The Violence of Climate Change

2 Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolence is countercultural, because war and violence are part of how most human cultures define themselves. Consider the typical history of the United States, which moves from the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, to world wars, and to terrorism—all defining the nation by its uses of violence to free itself and affirm democracy. Consider the quintessential fictional heroes created by popular media, like Luke Skywalker, Katniss Everdeen, and Harry Potter—good people who become experts at violence in order to stand up against evil people. Violence is part of culture, and so opposing violence is countercultural. To imagine living and defining oneself without violence is to go against the norm.

In 1906 the philosopher William James gave a speech on this subject titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” It was an optimistic time; in the years before World War I, many intellectuals believed that the international community was on a path to make war illegal and unacceptable. James was trying to anticipate the problems of this peaceful world, and he considered the fact that meaning and discipline tend to come from war. Violence has become “a sort of sacrament” and “a permanent human obligation.” Centuries and millennia of war have made it seem normal, and “the militarily patriotic and romantic minded” have learned to define themselves, their communities, and their nations with stories about war and violence. So, James suggested, those who oppose war must create a “substitute for war’s disciplinary function”—a “moral equivalent of war.”1 Cultures must find some other struggle with which to define themselves.

James’s answer to this problem is a bit shocking to twenty-first-century ears because he proposed that all young people should be drafted into an “army enlisted against Nature.” He imagined young adults being taught to mine coal or catch fish or build skyscrapers in order “to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas,” after having “done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature” (emphasis in the original).2 The substitute for war against other people, for James, was a “war” against the nonhuman world.

The evidence given in the last chapter suggests that such a “war” is already being waged. Glaciers and polar bears and kudzu all reveal that humanity has gotten very good at violence against the natural world. But climate refugees and flooded coastal communities suggest that violence against nature is also, inevitably, violence against human beings. Climate change teaches a lesson that much of the world had not learned in 1906; there is no way for human beings to “wage war” on the natural world without also harming themselves. There is no peace for people who remain violent against nature.

Mohandas Gandhi found a different moral equivalent to war in nonviolence—in the commitment to resist violence without using violence. The same year William James gave his speech, Gandhi opposed a law that required Indians in South Africa to register with the government. He publicly refused to register and urged other Indians to do the same. During the next seven years, thousands were beaten and jailed for their disobedience. The resisters openly faced these punishments, and the fact that the state was violent while the protesters were peaceful drew a public outcry. South African leaders eventually negotiated a compromise. Gandhi then took his strategy of nonviolent resistance home to India and used it to oppose British colonization for the next forty years. Eventually, the Indian people won independence without fighting a war against the British.3

Like war, nonviolence requires discipline; those who protested with Gandhi had to be rigorously trained so that they would not fight back, even when the police beat them. Like war, nonviolence creates a sense of community; the nation of India to this day prides itself on an origin that did not require the violent overthrow of its oppressors. Like war, nonviolence creates a legacy of heroism; Gandhi was named Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” during his lifetime, and he continues to be revered in India and around the world.

William James was right that opposing violence requires significant cultural change.4 But opposing violence does not require a “war” against nature—or anything else. Instead, this chapter argues, the best way to resist violence is to side with human beings and with nature, to learn the counterculture of nonviolence from Gandhi’s movement and the movements it has inspired.

This chapter’s argument narrows as it develops—from an overarching view of nonviolence, to Christian expressions of nonviolence, and then to the particular work of five witnesses from the United States. Each of these narrowings is meant to clarify and focus, but none is meant to exclude. I am not arguing that nonviolence is the only acceptable response to the violence of the world; that is a broad claim beyond the scope of my work. This chapter does not even argue that all responses to climate change must be nonviolent; the problem is too wicked to lend itself to such simplicity. Nor do I believe that all nonviolence should be motivated by Christian faith; people of many traditions and no tradition have contributed enormously to the nonviolent tradition.5 Finally, the argument is not that all Christians must embrace nonviolence as it has been modeled in the United States; there are many other long-considered and insightful Christian responses to violence. The argument is, instead, simply this: All who are concerned about climate change have something to learn from this Christian tradition of nonviolence.6

DEFINING NONVIOLENCE

The previous chapter defined violence as selfish action that causes harm. I act violently when I act as if I am the only one who matters, hurting others through carelessness or maliciousness. Nonviolence is the opposite because it insists upon care for and attention to others. This means resisting violence while refusing to use violence.7

Resisting Violence

Nonviolence is often assumed to mean passivity, a refusal to act. The political scientist Gene Sharp, who extensively studied Gandhi’s movement and many other similar ones, insists that this is not true. Nonviolence, he writes, “is action that is nonviolent,” and thus it consists of active resistance.8 Furthermore, nonviolence seeks to coerce those who perpetrate and allow violence to change what they are doing. In his classic The Methods of Nonviolent Action, Sharp names 198 distinct methods for nonviolent action, from picketing to refusing to pay taxes to sit-ins.9

Gandhi famously resisted any use of violence, but he less famously said that he would rather have violence than inaction. In 1924 he wrote, “Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach nonviolence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes.”10 He taught Indians to nonviolently resist British colonialism; but to do so, he first had to convince them to recognize the violence of colonization and oppose it, to be willing to fight against injustice. The first step, he insisted, is to resist violence.

On a personal level, resisting violence means standing up for oneself when one is attacked or hurt and standing up for those around us who are being attacked or hurt. People who walk away from an abusive relationship or defuse an escalating argument are resisting violence. On a political level, resisting violence means standing in the way when a government acts violently. People who march in opposition to an unjust war or call upon their elected representatives to invest more in diplomacy rather than weapons of mass destruction are resisting violence. On a global level, resisting violence means responding when one hears about injustice, oppression, or structural violence anywhere in the world. People who boycott a product or divest their resources from a company because of harm caused to others are resisting violence.

When violence is structural, resisting violence is about creating structural change, opposing the systems that leave some people destitute, disenfranchised, or dejected. Nonviolent resistance should lead to better structures, to a more equitable, more democratic, and more empowering society. As Sharp and his colleague Joshua Paulson write, “Real and lasting liberation requires significant changes in the power relationships within the society. . . . Liberation should mean that the members of the previously dominated and weak population obtain greater control over their lives and greater capacity to influence events.”11 Resisting violence means changing the systems that create violent outcomes.

In the twenty-first century, nonviolence must include resisting the violence of climate change. People should resist the temptation to use fossil fuel energy or consume industrial foods that they do not need. Citizens should march and protest when governments fail to pass laws limiting overproduction and overconsumption. All human beings should find ways to help those who have been driven from their homes and livelihoods by the changing atmosphere. To resist violence is to seek climate justice.

Refusing to Use Violence

There are many ways to resist violence. If I feared a violent attack on my home or my family, I would call my city’s police, who are armed so that they can prevent violence with the use or threat of violence. When the United States feels threatened by an opposing army or terrorist group, it increases its investment in the military and homeland security, which are highly prepared to use violence in order to oppose any threat against the nation. What makes nonviolence unique is that it does not appeal to violence—it refuses to resist violence with violence. To strike out violently runs the risk of killing the opponent, and even nonlethal force reduces the possibility of future dialogue. So, nonviolence stands up against threats and injustice without resort to guns, fists, or the threat of harm to the opponent. This form of resistance seeks to win without forcing the other side to lose in a final or ultimate way.

For many nonviolent activists, the refusal to use violence is motivated by a refusal to believe that the world is simplistically divided into good and evil people—us and them. Instead, nonviolence is based on a belief that no one is perfect and everyone can become better. To know that no one is perfect is to know that I myself have limitations and make mistakes, and this makes me cautious about using violence. Because all people make mistakes, I should be wary of allowing myself (or, indeed, my nation) easy access to weapons that could cause irreparable harm. I can never be sure that such tools would be used wisely or well.12 At the same time, to know that everyone can be better changes the way I treat my opponents. If I understand that those with whom I disagree, though flawed, can become better, then I will be cautious about ending their lives or putting them on the defensive with a threat of harm.

Another reason many activists refuse to use violence is because they worry about its long-term effects. Nonviolence is the sensible choice when one cannot win by violence or when one worries that violence would result in too much destruction to one’s home or one’s relationships. In South Africa Gandhi organized a small minority of Indians who would otherwise have been crushed by the government, so nonviolence was strategically wise. In India there were enough native Indians to overthrow the minority of British colonizers, but Gandhi worried about the future of a state founded on violence, and so he found another path. In both cases he believed that nonviolence would lead to a better future than violence.

Therefore, nonviolence avoids harming the other out of awareness of one’s own limits, respect for the humanity of the opponent, and a strategic desire for the most positive outcome. The Christian activist and theologian Ronald Sider accurately expresses all these justifications for nonviolence, noting that nonviolence “respects the integrity and personhood of the ‘opponent’ ” and also produces “a better chance of democratic results, . . . because the process itself is more democratic.”13 By treating the other side humanely, nonviolence preserves the hope of a cooperative outcome that sustains rather than strains community.

Most critiques of nonviolence focus on this refusal to use violence, suggesting that it is impractical to take options off the table in an uncertain world. The most common criticism comes from examples that make violence seem like the only option: How could Hitler have been stopped without violence? What would the principle of nonviolence have me do if I see a crazed murderer about to attack an innocent child? There are thoughtful responses to such critiques, but they are beyond my argument.14 I am not trying to prove here that nonviolence is always the best way to resist violence, only that it is sometimes a viable form of resistance and has something important to teach privileged people who seek climate justice.

As a group, privileged people have not been tempted to use violence to stop climate change, but we have been tempted to ignore the violence caused by our lifestyles and the institutions that support them. Thus, nonviolence can most particularly teach concerned people about the importance of resisting violence and the possibility of doing so without contributing to further violence.

Pragmatism and Principle

Most accounts of nonviolence distinguish between two different motivations for it: those who are nonviolent for purely pragmatic reasons and those who are nonviolent out of deep moral principle. Gene Sharp has focused his attention on the former category, insisting that nonviolence is a strategic choice, defined “by what people do, not by what they believe.” He thus insists that most nonviolent activists choose that path because it makes sense, not out of obedience to some moral rule. He founded the Albert Einstein Institution to train leaders in nonviolence and distributes a handbook for nonviolent struggle, From Dictatorship to Democracy, that has been used extensively by protest movements in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and throughout the world. His core principle is that violence is impractical, which he stresses by using italics: “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.”15 Nonviolence is a strategic option, to be chosen because it is the most effective way to resist violence.16

Other approaches more heavily emphasize moral principle, arguing that nonviolence is an end rather than a means and is worth pursuing whether or not it is effective. For example, Amish communities in the United States are committed to “nonresistance,” with a moral commitment that forbids them from serving in the military or the police, raising a hand in anger against another person, or even standing up against opponents in a court of law. An Amish man on trial in 1953 for refusing to serve in the military told the court that “Jesus never killed His enemies. He let his enemies kill Him. . . . Therefore, I’m here to give myself up to the jury” (emphasis in the original).17 Such an approach to nonviolence is principled rather than pragmatic. This Amish man was not motivated by what would happen to him, or even about what would happen to the nation if no one fought for it. He sought to follow the rule laid down in his faith, whatever the consequences.18

These examples suggest a choice. Sharp seeks a universal strategy, and so he pays little attention to principles that differ across cultures, philosophies, and religions. By contrast, the Amish separate themselves from mainstream culture with a firm allegiance to their particular beliefs and principles, so they pay little attention to strategic goals that might lead to moral compromise.

One can also find a middle ground that is both strategic and principled. The definition of nonviolence used in this book—a commitment to resist violence while refusing to use violence—attempts to hold pragmatism and principle together, to lift up nonviolence as a response to climate change that does pragmatic good while also exemplifying key moral principles. Such a middle ground, I argue here, is well demonstrated in the tradition of Christian nonviolence.

CHRISTIAN NONVIOLENCE

Many accounts of Christian nonviolence focus on principles, citing biblical texts that command Christians to avoid violence and emphasizing that faith-based nonviolence tends to be based on moral commitment.19 This is reasonable because the Christian Bible includes profoundly principled language that seems to command pacifism. In the Gospel of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs his audience: “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” and commands them to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”20 These biblical verses can easily be interpreted to justify nonviolence; Jesus commands his followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek, so Christians can say that they are commanded to be nonviolent. However, these instructions are not merely principled; they also lead to very pragmatic movements offering real and effective resistance to violence.

Loving Enemies

The Sermon on the Mount includes the instruction to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”21 For the last two thousand years, Christians have been trying to figure out what this means.

The activist and New Testament scholar Walter Wink insists that the best way to live out Jesus’s command is nonviolent resistance. One can only love one’s enemies if one refuses to kill or violently harm them, but truly loving them nevertheless means resisting their violent and evil intentions. Praying for one’s enemies means praying and working for their “transformation” and thus requires an approach that can “liberate the oppressed from evil even as it frees the oppressor from sin.” In other words, loving one’s enemies does not mean simply wishing them well, but also trying to help them to do better, to live less violently. Christians are called to love their enemies “not blindly, but critically, calling them back time and again to their own highest self-professed ideals and identities.”22

Wink learned about Christian nonviolent resistance in part by spending time in South Africa, where he studied nonviolent protests that came decades after Gandhi and helped to defeat the apartheid system. Under apartheid, black South Africans had separate and inferior educational and health care systems, were forced into segregated neighborhoods, were denied political representation, and were under constant threat of police violence. The victims of this oppression had as much reason as anyone to hate their enemies, and many called for a violent revolution by the majority black population against the minority whites in power. However, some leaders of the resistance against apartheid instead advocated nonviolence and love for their enemies.

After having been jailed for twenty-seven years because of his attempts to overthrow the oppressive government, Nelson Mandela left prison committed to nonviolence, having learned to love his enemies. He writes:

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.23

After apartheid ended, Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. In this capacity, he helped to create the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to help both victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence to process what had occurred and move on to a healed South Africa.

Assisting Mandela in these efforts was the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, who was also a black South African who had suffered under the injustices of apartheid. Like Mandela, Tutu sought to move away from violence by loving his enemies. “God has no enemies, only family,” he insisted, and so “only together, hand in hand, as God’s family and not as one another’s enemy, can we ever hope to end the vicious cycle of revenge and retribution.”24

Tutu and Mandela both insisted that if God loves all people, Christians must work to do the same. Their work in South Africa is one example of how a commitment to love one’s enemies leads to nonviolent resistance that attempts to heal rather than abolish the enemy, to transform rather than defeat others. This is Christian nonviolence, which seeks not only to follow Jesus’s commandments but also to make a positive change by resisting violence.

Turning the Other Cheek

Of course, as the Amish example above demonstrates, it is possible to understand Jesus’s commands as instructions to love one’s enemy without resistance, even to passively accept violence. This is one interpretation of Jesus’s instruction to “not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”25 If Christians should “not resist an evildoer,” then could active resistance ever be justified? Should Christians passively turn their cheeks rather than take positive action?

Ronald Sider offers a helpful perspective. He notes that many places in Jesus’s story show him resisting evil—arguing with mistaken Pharisees, driving moneychangers out of the temple, and standing up to the Roman Empire with his very life. This record of resistance helps Sider notice that the command is not “do not resist evil”; it is “do not resist an evildoer.” So, Sider argues, Jesus’s words do not forbid his followers from resisting evil, but rather urge them to resist evil while still wishing good for the person doing it. For Sider, this interpretation clarifies that “Jesus’s kind of resistance to evil will be of the sort that refuses to exact equal damages for injury suffered.”26 Christians are called to resist evil but to do so without hating their enemies or seeking revenge. The violence of the world must be opposed without using violence.

The notion of “turning the other cheek” might remain puzzling, however, because it is usually interpreted as a passive accepting of violence or even as asking for more abuse. Once again, Walter Wink’s analysis is useful. He points out that when it is read in historical context, this instruction is a concrete and clever strategy for resisting violence without using violence. In Jesus’s time, to be struck on the right cheek was to be given a backhanded slap, dismissed as an inferior. This was not about causing physical harm but about asserting power. By contrast, to be struck on the left cheek was to be punched, challenged as an equal. Thus, the instruction to turn “the other” cheek was about refusing to be dismissed, refusing to be treated as an inferior. To turn the other cheek was to communicate to one’s oppressor, in Wink’s words, “I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me.”27 Thus, in reality, turning the other cheek is not about accepting physical violence; it is about resisting the violence of dehumanization.

A twentieth-century example of Christians turning the other cheek comes from the small French village of Le Chambon sur Lignon. During World War II, the town’s two pastors were committed to Christian nonviolence. So, when Germany invaded France, they instructed their congregants not to fight back, not to “resist the evildoer.” However, when the Nazis later came into town seeking to register and then to deport the Jewish population, the people of Le Chambon refused to cooperate, refused to participate in the dehumanization of their neighbors. Instead, they hid Jewish refugees in schools, orphanages, and the nearby countryside. They helped counterfeiters produce false papers so that these refugees could escape occupied territory. And they filed a petition with the occupied French government opposing the deportation of Jews. These were creative versions of turning the other cheek, of nonviolently insisting on the humanity of all and standing up against an oppressor’s violence without using violence. Estimates suggest that between 800 and 5,000 Jews survived because of this single town’s refusal to participate in the violence of the Holocaust.28

Writing about Jesus’s command to turn the other cheek, the lead pastor of Le Chambon, André Trocmé, insists that the key lesson of this verse is about action: “Nonviolence engages evil, it does not withdraw from it,” and so Christians are called to act to make God’s peace in the world. “Nonviolence can only overcome evil if it is the act of God’s power on earth, working through human beings.”29 This is a pragmatic, active expression of Christian love that is grounded in deeply held principles.

FIVE LESSONS OF CHRISTIAN NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE

A few more dimensions of Christian nonviolence can be explored by reintroducing the five witnesses who will guide the rest of this book. Each one demonstrates the richness and complexity of what it has meant for Christians to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. These witnesses show us that nonviolence is creative, structural, courageous, communal, and inclusive.

Lesson One: The Creativity of Nonviolence

John Woolman lived in the eighteenth century, when most white people in North America simply assumed that the institution of slavery was a part of how the world worked. Slavery was not worth questioning, much less overthrowing. So Woolman had to be creative in his resistance against this violence. When he discovered that clothing dyes were produced by slave labor, he began to wear only undyed clothes, and the sight of his stark white attire called attention to his moral principles. When he dined at others’ homes, he refused to eat with silver utensils or plates, because slaves mined silver. Such stark moral commitments were partly about purifying Woolman’s own life, but they also served as creative ways to raise awareness about the evils of slavery to everyone he encountered.

Woolman’s creativity was also devoted to an empathetic understanding of others. Though he was a white man who had been born free, he learned to imagine the hardships and oppression of slavery, and he encouraged others to do the same. For example, in an abolitionist essay, he asked his white readers to compare their own pains with those of families wrenched apart by the slave trade:

Our children breaking a bone, getting so bruised that a leg or an arm must be taken off, lost for a few hours, so that we despair of their being found again, a friend hurt so that he dieth in a day or two—these move us with grief. And did we attend to these scenes in Africa in like manner as if they were transacted in our presence, and sympathize with the Negroes in all their afflictions and miseries as we with our children or friends, we should be more careful to do nothing in any degree helping forward a trade productive of so many and so great calamities.30

In other words, if people could imagine themselves suffering the injustices perpetrated by the slave trade, they would never support it. This creative exercise of empathy was an act of nonviolence. Woolman resisted slavery by asking white people to think more broadly, more creatively. At a time when people like him barely thought about the humanity of African slaves, his work to understand their suffering was a form of resistance against dehumanizing violence.31

Nonviolence must be creative because it is countercultural—it always works against conventional wisdom and societal norms. The ethicist Ellen Ott Marshall notes that nonviolent activists “envision alternatives” to a culture that seeks to teach them that their enemies are always evil and they are always good, that the only options in the face of violence are fight or flight. The imagination of a nonviolent activist like Woolman helped him to “envision a third way between the two givens of violence and acquiescence” and thus also to “perceive the connection between the two sides of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ”32

Lesson Two: The Structures of Nonviolence

In 1889 Jane Addams moved to Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, a poor neighborhood with a population of mostly immigrants, and she remained in residence there across the next four decades. She hoped to empower her neighbors by nurturing their minds and their sense of justice, and she formed deep relationships with these neighbors. She was an educator who cared deeply about personal relationships, but her work was primarily about creating and changing institutions, building systems that resisted violence. Her deepest nonviolence was structural rather than personal.

Addams resisted poverty and racism by creating Hull House, an institution devoted to education and inclusion that continued helping thousands of people long after she died. This same impulse led her to engage other institutions—working for the City of Chicago, lobbying the president of the United States for new laws, and founding an international organization for peace.

Addams never used the phrase “structural violence,” but she was profoundly insightful about the power of structures and institutions to shape people’s lives and societal assumptions. For example, she criticized union organizers who used what she called “war methods”—siding with one racial group against others or helping union members at the expense of nonunion members. Such methods, she taught, created systemic resentment and hatred, which would be expressed in other parts of the union members’ lives. She wrote: “It is fair to hold every institution responsible for the type of man whom it tends to bring to the front, and the type of organization which clings to war methods must, of course, consider it nobler to yield to force than to justice.”33 She built Hull House and many other institutions to demonstrate that “peace methods” could work and to make people better by teaching them how to be less violent.

It is always tempting to personify violence and evil. The stories that are told about the Third Reich in Germany too often focus on Adolf Hitler to the exclusion of the political movement of Nazism and the social forces that gave it power. The stories that are told about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States too often focus on Osama bin Laden rather than the broad movement of Al Qaeda and its political and economic foundations. Such personification is dangerous because it makes evil seem to exist in certain people and nowhere else. But violence is more pernicious, more structural than this. In her struggles against corrupt Chicago politicians, Addams spent little time vilifying their greed or arrogance but instead tried to figure out how the system was structured to reward greed and arrogance and how this system could be changed.34 She sought to defeat not evil people but evil structures. Her conception of nonviolence was systemic.

As the activist and scholar Walter Wink puts it, “Evil is not just personal but structural and spiritual. It is not simply the result of human actions, but the consequence of huge systems over which no individual has full control.”35 Institutions shape human beings, so making human beings less violent requires structural changes to these institutions.

Lesson Three: The Courage of Nonviolence

Dorothy Day, who devoted her life to serving alongside the poor in New York City and witnessing for peace, took a resolutely nonviolent stance against US involvement in World War II. She believed that Christians are called to love their enemies and that such love could not be compatible with war. This was a profoundly unpopular position, and therefore, as the war began, many who had joined and supported her work on behalf of the poor turned away because they did not want to be associated with her stance.

Day remained resolute in her commitment. However, it bothered her when critics called pacifists “cowardly,” implying that those who resisted war were motivated by a fear of violence. She defended herself and others in her movement by noting that they had made the brave decision to live among the poor and that by living with the poor they saw the depths of violence and oppression far more deeply than most: “Let those who talk of softness, of sentimentality, come to live with us in the cold, unheated houses of the slums. Let them come to live with the criminal, the unbalanced, the drunken, the degraded, the perverted. . . . Let them live with rats, with vermin, bedbugs, roaches, lice.”36 She insisted that no one who had chosen to live in the poorest part of New York City could possibly be dismissed as a coward.

It is certainly possible to argue that Day was wrong to oppose military action in World War II, but it is unfair to argue that she was a coward who feared conflict. Throughout her life, she subjected herself to dangerous conditions in order to be with the poor. In World War II and at many other times, she took an unpopular pacifist stance and lived with the consequences. Her commitment to nonviolence was brave precisely because it was countercultural.

To be consistent and effective, nonviolence must be courageous—it must show a willingness to endure hardship and criticism, over months, years, or a lifetime. Ronald Sider notes that Christian nonviolence is based upon the model of Jesus, who was crucified for his resistance against hatred, oppression, and the Roman Empire. For those who believe in it, Sider writes, “the cross is not some abstract symbol of nonviolence. The cross is the jagged slab of wood to which Roman soldiers spiked Jesus of Nazareth whom we follow and worship.”37 Christian nonviolence requires courage because it leads to real pain and marginalization, as it did for Jesus. Dorothy Day took courage from the story of Jesus, a story that helped her to live with rats and bedbugs and the harsh judgment of many who dismissed her.

Lesson Four: The Community of Nonviolence

Christian nonviolence can also lead to death, as it did for Martin Luther King Jr. During his very first organized protest in Montgomery, Alabama, racists set his house on fire while his wife and daughter were inside. They survived, but King knew from this moment that his resistance against the violence of racism, poverty, and militarism could be costly. In his final sermon, preached in Memphis the night before he was shot, he spoke about this cost. He told the story of another assassination attempt, when he was stabbed while signing books. He noted that every plane he boarded had to be searched an extra time because of the likelihood that someone had placed a bomb on it. He knew his death was possible. Facing this fact, he told his audience,

I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.38

These words testify to King’s deep courage and his profound faith, but they also show that he understood the movement for nonviolent justice as something far bigger than himself. He was not concerned about what would happen to him but rather what would happen to the community.

Nonviolence can only work if it is undertaken alongside other people who can prop up one’s courage, help to tackle violent structures, and inspire creativity. Five years before his death, writing about the movement against segregation in Birmingham, King noted that change was accomplished not by his speeches but by the community of “sit-inners and demonstrators,” “young high school and college students,” and “old, oppressed, battered Negro women,” such as the one who encouraged everyone to sustain an exhausting protest with the words “my feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.”39

Martin Luther King Jr. was an amazing human being, as were the other four witnesses discussed in this book. But none of them worked alone; all were part of movements. All participated in, helped to nurture, and left behind communities of nonviolent resistance.

Lesson Five: The Inclusivity of Nonviolence

In 1962 Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and a community of farmworkers formed a union to demand better working conditions, better pay, and basic human rights. As the leader of this union for the next thirty years, Chavez learned that he could best serve farmworkers if he made connections to other communities beyond them. To fund national strikes, he had to build partnerships with other unions, churches, and donors who could help support his workers and their families. Before the grape growers would take his demands seriously, he had to mobilize a national boycott of their products. As he studied the health effects of pesticides on his union’s members, he also learned about the effects on their children, on the people who bought and ate the food, and on the natural world. His nonviolent movement was inclusive because he believed he could only resist violence against farmworkers by working to protect all people and all creatures.

In contrast to the other four witnesses, it is appropriate to call Chavez an environmentalist because he wrote and thought a great deal about how his resistance against violence should advocate justice not only for the entire human race but also for other creatures. This influenced his personal discipline, as well, and he was a dedicated vegan and animal rights activist. When presented with an award from In Defense of Animals, he told them: “The basis for peace is respecting all creatures. . . . We cannot hope to have peace until we respect everyone, respect ourselves, and respect animals and all living things.”40 This broadly inclusive approach to nonviolence is vital for climate justice, which requires that people resist the global violence of climate change against every person and every living thing.

The same idea has been expressed more recently by the Catholic peace activist Brayton Shanley, who insists that “nonviolent peace activism stands in opposition to our society’s plague of violence and cannot simply remain in the historically limited framework of anthropocentrism—that is, human beings mediating their conflicts on earth with regard only to other human beings.”41 If nonviolence is to truly challenge the structures of violence, it must challenge the structures that separate humanity from the rest of the world. If nonviolence is to creatively build communities, it must extend these communities beyond any single species. Nonviolence is radically inclusive.

RESISTING THE VIOLENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The violence of climate change will not be solved, and there is no single response that will be sufficient or satisfying by itself. However, this does not mean that the problem is hopeless. Much to the contrary, it means that many responses can and should be tried. These responses should be inclusive, because climate change threatens every creature on the globe. Responses to climate change should be communal, because no one can understand or meaningfully resist this violence alone. Responses to climate change should be courageous, because it is tempting to be overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear in the face of a problem so large and so complicated. Responses to climate change should be structural, because destructive institutions and systems have developed and solidified over time. Finally, responses to climate change should be creative, because the adaptive complexity of this violence exceeds conventional wisdom.

Nonviolence offers a countercultural tradition of creativity, structural thinking, courageous action, communal partnerships, and inclusive attention. This tradition will not solve climate change, but it will help people to resist its violence while learning what it would take to stop contributing to further violence. We can learn more about such resistance from the five witnesses to whom we now turn.

NOTES

1.James, “Moral Equivalent of War,” 353, 352, 356.

2.Ibid., 359.

3.See especially Gandhi, Essential Gandhi; Gandhi, Autobiography.

4.The journalist Mark Kurlansky notes that there is no positive word for “nonviolence.” That it can be discussed only as a negation of something else signals how revolutionary an idea it is—“an idea that seeks to change the nature of society, a threat to the established order.” Kurlansky, Nonviolence, 5.

5.For multifaith considerations of nonviolence, see especially Smith-Christopher, Subverting Hatred. For a powerful justification of nonviolence that does not depend upon any religious tradition, see especially Deming, Part of One Another.

6.The social ethicist Reinhold Neibuhr, who argued emphatically against pacifism for most of his public life, made a point of noting that he still believed he had much to learn from pacifists. In an essay advocating military engagement before the United States had joined the allies in World War II, for example, he wrote: “If there are men who declare that, no matter what the consequences, they cannot bring themselves to participate in this slaughter, the Church ought to be able to say to the general community: We quite understand the scruple and we respect it. It proceeds from the conviction that the true end of man is brotherhood, and that love is the law of life. We who allow ourselves to become engaged in war need this testimony of the absolutist against us, lest we accept the warfare of the world as normative, lest we become callous to the horror of war, and lest we forget the ambiguity of our own actions and motives and the risk we run of achieving no permanent good from this momentary anarchy in which we are involved.” Niebuhr, “Why the Church Is Not Pacifist,” 146.

7.For histories of nonviolence as an idea and movement, see Juhnke and Hunter, Missing Peace; and Chernus, American Nonviolence. For case studies on nonviolent struggles, see Ackerman and Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict; and Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful.

8.Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part One, 64.

9.Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part Two.

10.Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers, 98.

11.Sharp and Paulson, Waging Nonviolent Struggle, 27.

12.David Hoekema makes this point well, writing that “realism about human nature . . . undermines the assumption that weapons of destruction and violence intended to restrain evil will be used only for that purpose. The reality of human sinfulness means that the instruments we intend to use for good are certain to be turned to evil purposes as well. There is therefore a strong presumption for using those means of justice that are least likely to be abused and least likely to cause irrevocable harm when they are abused. An army trained and equipped for national defense can quickly become an army of conquest or a tool of repression in the hands of an unprincipled leader.” Hoekema, “Practical Christian Pacifism,” 918–19.

13.Sider, Nonviolent Action, xv, 159–60.

14.See especially Wink, Engaging the Powers, chap. 12; and Brimlow, What About Hitler?

15.Gene Sharp, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” 4.

16.Other explorations of nonviolence that focus on a pragmatic approach include those by Boserup and Mack, War Without Weapons; Ackerman and DuVall, Force More Powerful; and Schock, Unarmed Insurrections.

17.Kraybill, Nolt, and Weaver-Zercher, Amish Way, 5–6. For a moving account of the kind of forgiveness that such nonresistance makes possible, see the same authors’ Amish Grace.

18.Other explorations of nonviolence that focus on moral principle include those by Yoder, Politics of Jesus; Kurlansky, Nonviolence; and Cortright, Gandhi and Beyond.

19.For collections of Christian writings about nonviolence that offer far more comprehensive and detailed accounts of the tradition than I can here, see especially O’Gorman, Universe Bends toward Justice; and Long, Christian Peace and Nonviolence. For discussions of nonviolence amid other Christian responses to violence, see especially Allen, War; Cahill, Love Your Enemies; and Allman, Who Would Jesus Kill?

20.Matthew 5:9, 39, 44.

21.Matthew 5:44–45.

22.Wink, Powers That Be, 110–11; also see 34.

23.Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 544.

24.Tutu, God Has a Dream, 47, 58. Tutu has more recently called for a divestment campaign from fossil fuels modeled on the divestment campaign that helped to weaken the apartheid South Africa government: “Just as we argued in the 1980s that those who conducted business with apartheid South Africa were aiding and abetting an immoral system, we can say that nobody should profit from the rising temperatures, seas and human suffering caused by the burning of fossil fuels.” Desmond Tutu, “We Fought Apartheid, Now Climate Change Is Our Global Enemy,” Guardian, September 20, 2014, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/21/desmond-tutu-climate-change-is-the-global-enemy.

25.Matthew 5:39.

26.Sider, Christ and Violence, 47–48.

27.Wink, Engaging the Powers, 176.

28.See especially Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; and Sauvage, Weapons of the Spirit.

29.Trocmé, Jesus and Nonviolent Revolution, 153.

30.Woolman, Journal and Major Essays, 233.

31.Laura Hartman argues that such creative imagination is a crucial gift that Woolman gives to morally serious people in our time. See Hartman, Christian Consumer, 178.

32.Marshall, “Practicing Imagination,” 66.

33.Addams, Newer Ideals, 80.

34.See especially Addams, “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” in Jane Addams Reader, 118–24.

35.Wink, Powers That Be, 31.

36.Day, By Little and By Little, 263.

37.Sider, Christ and Violence, 16.

38.King, Testament of Hope, 263.

39.King, Why We Can’t Wait, 94.

40.Quoted by Elliot M. Katz, “Cesar Chavez: A True Guardian,” March 27, 2013, www.idausa.org/remembering-cesar-chavez/.

41.Shanley, Many Sides of Peace, 12–13.