For many years, I have been a proponent of nonviolent direct action. I say this as someone who might be called a pacifist but not one who is passive — two concepts that are often confused.
Nonviolent direct action is founded in the firm conviction that human life is too precious to be taken to achieve a political end. We are all created in God’s image and are valuable to God; hence, we should be valuable to each other. The sanctity of life is the key foundation for nonviolent strategies.
It continues with a moral commitment to act only by doing good. The means must cohere with the desired end to achieve a moral good. When we achieve a goal through moral compromise, we undermine our own morality. In this regard, I am captivated by Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:21: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” This is the way of nonviolence: collaborating with good to foster a just outcome.
A deep and sustained courage frames and feeds a willingness to violate unjust laws to show that injustices should not stand. The courage is not only in breaking a law, violating a policy or putting oneself at odds with state-sanctioned authority.
Nonviolent direct action is one of the most proactive choices a person can make when confronted by oppression, systemic immorality and injustice. Far from espousing passivity or peace as quiet acquiescence, nonviolence is a choice to lay down arms, refuse to resist physically, accept violation (and perhaps even violence), and then bear the consequences of one’s actions willingly — all to bear witness to God’s call for justice to “roll down like waters and righteousness as an ever flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).
I learned in my Quaker high school that simply claiming opposition to human rights violations or injustice is hollow unless one takes action. Without resistance, passivity makes us complicit. As Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King Jr. and others have said, neutrality supports the status quo. Nonviolent direct action allows us to act morally, in line with our beliefs.
The Christian community will need firm conviction, moral commitment and courage for nonviolent direct action in the coming months and years. Dangerous policies from the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court pose threats to immigrant rights that have been imperative for non-native-born neighbors; to the diversity, equity and inclusion won during the Civil Rights Movement; to LGBTQIA+ individuals vulnerable to identity-based discrimination; to Muslims and those of non-Abrahamic faiths; to the poor who struggle to gain access to medical treatment, and to others vulnerable in our current political climate.
The church must bear witness against such practices and remember God’s call to love and care for those who are poor, the widows (whom we call single mothers), the orphans (whom we call fatherless children), the sick (whom we have historically left to languish without access to the fundamental human right of healthcare), the aliens (whom God welcomes regardless of immigration status), and the incarcerated (who are far too often Black and brown people warehoused in for-profit penitentiaries for non-violent drug offenses for which their White counterparts are routinely excused).
May we learn nonviolent direct action as a Christian spiritual discipline and use it to help community members at greater risk. By doing so, we regain the agency many fear we’ve lost.
Nonviolent direct action reminds us we’re not powerless. When we organize, pray, sing, shoulder to shoulder, and raise our voices together, we remind leaders they work for us and must pursue justice, recognizing God is watching. We have the power to promote change and align our actions with God’s preference for the poor and marginalized, fulfilling our nation’s ideal of equality and inalienable rights.
We have the power to change. May we use this to bear witness to the kind of world that justice, Jesus and God demand!
