A Community Of Sanity

A friend, actually the first of many, once asked me a question: "Why do we choose civil disobedience over the more acceptable forms of protest?" The question seemed incorrect. I don't think it is accurate to say that we choose civil disobedience. Even the term disobedience—while we continue to use it—less and less describes what we are about.

Civil disobedience implies a basic faith in a system that needs changes in certain areas. So one disobeys unjust laws to press for those changes, on the level of consciousness and then in the law.

I think it dangerous and misleading to use the term, to talk about constitutional rights, the first amendment, etc. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights never speak about the real powers which control human life. They speak of government and of the citizen or citizens as if they constituted the whole calculus; whereas we know from experience and observation that the forces and powers that control and govern the whole economy and major policy lie in the Pentagon, CIA, National Security Agency, and the gigantic transnational corporations. These have, for longer than we've known, shaped the world into rich and poor, privileged and oppressed.

When people have spoken derisively of "the establishment," or "the system," they were struggling to find some way to indicate those powers more basic than the bureaucracy and leadership that determine human conduct and what passes for national life. They are struggling to pinpoint the same thing as Paul was when he said: "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but the principalities and powers of this world" (Ephesians 6:12).

We find ourselves talking about our resistance more in terms of being advocates of the poor and those without a voice or as acts of witness. The change is something other than a change in vocabulary. It reflects the deepening of a biblical perspective and faith.

Being a Witness
When Jesus said, "You shall be my witnesses" (Acts 1:8), he was not giving advice to his disciples; he wasn't recommending to them a course of action. He was telling them what had happened and what would continue to happen to them.

Witnessing is not something one does; it is something that happens to one. To be a witness is to be in a position to tell some truth. The witness has the right, more the duty, to speak about the matter in question. It is way beyond choice. To witness is to risk oneself. How I'd like to know an easier way. But I sense that any other way would involve turning my back on all the clues I've had about a decent, meaningful human life. The search, the struggle, would die of neglect, along with a real part of me.

What has happened to us, what have we seen that we must tell?

First, we've read the gospels and heard Christ's injunction: "Follow me!" "Remember me!" And it sounds like: "Cut loose." Make a radical change in our lives and our values. Not, as Clarence Jordan would say, a "low risk, blue chip investment." Against all the watered-down versions meant to take the edge off this call, the Beatitudes are crystal clear.

We have heard a call to experiment with living in a condition that is not yet real: the kingdom of God. In an unjust world, we have been set free to practice actual justice. In an oppressed world we are free to speak for—or more insistently with—the oppressed, and to show forth God's love and mercy and justice until it comes to be.

What have we seen that we are compelled to tell?

That hand in hand with the destruction of the environment has gone the destruction of human life. It is too obvious; the evidence is overwhelming. Those who march lock-step with the "system's" definition of life, freedom, peace, justice, and the "enemy" are walking dead.

The humiliation and degradation of human life is endemic. And at root is the bomb. Right after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Dorothy Day pointed to a truth we have but recently grasped: "The Lordship of Christ has been replaced by the lordship of the bomb." It is what controls national life, attitudes, psychologies, the economy, international relations, diplomacy.

In his Book of Uncommon Prayer, Dan Berrigan wrote: "The bomb is a monstrous puppet, its voice is our own; our fears, obsessions, hatreds, religious awe, the self-love that breaks us to pieces....We came first; we hatched that horrid egg—out of our guts, out of our fevered coupling with the powers of darkness" (a better, a biblical name for "the system").

The bomb came out of our souls and is now enthroned. It is the national policy not because it makes any sense, not because it enhances our security, not because it pads the purses of the poor and middle-class peoples, certainly not because it is right, sane, decent. But because it is big business for those who dictate policies. The bomb possesses, controls, and destroys them every bit as much as it possesses, controls, and destroys us. As he came to Attica under invitation of the rioting inmates in 1971, Tom Wicker wrote these observations: "In the first glimpse of the weaponry available to the police, I did not understand that so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting on the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are on hand, the question of those who have them inevitably becomes: 'Why not use them?' The more the weapons the more insistent the question."

How do we as Christians witness to Christ as Lord in face of the lordship of the bomb? The system cannot be put together again. Whether we speak of welfare, criminal justice, urban affairs, agriculture, commerce, transit, housing, medicare, food stamps—programs that (at times) the system has had some interest in reforming—or whether we speak of arms control, which is a mere euphemism for escalation of the arms race, the system shows itself incapable of growth, change, self-control. Each political election leaves us just about where we were when it comes to the basics of both foreign and domestic policy. A self-propelling and self-serving bureaucracy is at work. There is no hope for change there, and to say that is to free ourselves from false hope and thus to discover (or be free to discover) a basis for hope.

What we attempt to do out of these perceptions is to point to this wellspring of death and to invite people—whomever will hear—to take successive steps to reassert the Lordship of Christ. To exorcise the demon not only from our national life but from our individual lives as well. We face total irrationality of public life and structures and the madness of those who hold authority. (Robert Jay Lifton prefers to call it the absurdity.)

We must get beyond living the absurd; we must get beyond the assumed rationality of it all. To do so requires, it seems to us, that we appeal to something deeper than reason, through the use of symbols and symbolic speech.

We do not do civil disobedience so much as we engage in symbolic action to witness to the truth about our lives today. We believe that restoring symbols and purifying them through suffering and public exposure is part of the renewal of a community of sanity, which ought to be the definition of the church.

When this article appeared, Elizabeth McAlister, a founding member of Jonah House, a resistance community in Baltimore, Maryland, was a Sojourners contributing editor.