Confronting the Powers that Be: But what if...? (Session 10)

Christians are called to nonviolence unequivocally. They are to engage evil nonviolently, in every circumstance, without exception. They must lean all their weight on divine grace, trusting that the Holy Spirit will reveal the third way not evident in the situation. (ETP 237)

We find it hard to believe in anything else than violence. We trust it, Wink says, we believe it saves us. We believe it is redemptive. Most Christians don't take nonviolence seriously because we don't think it will work most of the time. We have been conditioned to accept the alternatives of fight or flight.

Invariably, someone will bring up a "what if" situation. What if your family is attacked? When William Jennings Bryan posed such a dilemma to Tolstoy, the Russian pointed out he had never seen such a situation, but that he had seen millions of brigands in violence against women and children in war.

Rarely, Wink points out, is the victim prepared to resist successfully anyway. He gives the example of a woman who engaged the intruder in conversation, won his respect, and got him to leave peacefully. If she had had a gun she might have injured him and ended up being killed herself.

The church should never condone violence, Wink says. He admits there are situations where violence seems inevitable, so, if we choose it, we recognize that we sin. We also must attempt to maximize all the nonviolent possibilities.

We are conditioned to violence, powerful and powerless, oppressors and oppressed, alike. But, Wink says, the burden of proof should be on the proponents of violence.

The truth is, nonviolence generally works where violence would work, and where it fails, violence too would usually fail. Neither was effective in Stalin's Russia, and neither has been successful so far in Burma. The declining postwar British empire would have lost India to either violence or nonviolence; but the choice of the latter meant a loss of only eight thousand lives instead of hundreds of thousands or even millions. But nonviolence also works where violence would fail, as in most of the nonviolent revolutions of 1989-1991. (TPTB 159-160)

• 30-312 C.E. Christians martyred for disturbing the peace and for refusing to worship the emperor, to serve in the army, or to engage in war.
• 41. The emperor Gaius Caligula orders his own image placed in the Jerusalem Temple. Tens of thousands of Jews protest to the Syrian legate, Petronius by throwing themselves to the ground and announcing they would rather die than see their laws transgressed. Petronius finally petitions Caligula to relent, a request that would have cost him his life had the emperor not been assassinated first.
• 1840-60. "Underground Railroad" helps slaves escape to the northern United States and Canada. 1871 Women in Paris block cannons and stand between Prussian and Parisian troops.
• 1892. Ida B. Wells-Barnett leads first a mass boycott and then a mass exodus from Memphis to northern cities to protest lynchings and discriminations against blacks. Whole congregations leave the city--over two thousand people in two months.
• 1900s. Labor movement (largely nonviolent) uses strikes to secure economic justice.
• 1901-5. Finns nonviolently resist Russian oppression, and force them to repeal the law imposing conscription.
• 1920. An attempted coup d'etat led by Wolfgang Kapp against the Weimar Republic of Germany fails when the population goes on a general strike, refusing to cooperate.
• 1944. Two Central American Dictators...are ousted as a result of nonviolent civilian insurrections and general strikes. Between 1931 and 1961, eleven Latin American presidents leave officein the wake of civic strikes.
• 1955-68. Montgomery bus boycott launches U.S. civil rights struggle...
• 1963. Atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty signed after six years of demonstrations and public pressure.
• 1977-84. Nestle boycott drive successfully brings about World Health Organization agreement restricting distribution and sale of infant formula in the Third World. Nestle later violates the agreement and the boycott is resumed.
• 1980s. More than eighty thousand Americans sign pledges to engage in civil disobedience if the United States invades Nicaragua (the "Pledge of Resistance"). Some believe it helped prevent the actual U.S. invasion.
• 1986. The nonviolent revolution of the Philippines brings down the oppressive Marcos dictatorship. (ETP 244-247)

2. Can you tell stories about your own use of nonviolent techniques to mediate or settle conflicts at home, school, work or elsewhere?

Copyright © 1998 by Vern Rossman