerging worldwide movement for economic justice, critical of globalization and the policies of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. In each of these movements, and many more, Christians have joined with other people of conscience to engage in powerful nonviolent action.
Now, as the clouds of war gather once again, we as people of faith face another challenging call for nonviolent action. In the wake of the attacks perpetrated on September 11 and the virtually permanent war declared in their wake by President George W. Bush -- enunciated in a graduation speech at the end of May of this year as a 50 year “War on Terrorism” to be waged in as many as 60 countries, and already being carried out in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia, and now being envisioned in Iraq -- we are called to relentlessly work for true peace and justice. Our history and experience reveal that violence does not breed security. Violence does not end violence. War will not end terrorism. As nonviolence scholar Michael Nagler suggests, water, not fire, quenches fire. We are called to what Walter Wink names the “third way” between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other. To open this space will take courageous and concerted public action.
There are many ways to undertake nonviolent resistance. We can strengthen and deepen groups and circles in local Methodist congregations to take action together for alternatives to war and injustice. At Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, we have developed a process called From Violence To Wholeness being used by people in a variety of denominations to help ground their work for peace and justice. Whatever process we choose to use, we are called at this critical time to join with one another to pray, reflect, act and support one another in the ways of peace and justice. Together, like the women in Nigeria whose “people-power” helped create a more humane environment, we can take strong and powerful steps toward a world where the well-being of all is translated from vision to reality.
