Rev. James Lawson (1928–2024), an influential teacher of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, insists on the effective power of nonviolence:
There is impracticality to violence. It’s ineffective and has been ineffective throughout the world for too many years. We must not let people who romanticize or mythologize violence persuade us that it has proven to be efficacious…. It has proven to be the most ineffective weapon. It drains emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual energy with no good consequences.
I want to urge you today to the spiritual and moral task of creating a revolution that is utterly necessary in the twenty-first century. And when I use the term revolution, I do not mean violence.
From the perspective of Gandhi, nonviolence is the use of power to try to resolve conflicts, injuries, and issues in order to heal and uplift, to solidify community, and to help people take power into their own hands and use their power creatively. Nonviolence makes the effort to use power responsibly.
Lawson’s Christian faith is at the center of his philosophy of nonviolence.
At the root of nonviolence is the notion that within each person there is not only a spark of God, as the Quakers say, but also the spark of love and compassion. I hear many people saying, “I’m not going to love my enemy.” As Martin [Luther] King points out so very well, when Jesus said to love thy enemy [Matthew 5:44], he was not talking about friendship love, nor was he talking about romantic love. [1] He was not talking about deep liking and appreciation. He was talking about what the Quakers and William Penn pledged to the Native Americans during colonial times: how even though we are very different, and we come from different countries and different cultures with many different languages, we have a common human experience that we can show each other and that we can come to respect.
There is no other way. It cannot be done with hatred. It can only be done by people who have compassion and awareness of their own lives in the light of creation. It cannot be done by insulting other people, cannot be done with the gun or the fist, cannot be done with bombs. We three-hundred-plus million people of the United States can be healed of our fears and our animosities, our hurts and our pains, but that can only happen if we adopt a nonviolent perspective, daring to put the issues on the table in front of us no matter the pain, walking through them and putting together the ethos and principles that can create in the United States a new earth and a new heaven. And I think if religion is valid, as I understand it for myself and for my family, I think religion must get out of the pews and become a movement for the moral, intellectual spirituality that can help us become the people that God has created us to be.
| John Chaffee’s Friday Five |
| Grace and Peace, Friends! This week, I was out with a friend who told me he was listening to a discussion online between a Christian and a Satanist. Yep, you read that correctly. He said that throughout the conversation, the Satanist was making excellent points about how the god of the Christian was vindictive, punitive, retributive, and kept account of wrongs. He said the Christian failed to respond well to that indictment and how the conversation left a mark on him. I couldn’t stay silent. During our walk, I burst out and said, “This is what infuriates me. The Christian God is barely taught about in a Christian way. Most people have no idea that God is infinite, out-pouring love, who does not keep account of wrongs and has already reconciled everyone and everything back to God (Col. 1:15-20). Most people’s understanding of God can’t even live up to 1 Corinthians 13. The problem is that we platform very passionate people into pulpits who are still quite immature, and they preach their immaturity but not Christianity. Then, they hear someone like me talking like this and I am experienced as polarizing for just quoting parts of the New Testament that people were never told about. Everything changes when you realize Christ came to salvage all of humanity (John 12:32). People walk away from Christianity because, often, they were not really taught Christianity anyways.” The moment was a little odd because I vented more than spoke calmly. We then continued our walk, which was quite a nice time, and moved on to other topics. But I thought about that moment for the rest of the day. One of the reasons I started this weekly newsletter was to try and offer some other voices and share quotes from people who helped me shift my understanding of the faith into something larger, more integrative, more mature, and more robust. I sincerely hope that if you have been reading these emails for the past few weeks or months or from the start, it has helped you expand your view of the world and God and challenged you to grow yourself. |
