In the spiritual renaissance that I believe to be aborning, it will not be the message of Paul that this time galvanizes hearts, as in the Reformation and the Wesleyan revival, but the human figure of Jesus. And in the teaching of Jesus, the sayings on nonviolence and love of enemies will hold the central place, not because they are more true than any others, but because they are our best chance of checking humanity's suicidal rush to Armageddon.
I submit that the ultimate religious question today should no longer be "How can I find a gracious God?" but "How can I find God in your enemy?" What guilt was for Luther, the enemy has become for us: the goad that can drive us to God. What has formerly been a purely private affair - justification by faith through grace - has now, in our age, grown to embrace the world.
As John K. Stoner, the Mennonite peace and justice worker, has commented, we can no more save ourselves from our enemies than we can save ourselves from sin, but God's amazing grace offers to save us from both. There is, in fact, no other way to God for our time but through the enemy, for loving the enemy has become the key both to human survival in the nuclear age and to personal transformation. Either we find the God who causes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, or we may have no more sunrises.
Jesus' teachings about loving enemies is a test of true faith. Just as in the lore of exorcism the devil cannot bear to utter the name of God, so our false prophets today cannot tolerate mention of the love of enemies.
Rev. Greg Dixon, a former state chair and national secretary for the Moral Majority, recently urged his followers to pray for the death of their opponents, claiming, "We are tired of turning the other cheek. ... Good heavens, that's all that we have done." Jerry Falwell and his ilk are champions of the warrior mentality and of peace through strength; Jesus' way of creative nonviolence is for them indistinguishable from supine cowardice. As Old Testament scholar James A. Sanders has reminded us, no false prophet can ever conceive of God as God also of the enemy. Taken as a whole, Jesus' teachings imply three possible responses to evil: submission, violent opposition, and a third way, which, for lack of a better term, has been called nonviolent direct action. The heart of Jesus' third way is contained in the thesis statement in Matthew 5:39, "Resist not evil" (KJV), or "Do not resist one who is evil" (RSV). These translations of anthistemi are more confusing than helpful. They seem to suggest that only two alternatives exist, violence or submission, and that Jesus counsels submission. One either resists, or resists not. If Jesus commands us not to resist, he would appear to be advocating submissiveness in the face of evil.
"Resist not" thus seems to encourage passivity, weakness, and victim behavior in the face of malignant and intolerable evil. Translated thus, Christians become doormats to be walked on, remaining silent in the face of injustice. Jesus' real intention is utterly lost, and the church becomes complicit with the oppressors.
Jesus' point is altogether different. His own life is the clearest refutation of that reading of the passage. What he means is, "Do not resist an evil by letting the evil itself dictate the terms of your response. Do not resort to evil by evil means." Anthistemi is most frequently used in terms of an uprising, insurrection, riot, revolt, or battle. Jesus does not mean that we should not attempt to counter evil but that we should not counter it with violence.
The question was not resistance or surrender but the kind of resistance: violent or nonviolent. Jesus equally abhors passivity and violence as responses to evil. He simply wants to break the vicious circle of acquiescence and revolt by offering a third option, one that would recover the human dignity of the oppressed, seize the initiative from the oppressors, overcome fear, and reclaim the power of choice, all the while maintaining the humanity of the oppressor.
The details of this reading will be spelled out in the second installment of this series. For now I merely wish to establish that "resist not" must not be heard as submission, but as refusing to let the enemy dictate the terms of opposition. It is not lashing back in kind. It is the refusal to react reflexively to evil.
THIS REFUSAL of reactive opposition is one of the most profound and difficult truths in scripture. We become what we hate. The very act of hating something draws it to us. Since our hate is a direct response to the evil done, our hate almost invariably causes us to respond in the terms already laid down by the enemy. Unaware of what is happening, we turn into the very thing we oppose. We become what we hate.
The arms race was the supreme example of this process. We felt threatened by the Soviets, so we increased our weapons. This in turn threatened them. They escalated production, which in turn led to cries here of being "behind" the Soviets, and so we took a new loop on the spiral to doomsday. Yet every weapon we add leaves us feeling more insecure, not less. No matter how much more powerful our resistance to evil becomes, Soviet resistance grew at the same pace.
Worse yet, we took on the very qualities in the Soviets that we claim to be resisting. To keep communism from spreading in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, we felt we must move in with our troops, or manipulate elections, or unseat legitimately elected regimes, or assassinate leftist leaders. To counter their espionage, we had a spy network; to make sure that no one cooperated with the enemy, we needed to spy on our own citizens. "You always become the thing you fight the most," wrote psychologist Carl Jung, and we have done everything in our power to prove him correct.
This is not merely an occasional aberration. It is virtually the rule in human behavior, from intrapsychic conflict to international relations. The alcoholic who tries to "resist evil" quickly discovers that the very attempt to conquer the compulsion by main force is futile. The harder the person tries to quit, the more she or he fails; and the more the person fails, the less self-esteem and confidence she or he has to try again. The experience of Alcoholics Anonymous members is that "resisting evil" cannot work. You have to acknowledge that you have utterly failed in all attempts to stop, that you have no power over the disease, and turn to a higher power and a supportive community for help. As long as we hate something, we draw it to ourselves.
Prohibition was a grand failure at resisting evil. It drew so much attention to booze and engendered so much rebellion against legal constraints that far more alcohol was being consumed when it was repealed than before it went into effect. A frontal attack energizes its opposite, calls attention to it, creates a conscious or unconscious fascination with it, and lends it enormous quantities of energy. Who fights with dragons, wrote Nietzsche, shall himself become a dragon.
We fought Hitler to stop the spread of tyranny in Europe, only to see half of Europe slip under the tyranny of Stalin. England went to war, Churchill told Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, so that Poland should be free and sovereign. That war did not save Poland for democracy nor save the lives of the Jews. Fascism, crushed in Germany, arose phoenix-like in the soul of the victors, because we chose the same means and fought fire with fire.
Terror bombing of civilians was not instigated by Hitler but by Churchill in retaliation for the accidental bombing of London on August 24, 1940. Hitler in turn ordered reprisals for the reprisals. Precision bombing was not yet possible. Even the wrong cities were being hit. Since the Royal Air Force could not consistently strike military targets, it attempted to destroy the morale of the German people. By 1942, crews were actually forbidden to aim at factories or military installations. The allies commenced to destroy systematically Germany's 43 major cities. Churchill justified this step as part of a "supreme emergency" and necessary to stop an immeasurable evil.
This policy culminated in the firebombing of Hamburg, while nearby factories and shipyards went untouched. Those factories and shipyards had been suffering an acute labor shortage, which was now filled by former waiters, shopkeepers, and office workers who were bombed out of their civilian employment. War production was back to normal in a few weeks. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: "In reducing, as nothing else could, the consumption of non-essentials and the employment of [people] in their supply, there is a distinct possibility that the attacks on Hamburg increased Germany's output of war materiel and thus her military effectiveness."
THE PRECEDENT SET by the saturation bombing of German cities made it easier in turn for us to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although an offshore demonstration of the bomb would have sufficed. Japan was already negotiating surrender, and Hiroshima had little military significance. The terms of surrender we accepted after the bombing were exactly the same as those proposed before it took place. An invasion would not have been necessary to force capitulation. When we "nuked" Japan, one of the largest single casualties was our own moral integrity as a people.
In the 1980s we were prepared to "nuke" the world to preserve our own standard of living. The nation that gasped at Hitler's genocide of the Jews ... prepared to commit ecocide: the terminal genocide of virtually all living species on the planet. The very spirit we had gone to war to drive out has leapt upon its unwary exorcists and driven us to conceive of crimes against our own consciences and the planet that promote the evils we set out to oppose. Meanwhile Japan, and to a significant degree, West Germany, has achieved virtually everything it set out to gain by war and gained it through defeat.
"The more a tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate in a violent mimesis," writes philosopher Rene Girard. "The resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror image of the other."
With what visage did we emerge "victorious" from forcible resistance to Hitler's evil? We have adopted a permanent war economy and a militarized conception of national security. We regard ourselves as the police of the "free" world and fund a huge army staffed, if necessary, through involuntary conscription. We have created an invisible apparatus of surveillance and espionage that seems incapable of distinguishing patriotic protest from sedition, can scarcely be held accountable by public authorities, and even inaugurates wars without consent of the Congress. We have increasingly come to rely on military intervention instead of diplomacy, force rather than negotiations. We are one of the two major purveyors of armaments to nations all over the globe, many of whom purchase weapons at the cost of the welfare of their own people and the destabilization of their own regions.
We have, in short, granted Hitler victory by assuming major elements of the ethos and mentality of Nazism. We fought to end the myth of Aryan racial superiority and lived to see Martin Luther King Jr. pinpoint it in our own courthouses, buses, and hearts. Our attitude toward the "gooks" in Vietnam echoed Hitler's attitude toward the Jews. We named Hitler the Beast, and we became bestial.
"By intensity of hatred," wrote anthropologist George William Russell, "nations create in themselves the characteristics they imagine in their enemies. Hence it is that all passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics." William Irwin Thompson commented on the implications for the Second World War, "Japan is now Los Angeles and Detroit; and Big Sur, California is a Zen Mountain Center. Germany is now a consumer society, and we are the largest militarist state in the history of the world. We have become our enemy."
CONQUERORS THROUGHOUT history have been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph P. Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, proved either a shrewd student of history or a prophet when he reputedly said, "Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies."
We want desperately to believe that our forcible retaliation to evil is like a projectile fired from a gun that will drop evil in its tracks. In fact, the situation is more like a ball hurled by a pitcher that will, likely as not, carom back at us, or over the fence.
In The Devil's Share, Denis de Rougemont articulated a penetrating warning even before the Nazis had been defeated. We Americans want to believe, he wrote, that the Nazis are animals of an altogether different race than ourselves. We run the risk of discovering someday that, after all, they are people just like us. And it is quite true, he says; they are like us in the sense that their sin is also secretly in us:
This is why we say today to the worthy democrats: "Look at the Devil who is among us! Stop believing that he can only resemble Hitler or his emulators, for it is yourselves whom he resembles most! It is in yourselves only that you will catch him in the act. And then only will you be in a position to unmask him in others, and to fight him successfully. For then only you will be cured of your unbelievable naivete in the presence of the totalitarian danger and be able to withstand the hypnosis."
We lacked a modern representation of the Demon. We had therefore ceased to believe in him. Then we imagined that the Devil was Hitler. And the Devil rubbed his hands. (And so did Hitler.)
IT WOULD MAKE a fascinating study to write a history of the world from the perspective of the principle of forcible resistance transforming into its opposite. One can find instances from virtually every period.
Rome attempted to destroy the Christian Church - and became its Holy See. The Catholic Church in turn sought to exterminate the heretical Catharii, with their Manichaean conception of the eternal warfare of light against dark, good against evil, spirit against matter, God against Lucifer. But in the means it chose to oppose the Catharii, the church became Manichaean. It demonized all Catharii, attacked them with military force, burned them alive, slaughtered whole cities, and finally accounted for the massacre of a million people. During the sack of Beziers, France, on July 21,1209, the entire population of 20,000 people was massacred, heretics and Catholics alike, with the papal legate crying all the while, "Kill them all, God will recognize his own!"
Again, in trying to suppress witchcraft, the inquisitors drew so much attention to it that they actually spread belief in it and fostered the practices they were trying so hard to repress.
Or, returning to World War II, we fought Japan ostensibly to prevent it from turning the Pacific basin into its own economic lake. Yet after the war, fueled by our fears of communism, we helped rebuild Japan as an economic giant in order to create a capitalist, anti-communist region surrounding the Soviet Union and China. Now even our domestic economy can scarcely brook the competition.
Without entering into the question of whether some wars are just or not, the point I am making is that, even if a war does appear to be just, or at least tragically necessary and unavoidable, it will nevertheless be incapable of achieving the goals for which it is fought. Worse yet, it will inevitably require the relatively more just opponent (if there be such) to become increasingly molded into the likeness of its adversary. War is not, then, the pursuit of diplomacy by other means, as the military strategist Karl von Clausewitz claimed. It marks the abject failure of diplomacy and the adoption of means which have very little likelihood of achieving desirable ends.
As Andrew Bard Schmookler has demonstrated in The Parable of the Tribes, "Successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it." The tyranny of power is such that even self-defense becomes a kind of surrender. Submission means being transformed by the power of the conqueror; violent resistance means transforming oneself into the conqueror.
"The ultimate weakness of violence," observed Martin Luther King Jr., "is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy." We wish to stop murder from being committed, so we execute murderers - becoming murderers ourselves. We try to stop our children from fighting - by hitting them. The unforgettable report from the Vietnam War says it all: "We had to destroy the city to save it."
The radical left fringe of the anti-Vietnam War movement correctly identified the evil our government was doing in Asia and adopted the same violent means to oppose it. Nor was that all; they became the actual image of what they hated. Like the powers they opposed, they became secretive (as terrorists must). This forced them to abandon all attempts to build a popular political base, so they became increasingly elitist, an oligarchy that "knew what was best for the rest of us." To counter messianic American imperialism, they became messianists in turn who would impose their good on the others.
Here, as so often, the thesis lived on in the antithesis. Having adopted the same violent means as the government they opposed, members of the Weather Underground became mimetically transformed into the very epitome of irrational violence. In the process, they provided the administration a pretext to infiltrate, wiretap, harass, and gather information on the far more effective nonviolent groups opposed to the Vietnam War.
We have even played out the principle of mimetic counterresistance in our relationship with nature. By 1950 many scientists recognized that DDT was toxic to a wide number of species, but we were already "hooked" into its use. For while malarial mosquitoes were becoming increasingly immune to DDT, discontinuing its application was not an easy matter, because the DDT had virtually exterminated the other species that fed on the mosquitoes. By 1980, 43 types of malarial-bearing mosquitoes had become resistant to the leading insecticides. As a consequence, the incidence of malaria in some countries has increased a hundredfold during the past 15 years. One response has been simply to increase the toxicity level of pesticides being sprayed, in a bizarre parody of Cold War politics. Violent reaction seems to be the only way we know.
THERE IS NO MORE classic instance of counterproductive violence than that employed by the Reagan administration against Nicaragua. Fear of communism drove our leaders to a series of reactions that are creating precisely what they fear. We refused Nicaragua access to our markets, equipment, and spare parts, forcing it to depend increasingly on the Soviet bloc. We feared socialism in Nicaragua's economic sector, so we cut off credits, a blow which has fallen with disproportionate force on the private businesses there. We hired Somocista-led mercenaries to destabilize the countryside, driving Nicaragua to further militarize the populace and rely on Soviet weaponry. A new Vietnam looms south of our borders, as an administration ignorant of the region and belligerent in its reflexes attempts to muscle the wind.
The cost of such forcible interventions is not tallied on the battlefield alone. We are still undergoing the shock of the Vietnam War in manifold and sickening ways. Why is it that nearly a quarter of the total prison population in the mid-'80s in the United States was made up of Vietnam War veterans, while three to five times that number have been in jail over the past 15 years? Why has it come about that the number of veterans who have died by suicide, drug and alcohol overdose, single-car accidents, and other probably intentional forms of self-destruction at least equals and perhaps surpasses the total U.S. body count from that war?
The medical writer Lewis Thomas argues that the gravest damage in most diseases is caused by a panicked overreaction by the body's own defenses. This has certainly been the case for the body politic of the United States.
Our overreactions to communist imperialism - McCarthyism, the Cold War, the arms race, the pervasive and endless projection of all evil upon communism, our ill-advised wars of containment against it - have unquestionably done more harm to our nation than anything the communists have ever done. We have opposed communist tyranny, in all its admitted brutality, by supporting brutal military dictatorships. We have stooped to the support of torture, assassination, and lies in order to check the advance of Godless communist immorality. In the process we metamorphose into the very thing we fear.
Every Soviet act of belligerence, every increase in its influence in other countries, every new weapon it adds to its arsenal, provokes alarmed reactions of reflexive militarism or repressive surveillance in the United States. Our "immune system" - the police, the military services, the courts, the FBI and CIA, the penal system - are no longer perceived by many people as protectors but as adversaries. The cure has too often been worse than the disease, and we have become a nation suffering chronic stress. And the Soviets, in their resistance to us, are subjected to the identical process, as we more and more begin to resemble one another. We become what we fight in the very act of fighting it.
Confronting Evil
EVIL IS A CONTAGION. No one grapples with it without contamination. In 1982 my wife and I spent four months in Latin America, observing military dictatorships, talking with the tortured, and visiting slums. Without realizing what was happening, I began to slip into spiritual darkness, until I was physically emaciated and spiritually wasted.
I did not understand what had happened until much later, when I dreamed I was attempting to escape from a Somoza concentration camp in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua. The dream faithfully mirrored my state: I was in psychic detention.
I had had, for a decade, a series of such dreams; always I was trying to escape a ruthless dictator. But this "Somoza" was within me; it represented my own unredeemed power drive. There is a dictator in me that would like to tell everybody else how to think and what to do. The outer scenes had, unknown to me, seeped into my own depths and activated and reinforced my inner power problem, and I was quite literally brought down into captivity.
At an even deeper level, however, seeing the suffering of those who had been victims of detention had triggered in me the memory of a traumatic experience of punishment and "incarceration" when I was a child. When I was about 10 years old, I lied a lot out of fear of the wrath of my father. One day I lied about having put my bike away in the garage. My father caught me lying; he had actually taken the bike from the front yard and hidden it.
My parents gave me two choices: to leave home for good or to spend the night in the "brig" ( a garage storeroom). Sensing that my life in my family was over, I opted to leave. When they asked me to whom I planned to go, at every suggestion I offered, they said, "They wouldn't want a liar living with them." There appeared to be no alternative to the brig.
That night, in a very profound sense, I died. Decades later, amid the general hopelessness of the situation of the oppressed in Latin America, I found myself sinking back into that old despair I had first known as a detainee in my own home.
In some way or another, I suspect, every injustice we encounter re-enacts our own personal wound. There is a dual action of projection and introjection: We project the evil within us out onto the world, and we introject the evil we see out in the world into our own psyches. Resistance to evil thus constellates in our own depths whatever is similar to the outer evil we oppose. Our very resistance feeds the inner shadow. The very shrillness of our opposition may indicate that a part of us secretly desires to emulate or is terrified at being . overcome by what we oppose.
Are we not often unconsciously attracted to the very evils we most stridently denounce? Is not our very intensity against evil a dangerous sign that it fascinates us? The very sight of evil kindles evil in the soul, wrote Jung. "Even a saint," he noted, "would have to pray unceasingly for the soul of Hitler and Himmler, the Gestapo and the SS, in order to repair without delay the damage done to his own soul." We are unavoidably drawn into the uncleanness of evil, whatever our conscious attitude. No one can escape this, for we are all so much a part of the human community that every crime elicits a secret fascination in some corner of our hearts.
Have you never caught yourself secretly pleased to hear that someone higher up the professional ladder you are climbing has had a crippling stroke? Perhaps now you can move up a notch. Or perhaps you thought, "Thank God it was her and not me."
Those of us engaged in struggles for social justice have been incredibly naive about what has been happening in our own psyches. The impatience of some activists with prayer, meditation, and inner healing may itself represent an inchoate knowledge of what they might find if they looked within. For the struggle against evil makes us evil, and no amount of good intentions can prevent its happening. The whole armor of God that Paul counsels us to put on (Ephesians 6:10-20) is crafted specifically to protect us against that contagion of evil within our own souls, and its metals are all annealed in prayer.
JESUS' THIRD WAY arrests both the outer spiral of retaliation and equips us to face the inner infection that it excites. His is a way of engaging evil that involves neither acquiescing to it nor hurling ourselves against it blindly, on its own terms.
In the East, whole systems of martial art and spirituality have been built around the awareness of the futility of counterresisting evil. Though differing in detail, the basic orientation of all of them is using the opponent's own momentum and energy to disarm that person, with as little injury as possible.
Women have long known through childbirth that to tighten against the pain merely increases it. To be able to surrender to the pain, to enter its core by breathing deeply and slowly, reduces the pain of the contractions. Others have applied the same insight to life generally: instead of trying to fight off illness or loneliness or the shadow that scares us, to instead accept it, breathe with it, turn toward it, open-handed, and give it love, acceptance, and the possibility of gracious transformation.
What difference might it make if, instead of resisting the awful things in our lives - for example, my neurosis, this dull job, that disgusting colleague, the bomb - we were to embrace them? Even the bomb? Yes, the bomb. Not in any sense of identifying with the powers of destruction, but in the biblical sense of abandoning all illusions about our salvation lying in nuclear capability, of facing our culpability for the worship of this false savior, and of looking to God for our redemption.
Our very resistance to the bomb has often been born of despair and hopelessness. Desperately we oppose it, as we must, but our real conviction is that it is going to destroy us. Spiritually we have already let ourselves be "nuked."
But the bomb may be the only stratagem in all God's universe able to force us to transcend petty nationalism and foster global community. Behind its patent evil is the impetus to a towering responsibility. Can we not believe that God has grasped this evil, which God neither fashioned nor condones, and is trying to use its momentum to throw us into a whole new world of international cooperation, if only we will collaborate? Perhaps the chances of success are only one-half of one percent. Never mind; that half percent is worth staking everything for.
Can we find the resources laid in store for us at our own heart's core for the kind of creative, persistent, and militant nonviolence that Jesus indicates by his "third way," that this nuclear night might prove harbinger to some new, imperfect, but survivable day?
Walter Wink taught New Testament at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and in workshops around the country when this article appeared. This article was the first of a four-part series by Walter Wink on nonviolent resistance to evil. The series, especially parts three and four, was directly influenced by Wink's trip to South Africa in the spring of 1986, but his theological discussion around the challenge of "facing the enemy" is relevant to many personal and global situations.
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