There are many schools and strategies for nonviolent resistance. Someone can train you in nonviolent conflict resolution at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, or you can study Marshall B. Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication. You can research the nonviolent social movements of history that have successfully toppled dictators and brought lasting peace. But I find myself increasingly drawn to Kingian Nonviolence, with its foundation in the Christian tradition and its vision of beloved community.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not become a civil rights leader overnight. He grew up in a family of resisters; his father, “Daddy King,” resisted racial segregation and inequality. A close family friend, Howard Thurman, was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, and brought the discussion of nonviolence into the King home. In college, Martin was introduced to and influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience.” Coretta Scott King, Martin’s partner in marriage and his thought partner, traveled with him to India in 1959 to learn more about the nonviolence Gandhi called satyagraha, which can be translated as “truth-force” or “love-force.” Ultimately, though, the life and teaching of Jesus Christ grounded every step King took on the path of nonviolent resistance.
King’s 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, best articulates his nonviolent philosophy. After his death, his colleagues Bernard LaFayette Jr. and David C. Jehnsen reread everything King wrote and codified his philosophy. The six principles of Kingian Nonviolence are now taught worldwide and applied to social movements seeking nonviolent transformative change.
According to Lafayette and Jehnsen, Kingian Nonviolence was never meant as an academic study but as a catalyst for real-life application. It is a set of principles for people who want to be a part of helping the “moral arc of the universe” bend toward justice and who see beloved community as a realistic goal to work toward.
The following is a summary of the six principles with discussion questions to aid study and reflection. The sources I studied (listed at the end) phrase each principle differently, but the core meanings remain the same. The text I’ve primarily drawn from is Kazu Haga’s Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm. Haga is a senior trainer in Kingian Nonviolence, and his book is an excellent and accessible introduction.
First Principle: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
Too often, people mistake nonviolence as weak and submissive or as backing down from conflict or violence. But nonviolence is an active, not passive, strategy — a means to resist evil, not acquiesce. It’s the unarmed Chinese demonstrator remembered as “Tank Man” blocking a line of tanks with his body in Tiananmen Square. It’s Ieshia Evans, the Black woman “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge,” as the iconic photo of her was titled, boldly opposing a line of heavily armed police officers in riot gear while wearing a beautiful, flowing sundress. It is Jesus willingly accepting the cross — neither passively submitting to it nor fighting its violence with more violence.
Nonviolent resistance requires more courage and personal, spiritual and moral strength than violence. It is easy to give into our human impulse to strike back when we have been struck. Nonviolence is a more challenging but effective path. It redefines “courage” as standing open and vulnerable before evil and the enemy rather than as closed, defiant and ready to strike. Nonviolence requires courage of the heart.
Questions for reflection:
- How do you define courage?
- In what ways, or in what people, have you seen nonviolent courage exemplified?
- Why is the warrior oftentimes viewed as more courageous than the conscientious objector?
- What changes would help society view nonviolent resistance as more courageous than violence?
Second Principle: The beloved community is the framework for the future.
In her 2017 memoir My Life, My Love, My Legacy, Coretta Scott King wrote, “The beloved community is a realistic vision of an achievable society, one in which problems and conflicts exist, but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. The beloved community is a state of heart and mind, a spirit of hope and goodwill that transcends all boundaries and barriers and embraces all creation.”
The term “beloved community” is often mistaken for a community of like-minded and likable friends, where everyone gets along and relationships are untroubled by tension or conflict. If such a place exists, this picture does not describe what Martin Luther King Jr. understood as beloved community.
Beloved community includes all people — even our enemies, those with whom we are to seek “friendship and understanding,” according to King in Stride Toward Freedom, “opponents,” who he said we are “not to humiliate.” Beloved community is not about loving those who are easy for us to love. It’s the challenge of loving those we despise, don’t understand, disagree with, even hate. This is not our current reality, but understanding beloved community gives us a framework and a goal to work toward for our future.
While no human community is free of conflict, the beloved community dedicates itself to dealing with conflict nonviolently and working toward a future of lasting peace. King wrote, “The aftermath of nonviolence is beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”
Questions for reflection:
- Recall a community conflict that ended well and a conflict that didn’t. Examine the engagement of each. Did the conflict include violence (including verbal assaults or emotional or spiritual harm)? Was the conflict engaged with nonviolence — opponents who sought understanding and tried not to humiliate one another? Which methods of engagement strengthened the community? Which led to bitterness?
- Envision a future conflict in your community. How do you imagine yourself working through the conflict in a way that builds beloved community? How can this framework be applied to conflicts in personal and family relationships? In national or global relationships?
Third Principle: Attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil.
In Healing Resistance, Haga writes, “People are not our enemy. Violence is our enemy. Injustice is our enemy. Any worldview that stands against life, love, and community is the enemy.”
A faith that seeks understanding puts this principle into practice. What stories shape people’s behavior? What hurt or trauma is behind the violence people perpetuate? What system, structure or institution turns its people into perpetrators of violence? In Healing Resistance, Haga highlights the 2003 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, during which U.S. military police and a private security firm were alleged to have tortured Iraqi prisoners, and instances of police brutality to reveal what research has shown: a person’s context influences their logical ability to make choices. Violent contexts and cultures make violent people.
Thus, we cannot solve our problems by attacking individuals. “When people talk about ‘holding someone accountable,’” Haga writes, “the key word should not be accountable, but holding. Does that person feel held, or do they feel attacked and judged? Are they feeling opened up, or are they getting defensive?” It’s important to remind ourselves of our long-term goal. “If our goal is simply punishment,” Haga writes, “then responding to harm with more harm is perfectly effective. But if our goal is accountability and the healing of relationships, we need to create space for people to be held.”
A common mantra of nonviolent activists is, “Hurt people hurt people.” The opposite is just as true; healed people heal people.
Questions for reflection:
- What systems or contexts of violence can you identify in our society? What people or communities are shaped by these contexts?
- Reflect on the mantra “Hurt people hurt people.” When have you witnessed a person hurt someone else from their own hurt?
- Now consider the opposite: Healed people heal people. Have you witnessed the healing of a conflict or a relationship from an individual or a community? What have you healed from that gave you the ability to help others in similar situations?
Fourth Principle: For the sake of the cause and the goal, accept suffering without retaliation.
This is the trickiest principle, raising valid ethical questions about whether suffering people should be expected to suffer even more for good causes. Haga says this principle should not be reduced to “accept suffering,” period. King taught that self-chosen sacrifice can be a transformative and redemptive force in conflict. Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:39 models the use of chosen sacrifice to transform conflict: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
According to Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, too many Christians have misinterpreted the message of this passage, as if we shouldn’t resist evil but accept suffering unopposed. Wink clarifies this teaching by highlighting that the “right cheek” is struck and the left is offered in response. In Jesus’ ancient society, people used the left hand for unclean tasks. We can then assume that the strike to the right cheek was done with the back of the right hand. Jesus was not referring to a fistfight, but an insult. The intention was to humiliate, not to injure. To turn the other cheek – the left – denies the oppressor the power to humiliate, which effectively and publicly sends the message, “Try again. Your first blow failed.”
According to this fourth principle of Kingian Nonviolence, accepting suffering in pursuit of a just goal places us in a different and empowered relationship with that suffering.
Questions for reflection:
- Consider a just goal you are passionate about pursuing. How might the nonviolent pursuit of that goal require suffering or sacrifice?
- Consider a conflict transformed by nonviolent sacrifice (a historical conflict or a conflict from your personal life). What thoughts or feelings arise when you witness people sacrificing and suffering for a just cause?
- Consider these options: The person who opposes injustice with violent power, and the person who opposes injustice with nonviolent power. Which feels more powerful to you and why? If your instinct leads you to violent power, what cultural or media models have inspired that feeling?
Fifth Principle: Avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence.
The work of nonviolence takes place in the world at large as well as within each heart and spirit. Internal violence cuts deep. Degrading, dispiriting or dehumanizing messages about yourself, your community or your culture are violently harmful. Such messages can take root and grow so powerful that we start believing them true.
In his book Race Matters, Cornel West writes about nihilism as the enemy of Black survival in America: “that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning.” To live in a society that consistently sends messages (sometimes subtle, sometimes overt) that Black life matters less than White life cuts deep internal wounds. “Sometimes,” Haga writes, “the work of nonviolence is as simple as telling someone they are worthy.”
Hate poisons the hater as much as those to whom the hate is directed, making it another form of internal violence. Hate makes us sick in spirit. This is why King said “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Questions for reflection:
- When have you struggled with internal violence or messages that you weren’t enough or weren’t worthy? How did you cope with this internal violence? Have you found your way to healing? If so, how?
- Recall a time when you witnessed someone’s hate. What was the expression on the person’s face? What did you see in their eyes? If you could conduct an autopsy of this person’s spirit, what do you imagine you would find?
- We tend to dislike in others what we dislike about ourselves. Consider someone with a trait you dislike or even despise. Can you forgive that trait in yourself? Can you forgive it in the other person?
Sixth Principle: The universe is on the side of justice.
“The moral arc of the universe is long,” King said, “and it bends toward justice.”
As a strategy, nonviolence requires patience and perseverance. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture and easy to give up. “We live in a shortsighted society,” Haga writes. “Every time war breaks out, every time there’s another mass shooting, every time a piece of legislation moves us away from beloved community, we lose perspective.” Too often, we sanction and sanctify war, naming them “holy” crusades. We have made long-term investments in violence: war, military strength, prison systems, guns and weapons of mass destruction, economic policies that perpetuate poverty, and in environmental degradation. To reap the rewards of nonviolence, we must divest from violence and invest just as much or more in the work of peace. But war and violence bend the universe away from justice.
King taught, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Persisting in nonviolence requires an unwavering faith that our God is a God of justice. We are responsible for our actions today and the world we build for tomorrow’s generations. Prophetic visions of Scripture reveal our promised destiny: a peaceable kingdom (Isaiah 11:1-9), and a new earth where “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4). Our perspective must be long, our eyes set not on the patch of grass at our feet but on the horizon.
Questions for reflection:
- Martin Luther King Jr. had a vision for our future. What is your dream? What can you do today to work toward this future dream?
- Consider the ways our communities and nation have invested in violence. How can we stop supporting harm? How can we invest more in peaceful strategies and peacemaking?
- Our world situation makes it hard to trust in justice. What small, daily action helps you sustain hope?
Resources for additional study:
- Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm; My Life and Training in the Nonviolent Legacy of Dr. King, Kazu Haga
- Stride Toward Freedom; The Montgomery Story, Martin Luther King Jr.
- Nonviolence 365, a virtual class offered by the King Center, thekingcenterinstitute.org
