Nonviolence Is Power

Lifelong peace activist and priest John Dear curated the CAC’s forthcoming edition of Oneing on nonviolence, which features Dear’s interview with Methodist minister and activist James Lawson. After visiting followers of Gandhi in India to study nonviolent resistance in the 1950s, Lawson began training civil rights activists in the principles and tactics of nonviolence. His students helped desegregate lunch counters and became Freedom Riders who pushed to integrate interstate travel. In response to a question about how he defines nonviolence, Lawson offers:

It is hard to define nonviolence. I think it was Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) who first used the term. [1] He maintained, in his book Non-violence in Peace and War, that the term is his translation of the Jainist theory of ahimsa. Gandhi translated ahimsa as “Do no harm; do no injury.” Jainism was an ancient religion of India, begun around the time of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s one definition I cling to. It allows me to live, to function, to practice.

Gandhi also stated that nonviolence is love in action, compassion and truth in action. Of course, he coined the word satyagraha [often translated as truth force or soul force] to further explain tenacity in truth, in the soul, in God, and in struggle.

So, for me, nonviolence is that quality that comes out of all the great world religions: the notion that the creative force of the universe is love, that God is love, and that love is all-encompassing. Gandhi insisted—and I think this is Gandhi’s great contribution—that the creative force of the universe is the force that we humans must learn to exercise because that force is the only force that can cause the human race to do God’s will.

And nonviolence is power. It is not, as I was taught in college in 1947, just persuasion. Persuasion is a form of power. Aristotle wrote that power is the capacity to achieve purpose. It is a God-given gift of creation to human beings. Nonviolence has its deep roots in the long journey of the human family as people operated out of love and truth despite all that was raging around them.

As Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. also said, nonviolence is the science of how we create our own life in the image of God, how we create a world that practices justice, truth, and compassion.

Gene Sharp (1928–2018) was the first scholar to pull together the science and the methodology of nonviolence. So, I have a two-fold definition. First, the religions of the world reflect on love as truth and power, as the way the human race discovers how to carry out the will of eternity. Second, we’re still learning about nonviolence as the science of bringing about personal and social change and establishing a world where all life is honored.

References:

[1] M. K. Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1944), 131. In his 1936 meeting with Howard Thurman, Gandhi said, “‘Non-violence’ is a term I had to coin in order to bring out the root meaning of Ahimsa.”

John Dear, “Nonviolence Is Power: A Conversation with the Rev. James Lawson,” Oneing 10, no. 2, Nonviolence (Fall 2022): 24. Forthcoming at CAC Bookstore.

 Explore Further. . .

• Read John Dear on Ghandi and nonviolence as a spiritual superpower.
• Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
• Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Susan Ruggles, Rally Against Iraq War 0017 (detail), 2003, Milwaukee, photograph, Wikimedia. Susan Ruggles, Iraq War Anniversary Peace Rally (detail), 2003, Milwaukee, photograph, Wikimedia. Susan Ruggles, Rally Against Iraq War 0014 (detail), 2003, Milwaukee, photograph, Wikimedia. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Candles are on either side of a central image, as in a sanctuary. Nonviolence is sacred.