Why is it that Christians have not made more use of nonviolent action as a normal part of their life of discipleship? Why is it that the Christians who have initiated nonviolent campaigns have almost always come from oppressed groups, e.g., black Christians in the civil rights struggle marching out from their churches to face dogs and fire hoses, while praying, “Lord, help us to love our enemies”?
Nonviolent action is consistent, in so many ways, with biblical faith that it would seem to be an inevitable part of the church’s evangelical outreach. The Bible calls us to “seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17). The fundamental stance of nonviolent action is work for justice and against oppression, relying upon the power of love and truth. Jesus asks us to take up his cross and to follow him. The whole basis of nonviolence is the struggle for truth, but with a willingness to take suffering upon oneself, rather than inflicting it on others. Nonviolence isn’t just avoiding violence, but working actively for justice and peace in a spirit of love. What could be more in harmony with the prophetic stance of the Bible or with the Spirit of the One who came "to set at liberty those who are oppressed" (Luke 4:18)?
In the past, Christians have responded in large numbers to nonviolent campaigns that confronted an obvious injustice and that were carried on in a loving, dignified spirit. It is estimated that in the '60s, some 40,000 white church people from all over the country participated in marches, picketing, and other kinds of direct action sparked by Rev. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. The movement against the war in Southeast Asia drew in many other Christians. Today, thousands of Christians (and some official church bodies) are supporting the nonviolent campaign for the rights of Mexican-American farm workers, led by Cesar Chavez.
Mainline churches, however, seldom initiate nonviolent campaigns or suggest that nonviolent action is an expected part of Christian discipleship. It is still a small minority of American Christians who have even in their lives participated in any form of nonviolent action. Yet Christians who have participated in such action have often found their engagement to be a profound experience of discipleship.
When several hundred church people responded to Martin Luther King’s call to support the Selma to Montgomery march in the early 1960s, we had a deep experience of first-century Christianity. Meeting with black civil rights protestors in the little Browns Chapel Church, surrounded on the outside by helmeted Alabama state police, we heard the plans being laid to march again to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This was the same bridge where, only a few days earlier, civil rights marchers had been beaten and teargassed as they pleaded for the simple constitutional right to vote.
In spite of the bandaged heads of black people who had been hit by nightsticks, there was no fear in the congregation. In spite of the violent attitudes of the police and the segregationist stance of city officials, the exhortations from the pulpit were all to meet the forces of hatred with the power of love.
When we returned from the march having been turned back at the bridge by police, we discovered that Rev. James Reeb, a white Northern minister, had been beaten almost to death. The black minister who made the announcement from the pulpit led the congregation in prayer. First he prayed for James Reeb, that his injuries would not be fatal. Then he prayed for the stricken man’s family, that they would be strengthened by God to face this crisis. Then, out of the depths, he prayed for the white segregationists who had attacked Jim, that God’s love would reach into their hearts, that they would recognize the wrong they had done, that they would find forgiveness and new life with God.
I glanced at a rabbi to my left, and saw tears streaming down his face. To my right, a visiting nun sat sobbing. Everywhere people were crying. I think a common thought was in all our minds. “These people are doing what Jesus called upon his disciples to do. They are taking up their cross and facing persecution. They are loving their enemies. They are forgiving 70 times seven, going the extra mile, overcoming evil with good. We are experiencing Christianity as it was lived in apostolic times. These fellow black Christians are expressing one of the deepest forms of discipleship we’ve ever seen.”
Because of experiences like this, I found growing in me a longing to participate in and to help develop nonviolent movements for peace and social justice done in the Spirit of Christ.
In the intervening decade I have felt fortunate to participate in many nonviolent campaigns in which Christ’s Spirit was powerfully evident. Particularly memorable was the 1972 “People’s Blockade,” which began in Leonardo, New Jersey, to protest America’s brutal bombing of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Almost by chance, we discovered the enormous Earle Naval Ammunition Depot, with its 10-mile long railroad track carrying bombs and rockets through suburban New Jersey to the long Raritan Bay pier, at whose end ammunition ships were loaded with their lethal cargoes.
Observing the pier, we saw the dozens of tracks marked, “Danger: High Explosives,” and the lines of open flatbed trains stacked with rockets and bombs. More than 90 percent of the ammunition going to Southeast Asia, we found, are transported by sea from this and similar depots. Here were the very anti-personnel weapons, the napalm, the laser bombs whose fragments would soon penetrate the living flesh of Asian men, women, and children, creating hundreds of My Lais for members of God’s family 10,000 miles across the sea.
Some of us who were active in the peace movement felt called to try to put our bodies between these weapons and the people of Vietnam. Believing that nonviolence requires openness and goodwill toward any opposition, we met with local police and military authorities to inform them of our intentions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we would be arrested if we tried to establish any kind of ammunition blockade. Local people in the Leonardo area told us that local police are extremely tough, so much so that ordinary citizens were worried that they had taken too much authority into their own hands. Also, the military unit guarding the Depot was made up of Marines, who would take no nonsense from well-intentioned peaceniks.
It was not entirely surprising, therefore, that when we drove to the public beach a half mile from the pier, intending to begin our protest, we were met by well-prepared police with tow-trucks who ticketed cars and began towing them away. As I walked over to a police car to find out what was going on, a policeman stepped out and ceremoniously pulled a rifle out of its case. “This beach is for Leonardo residents only,” he said.
I found an unambiguously public state marina nearby and the rest of our cars parked safely there. Police cars were everywhere. Local residents, who had heard of “troublemakers” in the area, gathered with angry voices rising. It looked as though the police were going to block our intended march down the beach to the pier.
Someone suggested, “Let’s worship and seek for strength together.” We sat in a circle, about 50 of us with curious townspeople looking on, and began to meditate and pray in silence. Then a woman read a beautiful peace prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. A Vietnam veteran, now a peaceworker, read a poem written by a Buddhist monk. A young man read from Jeremiah. Someone led us in a couple of songs of peace and fellowship. There in the marina’s parking lot, the peace of God stole into the midst of us, so evident that even the on-looking townspeople sensed the change and became quieter.
We rose, formed two lines, and began to walk slowly toward the beach, the waiting police, and the pier beyond. As we approached the police, they inexplicably got into their cars and moved out of the way. To see their threatening line disappear and to watch them drive away was as near as I have come come to experiencing the parting of the Red Sea.
We walked on down the beach and began to make out the forces waiting for us. To the left, along the track, were a contingent of U.S. Marines, standing near the bomb-laden trains. To the right, spread out for 50 yards along the near side of the two-mile long pier, were Monmouth County police, outfitted in helmets and carrying riot sticks.
We sat in front of the pier for another time of silent prayer and song, then broke into small groups and tried to climb up the 10 feet from the beach to the level part of the pier. My wife and I were able to climb up onto a pipe halfway up, but when we tried to hoist ourselves to where the track runs, we were forcefully pushed back by the police. We talked to them in an urgent but friendly way, asking to be allowed to halt the flow of death along this track.
Finally, a train with a large water tank and hose on the front moved slowly down the track. In an effort to clear us off the pier, the hose was turned on and pointed toward us. Phyllis and I had decided the night before that the most powerful symbol of the spirit in which we were acting would be to kneel in front of an ammunition train or truck. I saw that there was room under the train to lay beneath it if I was run down, but I was fearful of putting myself in its way and I couldn’t figure out how to get past the policeman.
I glanced down the pier and saw Phyllis with her hands clasped and her head bowed, and I too began to pray. Immediately I was enveloped with an overwhelming sense of peace and inrushing power, taking away every vestige of fear. The policeman stepped back to get out of the way of the on-coming train, and I felt the Spirit almost picking me up, swinging me to a kneeling position between the rails.
The water hit me, then the slow moving train thumped into my chest, knocking me over on my back. My legs easily passed safely underneath, between the wheels. I held onto some cables along the front and was dragged along for a few yards, while police shouted “Stop the train!” They pulled me out from underneath and laid me beside the track. So strong was the sense of God’s presence that I felt as though I was floating through the air, rather than being carried. Many others from our group that day knelt or lay in front of the ammunition trains, and we learned what the early Quakers meant when they said, “The power of the Lord was over all.”
A little over a month later, 150 of us, including a number of clergy and many committed Christians and Jews, gathered at a church inland from the pier and marched toward another part of the track, carrying a 12-foot high wooden cross and a Star of David. We had prepared carefully for this demonstration, holding nonviolent training sessions and getting everyone to agree to a carefully worked-out nonviolent discipline.
When we arrived at the track, we dug holes in the loose gravel between the ties and firmly planted the cross and Star. Seldom have I experienced such satisfaction, or such a sense of God’s presence, as when I helped to place the cross, symbol of God’s suffering love, in the middle of the track, symbol of death.
A friend of mine, a Methodist minister who felt that he could not afford that day to be arrested, found that he could not let go of the cross, even after we were surrounded by a squad of Marines and told through a bullhorn that we had five minutes to leave. We sat down on the track and recited a peace liturgy, led by an Episcopal priest.
Perhaps the Marines had orders to try to frighten us, because, when the five minutes were up they rushed double-time into our midst, grabbed people by the hair and clothes, pulled people roughly over onto their backs and dragged the first group of worshippers to a waiting bus. But the spirit of love was so deep among us that, as people were being dragged off, they put their arms around the young Marines and said things like, “We know you don’t want to be doing this,” and “We’re not angry at you for what you’re doing.” No one panicked or struck back.
When the Marines came back from the bus for their second foray, they moved more slowly and seemed less certain, and when they returned for the final group of protestors, they almost politely tapped them on the shoulders, saying, “Sir, would you mind coming with me.”
Taken to the Marine headquarters and put under guard, we continued to worship and singing chorus after chorus of “Amazing Grace” and other hymns. It was clear that God gave us an inner liberation that made us know what it was to be “captive, yet free.” We knew the joy of taking a risk to stand up for what is right, while maintaining love toward our temporary opponents, seeing them also as God’s beloved children.
I know that many Christians have not had the experience of nonviolent action carried on in this loving and joyful spirit. Many, in fact, have felt that they could not associate themselves with anti-war demonstrations because they have heard vituperative speech-making, have seen demonstrators calling police “pigs,” or have learned of property destruction associated with supposedly nonviolent demonstrations.
But there is a tremendous tradition of nonviolent action carried on in a spirit with which Christians can fully identify. And it is possible to organize powerful movements against war and social injustice that are not based on violence or hostility of spirit. Don’t Christians have a responsibility to be a part of such movements for social justice, seeking to infuse them as much as possible with the Spirit of Christ?
It is in the search to create and to be a responsible part of such movements that Gene Sharp’s monumental book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, is an invaluable resource. Never before, to my knowledge, has anyone brought together such a collection of every conceivable form of nonviolent action. The fruit of more than 15 years of research by a highly qualified social scientist (Dr. Sharp has a Ph.D. in political theory from Oxford University and teaches at Harvard and Southeastern Massachusetts University), The Politics of Nonviolent Action gives a full history of nonviolence in all parts of the world since the time of Christ.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the book is in its categorization. Part I describes the general characteristics of nonviolent action and relates it to the nature of government and political power. But it is in the more than 300 pages of Part II, “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” that the reader is led through a fascinating array of types of nonviolent action, cataloged in somewhat the same way that a biology textbook would put flora and fauna into their proper family, genus, and species. All in all, 198 separate kinds of nonviolent action are listed and described, grouped under 37 sub-headings and the five general headings of “Protest and Persuasion,” “Social Non-Cooperation,” “Economic Non-Cooperation,” “Political Non-Cooperation,” and “Nonviolent Intervention.”
Each of the 198 kinds of nonviolent action is described as a general method, then illustrated by several concrete historical examples. For example, “Nonviolent Occupation” (a “species” under the “genus” “Physical Intervention” and the more general “family” of “Non violent Intervention”), is described as holding onto land or a building by people who have been ordered to leave. The first illustration is of Bishop Ambrose, who in Easter Week, 385 AD., defied the orders of Imperial Rome to turn over a church to others.
Troops surrounded the building and Ambrose risked imprisonment or death, but he held masses for five days, after which the government troops were withdrawn and the fines were remitted. Sharp then further illustrates “Nonviolent Occupation” with examples from Gandhi’s 1928 Bardoli campaign in India, American Indian occupations of property in 1957 and 1969, and nonviolent Czech resistance against the Warsaw Pact invasion of August, 1968.
To list just a few of the kinds of nonviolent action Sharp describes suggests the enormous range of nonviolence and the scope of the author’s study: Group or mass petitions; skywriting and earthwriting; deputations; mock awards; group lobbying; picketing; mock elections; prayer and worship; wearing symbols; symbolic lights; new signs and names; vigils; “haunting” officials; fraternization; humorous skits; singing; demonstrative funerals; teach-ins; protest meetings; walk-outs; silence; renouncing honors; social boycott; student strike; stay-at-home; sanctuary; consumers boycott; collective disappearance; rent withholding; workmen’s boycott; withdrawal of bank deposits; domestic embargo; strikes; economic shutdown; boycott of elections; disguised disobedience; sitdown; civil disobedience; administrative noncooperation; fasts; reverse trial; sit-in; nonviolent raid; guerrilla theater; reverse strike; alternative institutions; selective patronage; parallel government.
Although The Politics of Nonviolent Action is written as a scholarly piece of sociology, and not as a religious work, the book abounds with illustrations of Christians acting out their Christian discipleship through nonviolent action. (Of course, since the term “nonviolence” was not coined until the 20th century by Mohandas Gandhi, most of them did not use the term to describe what they did. But to the extent that they saw themselves as struggling against injustice, not with violence, but with the weapons of suffering love, they were engaging in what is now known as nonviolent action.) Here are black Presbyterians in the 1850s participating in “ride-ins” to protest segregated seating in New York City’s horse-drawn trolley cars. Here are Christians in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 praying together at the spots where Germans had destroyed national monuments. Here are Quakers holding silent worship in the U.S. Senate Visitors Gallery to protest the intensified bombing of North Vietnam. Here are Roman Catholic priests helping Columbian peasants nonviolently seize agricultural land in a Latin American land reform movement.
Part III of the book, “The Dynamics of Nonviolent Action,” describes the actual means by which nonviolent campaigns are developed and brought to a successful conclusion. Preparation for action is discussed, strategy and tactics are reviewed, suggestions are given for how opposition, persecution, and repression can be met in a creative way. Sharp shows why and how nonviolent action often works and achieves its goals, and he describes the three basic methods by which success may be achieved.
How can Christians who want to engage in nonviolent action use this book? Obviously, the theoretical sections will help us to see much more clearly the power of nonviolence and how to organize for effective nonviolent action. But I myself find the middle section, “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” the most useful, practical part. It is tremendously stimulating to sit down with these hundreds of examples of nonviolent action before you, examples drawn from centuries of human history, and to reflect on what could be done today. Inevitably, I find myself saying, “That’s an approach that would be effective in our support of the farm workers struggle,” or “We could adopt that method to oppose U.S. support for African apartheid.”
God is engaged in the struggle to make this world more like the kingdom of shalom that God will initiate. American society is rife with injustices that Christians are called upon to try to overcome, that we no longer “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2:7). Ten million Americans still suffer hunger. The corporate economy channels immense wealth to some while ignoring the needs of 30 million poor people. Poorer nations outside the U.S. are exploited to fuel our burgeoning C.N.P.
Gene Sharp’s book suggests that Christians have in nonviolent action a powerful means of working against social injustice and for a better society, a means that is consistent with Christian values and, perhaps, demanded by Christian faith.
Richard K. Taylor has had much experience in nonviolent direct action efforts. When this article apeared, he was a contributing editor to the Post American.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!