A Leaven in the Leaven

The issues surrounding civil disobedience are as important as they are controversial. We offer in the following articles a substantial forum on these questions so that many voices can be heard. While there are differing opinions represented here as to the theology, purposes, tactics, and spirit of civil disobedience, all those who have been asked to contribute have demonstrated a biblical commitment to civil disobedience and speak out of their experience. - The Editors

Civil disobedience is the expression of a wider moral principle. The way Gandhi phrased it is: "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good." This principle is morally and politically revolutionary. If understood and acted on by a growing number of Americans, non-cooperation with evil would destroy the basis in this country for nuclear war preparations.

Civil disobedience is especially powerful when it can serve as a catalyst for other acts of non-cooperation with evil, where its example of moral freedom is so clear and contagious that it can ignite the spirit of a larger community. This is how our Ground Zero community has sought to apply civil disobedience in our campaign around the Trident base whose fence our center shares. Our hope is that acts of loving disobedience, in the context of continuous dialogue, can help ignite the spirit of a larger community into non-cooperation with Trident. It is, in Gandhi's terms, an experiment in truth.

Our Trident campaign is characterized more by dialogue than it is by civil disobedience. Our first step toward dialogue in the campaign is simply to hand hundreds of workers a new leaflet each Thursday morning. On holidays, we hand out a variation on the leaflet: for example, a loaf of bread on Thanksgiving, a Valentine about St. Valentine and war resistance on Valentine's Day.

Our weekly presence outside the base gates for more than four years has been more of an effort to say "God bless you" than to share any particular information. What we do share in words is meant to convey a deeper respect, not imply a judgment. Workers read the leaflets and respond. Five have publicly resigned from their jobs, and the ripple effect goes much farther.

I believe our nonviolent process has already undermined the authority of the Trident base far more than we know. In reaction, base and county authorities have done everything possible to obstruct the leafletting. Ground Zero people are almost constantly fighting leafletting charges ("obstructing traffic," "pedestrian in the roadway," "soliciting" - the charges rotate as do Ground Zero leafletters in court). Workers on the base have also been threatened repeatedly with arrest, both for accepting leaflets as they drive in and for distributing them to others inside the base.

In the context of such efforts at communication, civil disobedience is a leaven in the leaven. It is not the Trident campaign itself. In a nonviolent campaign, civil disobedience, meaning non-cooperation with evil and resistance to systemic violence, is companion to dialogue and respect.

In relation to the kind of change needed, dialogue without resistance is sentimental, and resistance without dialogue is cynical. A process that integrates dialogue and resistance in an ongoing campaign, year after year, is transforming to ourselves and others. It transforms the very situation in which we all feel caught.

The account of Jesus' dialogue with the scribes and Pharisees and the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11) provides a good example of this kind of transformation. In those exchanges no one is condemned by Jesus, neither the woman nor the scribes and Pharisees who brought her forward for judgment and stoning. Yet Jesus resists the law of death by stoning, and succeeds in doing more. The act of non-cooperation with evil is loving, without judgment, and transforms the very situation which bore death within it. Everyone involved walks away from judgment and death.

A positive struggle for us in the Trident campaign has been in choosing actions and symbols that emphasize our own responsibility for evil rather than others. We desire to resist evil while trying to walk away from judgments, so as to help others walk away from nuclear weapons. We seek simple actions, through which we can accept personal responsibility for the evil, with as little judgment of others as possible. In actions of high risk, we have felt the need to do nothing more elaborate than pray (at nuclear weapons bunkers) and row a boat (to blockade a Trident submarine), actions emphasizing our own responsibility for Trident.

Civil disobedience also needs to be more than civil. By its nature civil disobedience is a disruptive force. It therefore needs within it the unitive force of love. Civil disobedience done with love, rather than the intention of acting against someone, is a deeply liberating force. The more loving an act of civil disobedience is, the more powerful it will be. The more caring it is of others, the more forceful it will be. If civil disobedience is not loving and caring, it will not express the full truth of nonviolence.

If chosen carefully, loving disobedience actions teach through the power of example; they break the code of personal security that corresponds to the nuclear security state. National sovereignty is based on attitudes of personal sovereignty. Loving disobedience says in action that God alone is sovereign, and that the blasphemous securities of our lives and nation must be surrendered for the sake of life. We can help our neighbors and our country surrender a false security if we surrender our own first. Breaking free from the personal security that binds us to the nuclear state is a liberating force, for ourselves and others. Actions of loving disobedience can serve as the catalyst for this liberation in a nonviolent campaign.

Nuclear weapons need fences in order to exist. When respect and love are reaching across spiritual fences, acts of loving disobedience can spark the truth of non-cooperation inside the Trident base fence - a truth that base workers are in a better position to practice than we are. In a campaign that emphasizes respect across fences, growing numbers of people going to jail for peace will create a moral and political crisis that is truly liberating.

People don't believe in nuclear weapons. Their consciences are stronger than their government's policies. The power to overcome evil, a divine love deep within us all, wants to emerge into the light. Loving disobedience can help open us as a family to that infinite force of good.

Jim Douglass was co-founder of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, located next to the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington when this article appeared, and his book, Lightning East to West: Jesus, Gandhi and the Nuclear Age, was scheduled to be published in August 1983 by Crossroad.