It’s good to be part of an exploration of nonviolence in a magazine whose roots are sunk in evangelical Protestantism. It’s good because, as often been remarked in these pages, American evangelicals have for too long acquiesced in a near total identification with a national status quo which has produced about as much violence as one could imagine. But it’s even better because the proponents of nonviolence, particularly those of my generation—the veterans of the sixties—have a good deal to learn from their evangelical sisters and brothers. It is the latter that I want to reflect on here, since in the long run I think this is probably the more important of the two; the evangelicals can doubtless survive without adopting nonviolence, but I’m not sure nonviolence will make it as a meaningful social force without hearing what evangelicalism has to tell it.
Two points in the evangelical tradition seem to me to be of special relevance for the nonviolent activists of the seventies, and they are: first, the emphasis on high standards of personal morality as the base of social change and betterment; and second, the insistence on the reality of the ‘principalities and powers’ standing behind and above visible institutions.
It may at first seem paradoxical to focus initially on the theme of private morality, since that is the evangelical characteristic most vehemently rejected by liberal social-activist Christians. Most of us are familiar with the arguments about how high private ethics can dovetail seamlessly into low public morals, and how justice requires the changing of institutions as well as individual hearts; indeed, many of us have probably repeated them on more than a few occasions. I am not intending to question these assertions, because I believe they are largely correct. What I am questioning is the unspoken but very real implication which too often has followed on such arguments: that private morals are practically irrelevant to the process and outcome of the struggle for justice. This conclusion does not follow logically from the assertion of the need to confront institutions and change public morality; but then, neither does it follow that concern with personal ethics necessarily dictates blanket acceptance of the institutional status quo, as it so often has among evangelicals. Both social change movements and evangelicalism are at much less than their best when they have espoused such positions. I believe there is an important if not always simple relationship between the personal and the institutional which, though frequently producing tension, is fatal to ignore.
Examples of the importance this consideration has been for recent nonviolent movements are not hard to find. One of the most poignant is the decline of the sixties civil rights movement in the south. The civil rights movement as recorded in the public media, was pictured as reaching its zenith of influence in 1965 with the voting rights campaign in
There is some truth to this account, but it is of a superficial kind. A closer examination will show that increasingly the civil rights movement was internally in bad shape, at least from early 1964; that the Selma triumph was actually its last hurrah; and that Black Power only brought into the open the divisions and hostility which had racked the movement for a long time.
What was the source of this degeneration? External forces like the war were important; but even more so, I believe, was the fact that by the end of 1964 the people who made up the key cadre of the movement in the south could no longer operate, except with great difficulty, as anything resembling a cohesive group. Their morale was low and sinking steadily and too many of them grew to dislike and distrust one another. What had been so often referred to as their ‘beloved community’ had been shattered, and was only a memory.
What undermined this once-vibrant ‘community’? The answer is complex, of course; but from my experiences as a participant and reflections as a student of the period, I think it can be said that a key factor was the primitive level of private morality that existed within the movement. Specifically, I am referring to a pattern of widespread sexual adventurism among this cadre, a pattern in which even the most respected figures in the movement were implicated.
Many pioneers among the early 1970s upsurge of separatist feminism have written angrily about this adventurist exploitation and the toll it took on women in the movement. Their outrage is clearly well-founded; but the price paid was serious for both women and men. They found themselves entangled in hypocrisy, since the movement’s roots were in a religious tradition whose standards were quite different, and in the public eye the struggle’s moral stance was the basis of its legitimacy. With hypocrisy came the need to conceal what was actually happening, a need which strongly reinforced the tendencies toward elitism and manipulative group politics; and these in turn fed the fires of that most destructive of male characteristics, cutthroat competition between groups and leaders, splashing on the already smoldering tangle of unresolved policy issues the gasoline of burgeoning personal jealousies and hatreds. The most debilitating results of such a process were the ones the crisis-oriented mass media were not well-equipped to perceive: not guns, riots or even a militant feminism, but rather a mix of bitterness, exhaustion, and disillusion issuing in attrition on the part of large numbers of the people who had once been ready to risk their lives for the cause.
To me the effects which came out of the initial personal hypocrisies into which so much of the movement leadership and cadre fell are more important than the question of what the standards of private morality in the movement ought to have been. We were an articulate and morality-conscious bunch in the movement, and there were few who could not cover themselves with a glib ‘New Morality’ line of rationalizations when the occasion called for it. But, despite our parroting of abstractions, the character of too much of our practice was in fact self-centered and predatory. Having sown those unhappy seeds among our constituency, the movement harvest, when outside developments made new responses unavoidable, was a bitter one.
I don’t mean by saying this that questions of personal ethics are easy to resolve, or that retreat into absolutism is the appropriate response. That would be to imitate the weakest strand in evangelical thinking. But nonviolent activists who are seriously concerned with building a viable movement ought to be able to agree with the best of evangelical thought that high personal ethical standards are important to such a process, that in a given movement they should be as widely agreed on as possible, that they should be such as will promote genuine concern and love for persons, and that they ought to be lived up to the best of people’s ability. If that sounds self-evident, our experience suggests that it has not been so in recent years. Mahatma Gandhi, incidentally, would have recognized and seconded such a set of standards—though his own, including complete celibacy and strict vegetarianism, would doubtless be controversial among American nonviolent activists (and evangelicals too).
If what I am suggesting here is true, that a close look at the history of nonviolent movements will reveal crucial relationships between the private morality of participants and their ability to work for social justice as a group, then the pertinence of this great theme of evangelical tradition is one we should have been taking more seriously long ago. And the same goes for the doctrine of principalities and powers. As William Stringfellow has pointed out brilliantly in his book An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, institutions, governments, etc., embody and are moved by invisible, fallen forces greater than themselves, with energies and purposes of their own. The nonviolent peace movement in the
The key risk in dealing with the news media lies in the fact that, functionally, it is of the same character as the entertainment industry; it can even be argued that journalism today has become only another variety of mass entertainment. This relationship is most corrupting once exposure in the news media and the benefits it produces get to be a habit with people and groups: then they tend almost unconsciously to adapt to the demands the media places on them for continued attention: demands for novelty, high visibility, and perhaps most critically the acceptance of the assumptions regarding processes of change and the importance of issues and events which structure the universe in which the media operates. This last item is crucial because, as Jacques Ellul has insisted time and again, the world of the media, with its endless reports of ‘news,’ the steady stream of vivid images, and its cascades of ‘facts,’ is a very artificial one, shaped as much by the internal logic and necessities of the technologies—and by deliberate manipulation by political and other propagandists—as by the truth of the world they exist in. Assimilation to this world makes people actors, and their movements the equivalent of vaudeville shows. One thinks with regret of Dr. King in his last year, running constantly behind on a twenty-hour per day schedule, trailing an omnipresent retinue of cameras and microphone-bearing reporters, making the same speeches over and over in city after city on a never-ending round of public appearances, like a political candidate unable to stop campaigning. It is a measure of his greatness that he was able to survive this routine, and still muster the strength and the will to provide as much historic leadership as he did.
How critical the descent into self-dramatization became for the peace movement of the late sixties can be seen in the degeneration of important segments of this struggle from nonviolence into a celebration of a stylized parody of guerilla warfare as the one truly meaningful form of protest. This commitment to violence came ostensibly at the end of a process of escalation of tactics in hopes of finding something ‘effective’ in stopping the
The trouble with this scheme is that it is strictly a media-centered, theatrical scenario. For one thing, the movement’s development was profoundly shaped by the patterns of personal relationships not unlike those we described as afflicting the civil rights struggle. For another, the antiwar movement’s notions of ‘effectiveness,’ and its understanding of its tactical options, were all deeply colored by the needs and values of the media universe, in terms of which it had operated without question since its beginning in the mid-sixties. The progression from peaceful petition to clandestine terrorism was not really dictated by any iron logic or inner psychological necessity; but it was one most easily adapted to media needs and values. Ironically enough, however, even the ‘effectiveness’ of their ‘militant’ but mainly symbolic acts of violence depended largely on their interpretation through the mass media, as the barrage of tapes, manifestoes and letters from the underground make plain. It is probably not accidental that no television stations have yet been bombed.
A different, and more discerning scenario which has the benefit of the evangelical understanding of the media as a power could have first questioned the real value of basing a movement so completely within the framework of the media universe. From there, its progression could have been not toward violent stunts but away from media scenarios entirely, toward an exploration of what a truer ‘effectiveness’ might be, what values it could be based upon, and how they might be pursued. There have in fact been significant developments along this line (the present journal being an important example); but they are by and large unnoticed by the mass media (deo gratias), because they are proceeding from a different logic than that of the novelty-facts-images nexus out of which media myths are manufactured and packaged for mass consumption.
The molding of part of the nonviolent peace movement into terrorism was not the result of some conspiracy by network moguls working with the CIA. The institutions have their own momentum, their own appetites, which are imposed on their ostensible masters as much as on their subjects. These same media have been dominant institutions in the experience of most recent movement activists, and thus one of the most difficult to see through.
It is at this point that the doctrine of the principalities and powers makes important sense. It provides a standpoint from which we can begin to understand the reality of such institutions, and then to begin to emancipate ourselves from their thrall. For the generation of the sixties, which was conditioned to media views of reality almost since birth, this emancipation is an enormous undertaking. Similarly, this doctrine can throw a new light on the problem of effectiveness, which in turn opens up new possibilities for tactics. Stringfellow’s book explores these areas with considerable trenchancy; and instead of repeating him, I would rather urge readers to seek it out and engage his whole argument.
These two brief examples of what the evangelical tradition can offer those of us who want to see a nonviolent movement survive and play a serious role in the life of our time scarcely exhaust the relevance of the tradition. Moreover, while I am not expert in evangelical history, it does not seem hard to discover why it possesses so much relevance: after all, much of it was forged in struggle, and is the legacy of Christians who had to suffer and overcome the world in order to live out their faith. The compromised, status quo evangelicalism we are accustomed to is a more recent, and not necessarily definitive representation. The further we explore the points of contact between this tradition and nonviolence, the more fruitful the dialogue should become, and both parties should emerge enriched.
Charles Fager was a freelance writer and an editor of the Boston Real Paper
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