In Africa, it is a curse to see the naked body of your mother, as we learn in “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a documentary of the 2003 Liberian women’s peace movement. Working together for the first time in Liberian history, Christian and Muslim women campaigned to end a civil war of sickening violence that had claimed more than 200,000 lives. Their nonviolent protests culminated in a sit-in, with hundreds of women dressed in white T-shirts reading “We Want Peace; No More War” — arms locked, sitting with their backs to the doors of the presidential palace in Ghana, where the men of Liberia were failing in their peace talks.
In the documentary, security guards arrive to arrest and remove the women. But their leader, Leymah Gbowee, stands in a rage. She says, “If you are going to arrest me, I’ll make it very easy for you,” and begins stripping off her clothes.
Christians should find Gbowee’s unarmed but direct action familiar. In Matthew 5:38-42 (turn the other cheek, give your cloak, go the second mile), Jesus teaches the oppressed to reclaim their dignity and power. In his 1992 book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Walter Wink explained that stripping naked – literally – is the nonviolent strategy behind Matthew 5:40, which says, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well.” Wink tied this statement to Exodus 22:25-27, where creditors are warned to treat their debtors fairly and not to exact interest from the poor by stealing their only possession, their coat. But in this abusive situation, Jesus also advises the poor to hand over their coat, which can be translated as “undergarment.”
“Nakedness was taboo in Judaism,” Wink wrote, and as in Liberia, “shame fell less on the naked party than on the person viewing or causing the nakedness.” Imagine the scene this would cause! An indebted peasant strips in open court and then marches out stark naked. “There stands the creditor,” Wink said, “covered with shame, the poor debtor’s outer garment in the one hand, his undergarment in the other. [The debtor] has said in effect, ‘You want my robe? Here, take everything! Now you’ve got all I have except my body. Is that what you’ll take next?’”
Jesus taught us to resist violence with nonviolence, but we often neglect the power of those strategies. In a world wracked with violence, we too quickly succumb to the belief that war is inevitable and that military power, guns or police brutality are the only viable ways to restore peace. But statistics and research reveal otherwise.
In their 2014 Foreign Affairs article, “Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works,” political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan found that nonviolent resistance “increased the chances that the overthrow of a dictatorship would lead to peace and democratic rule.” No nonviolent resistance campaign is the same. But according to Chenoweth and Stephan, the ones that work have three things in common: they enjoy mass participation from diverse peoples; they inspire regime defections, such as soldiers who refuse to shoot or who even leave their ranks to join the resistance; and they employ flexible tactics, shifting between protests, boycotts or strikes to make the movement challenging to pin down and defuse.
Chenoweth and Stephan’s statistics revealed that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes was “twice as likely to succeed as violent movements” — thereby achieving goals almost half the time, compared to only 20% of violent movements.
Peace often requires more of us than violence: more courage, more creativity, more strategic thinking, more faith. When Gbowee stood to disrobe, the security guards backed off. When the (male) delegates tried to escape the threat of nakedness, the women blocked the windows as well as the doors. And the nation’s warring leaders, shamed and sobered, eventually signed a treaty. Gbowee – the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate – reclaimed her maternal body from war on her own terms, and the women’s movement helped create a democratic Liberian government that still endures.
It’s hard to step up and disrupt without violence. Peaceful change takes longer, but it also lasts longer. We must use our vulnerability as power and a call to peace.
