Many scholars have explored the ways that Gandhi influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and inspired him to dream of ways that nonviolent protest could work on a societal level.
More recently, as the year of the Arab Spring turned a bit bleaker with the prospect of a long Arab Winter, thinkers have again turned to the question of whether nonviolent resistance can really transform the larger culture.
Skeptics might say, “Sure, it’s one thing to use nonviolence to transform human relationships, one human to one human. But can one really overturn a violent society with nonviolent tactics?”
The lives of Gandhi and King reassure us that yes, change can come through nonviolent resistance. Here’s an interesting possibility:The social change that has the most potential for lasting transformation can only come through nonviolence. And often, the training in nonviolence comes from religious traditions.
The power of nonviolence
Jonathan Schell, in an 2009 article lists autocratic regimes in the 20th century that have fallen to nonviolent movements and concludes: “So there really is a counter-story to the dominant narrative of the twentieth century — the shocking and unbelievable expansion of the use of violence. But this sort of subterranean stream of nonviolence was also present. The fall of the British Empire, the fall of the Soviet Empire — these are not the small change of history. These are serious events.”
The theologian Walter Wink has done more work in this area of nonviolence and social change than most scholars.
In a 1993 essay he noted, “In 1989 alone, there were thirteen nations that underwent non-violent revolutions. All of them successful except one, China. That year 1.7 billion people were engaged in national non-violent revolutions. That is a third of humanity.”
Wink continued, “If you throw in all of the other non-violent revolutions in all the other nations in this century (the 20th), you get the astonishing figure of 3.34 billion people involved in non-violent revolutions. That is two-thirds of the human race. No one can ever again say that non-violence doesn’t work. It has been working like crazy. It is time the Christian churches got involved in this revolution because what is happening in the world is that the world itself is discovering the truth of Jesus’ teaching, and here we come in the church, bringing up the rear.”
What does Jesus say?
We might be scratching our heads as we try to remember what Jesus said about overturning autocratic regimes. Was this not the man who told us to turn the other cheek while we give up our coats and our shirts and walk the second mile with soldiers (Matthew 5:38-48)?
These texts have been so misunderstood through the centuries that it’s hard to remember what Jesus was really saying. Jesus was NOT saying to let your abuser batter you day in and day out.
Jesus was not instructing us to let evil governments steamroll right over us. Jesus was not even calling us to a stoic acceptance of brutality that will buy us a better condo in heaven for enduring hell on earth.
No, Jesus gave us resistance texts. Yes, resistance texts.
These are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that evil elements will not turn around and destroy us. Likewise, these are texts that show us how to resist evil in such a way that we don’t become the evil that we are resisting.
Turning the cheek
Let’s focus on the turning of the other cheek, since this passage is so well-known. Notice that Jesus gives specific cheeks in specific order. That’s a detail lost on us, but it wouldn’t have been lost on the people who heard Jesus’ instructions. Walter Wink explains:
Imagine if I were your assailant and I were to strike a blow with my right fist at your face, which cheek would it land on? It would be the left. It is the wrong cheek in terms of the text we are looking at. Jesus says, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek … .” I could hit you on the right cheek if I used a left hook, but that would be impossible in Semitic society because the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. You couldn’t even gesture with your left hand in public. The only way I could hit you on the right cheek would be with the back of the hand.
Now the back of the hand is not a blow intended to injure. It is a symbolic blow. It is intended to put you back where you belong. It is always from a position of power or superiority. The back of the hand was given by a master to a slave or by a husband to a wife or by a parent to a child or a Roman to a Jew in that period.
What Jesus is saying is in effect, “When someone tries to humiliate you and put you down, back into your social location which is inferior to that person, turn your other cheek.”
Now in the process of turning in that direction, if you turned your head to the right, I could no longer backhand you. Your nose is now in the way. Furthermore, you can’t backhand someone twice. It’s like telling a joke a second time.
If it doesn’t work the first time, it has failed. By turning the other cheek, you are defiantly saying to the master, “I refuse to be humiliated by you any longer. I am a human being just like you. I am a child of God. You can’t put me down even if you have me killed.” This is clearly no way to avoid trouble. The master might have you flogged within an inch of your life, but he will never be able to assert that you have no dignity.
Gandhi and King are some of the more famous people who cried out for justice and who nonviolently resisted evil governments, but there are plenty of others, a list too long to make here. Some of them died before they got to see the full fruits of their labor, but the groundwork that they laid was vital for bending the arc of history toward justice, to use King’s beautiful language.
The larger culture of empire and popular culture can be in thrall to death. It’s good to have a day to remember that nonviolent resistance can overcome death’s bewitchment in many different ways.
It’s good to remember that we can resist in life-affirming ways that not only prevent us from becoming agents of oppression ourselves, but that lead us toward all sorts of transformations as we become the arks that keep the more vulnerable members of society safe.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott is a lifelong Lutheran, a college teacher and department head. She has taught a variety of English and creative-writing classes for the last 20 years.
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Two parts of this article bother me. The first is the amount of propaganda that goes into attempting to prove that 'nonviolence works and violence doesn't.' Violence works rather well. That's why there's so much of it. Nonviolence is hard, not guaranteed, and it is likely to get you killed. Not that we need to sell violence as a method, but it would be nice to be more realistic in our assessments of these things.
Plus I think Wink's statistics are basically made-up.
The other problem I have is that this seems like an exercise in rationalizing an uncomfortable part of Scripture. Matthew 5:39 in full is "But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also."
He may be able to rationalize 'turning the other cheek' into a "resistance text", but "do not resist an evil person" seems pretty explicit to me. It also sets the context for turning that other cheek-- it is not an act of resistance. Most alarmingly to me is that twisting the texts in this way robs the cross of its power and meaning. Jesus did let the soldiers batter him and the evil government steamroll over him.
Interestingly, Dr King didn't start from this so-called "resistance text", nor did he need to twist Scripture to fit his ideas of justice. Rather than the Sermon on the Mount, he grounded his nonviolence in loving one's enemies, which included not resisting the evil ones. To wit (from a sermon in 1957): "To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.'"