Breaking the silence: understanding Dr King and nonviolence

A paper originally written in January 2008, when I was still at Kalamazoo College. I believe that much of it still bears true; though we are no longer at war in Iraq, we have since gone to war in Libya and are threatened with grim prospects in Syria and in Iran. Though my own views have since drifted a few degrees from their Anabaptist wellspring, I still believe that ‘the apathy of conformist thought’ remains the single greatest enemy of a just peace, and the single greatest asset of those who would condemn our nation to a state of perpetual war, and that saints and prophets are not to be taken lightly, particularly not in this day and age. It would be a profound disservice to Dr King’s memory if we remember only his comforting words of equality, so often quoted by the comfortable liberal establishment, and forget the more radical call in Beyond Vietnam to ‘rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society’, that the triple demons of racism, materialism and militarism may be the more swiftly vanquished.

It often seems that the common doom of the prophets of the Hebrew tradition – Moses, Nathan, Isaiah, Jeremiah – was that when they spoke, what they spoke was true and profound and relevant, but fell on sleeping ears which neglected them, scorned them or simply misunderstood them. Such prophets, in principle, were to be venerated, but in practise welcome for prophets was rare, and rarer still any kind of serious consideration for their message. Considering the Hebrew prophets, the resemblance the tale of Martin Luther King, Jr. bears to them is striking. Every American schoolchild hears of the accomplishments of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement and how they led the way to the end of racial segregation in law. They learn to honour him as a great man, even a martyred saint of sorts – a man with a dream, which in the end was realised.

But one problem with making Dr. King into such a saint is that it becomes all too easy to turn his veneration into a kind of pious somniloquy, to slip back into the slumber and apathetic silence which Dr. King had been trying to break. His iconic image has become complacent in its beatitude; the radical edge of his message of non-violent civil struggle has been dulled. The anxiety of Søren Kierkegaard that his work would ‘be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap’ is difficult not to feel now on King’s behalf, especially during this season, when his name and legacy is certain to be preached in hagiographic reverence from pulpits whose voices will then shy away from speaking out against the war in Iraq and all the grievous social injustices accompanying it.

As an Anabaptist, I feel that the methods and philosophy of non-violence, as taught by Christ, Menno Simons, Ghaffar Khan, Gandhi, King and many others, are both invaluable and viable; I try my best to understand them, to articulate them and to live them. Though I have not experienced the discrimination and persecution and hardships that Dr. King and those who participated in the Civil Rights Movement faced, I have often been disappointed and frustrated at how often and how sorely non-violence is misunderstood, even among my peers. It is rarely met with contempt; more often it meets with infuriatingly patronising forbearance, of the sort reserved for mistaken idealists and hopeless daydreamers. It is largely dismissed as a nice dream, but one which could never work in ‘the real world’.

Upon reading Dr. King’s sermons, however, it becomes clear rather quickly that he may have had a dream, but the man was no idle dreamer. Having lived through economic and racial injustice and having seen the anger and resentment that it bred, he set forth a vision from which he expected true and lasting results. He realised that it wasn’t enough that we simply end a war overseas, but that we must take it on ourselves to build a peace, we ‘must with positive action seek to remove… conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice’. To this end, he articulated not the kind of love that is just a nice dream, just a ‘sentimental and weak response’, but the kind of love that demands dedication to a ‘long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world’ , the kind of love which understands and undertakes, in the words of G. W. F. Hegel, ‘seriousness, pain, and the patience and work of the negative’.

The radical love that Martin Luther King, Jr. made a part of his life and a part of his ministry, the love that transcends sentiment, can be neither silent nor somniloquent. If we decide (as a community and as individuals) that we want to represent social justice and human dignity, that we want this kind of love to be made manifest in our words and in our actions, silence – not speaking when something has to be said – is self-betrayal. For my own part, this means that mere pacifism is not enough. The kind of pacifism that sleeps through peace-time, only to awaken itself to outrage when war’s trumpets shatter that slumber, betrays itself. Wars like these in Vietnam and Iraq may spring from inflamed injustices and inequalities, whether real or perceived, but in democratic societies they thrive on ‘the apathy of conformist thought’. Any pacifism that sinks into such apathetic, conformist quietude, which opposes war but does nothing to prevent it, must be seen as ultimately self-defeating. Truly, in the spirit of Dr. King, we must and we shall continue in our principled opposition to this war in Iraq, which has been the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and which has blinded the society to other urgent issues of social and economic justice. However, if pacifists – myself and my fellow Anabaptists included – truly value a lasting peace as a positive end, out of moral respect for human life and dignity, then it becomes an imperative that we practise not merely pacifism, but an actual, effective discipline of non-violence in the service of social justice, even in times when war is not occupying our attention.

Indeed, like the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, Dr. King spoke a prescient, profound message which still rings true. This truth, in his message of non-violence, deserves to be taken seriously and understood, at a level deeper than simple sentiment. Here we are, forty years after he delivered the sermon at Riverside Church in New York. In this time of war, we again wander the Mosaic wilderness of our own social conscience. The time has come when we must ask ourselves whether we undertake the seriousness and pain, whether we with patience and work take up the struggle for social justice, and speak for a peace that will last. As Dr. King himself put it: ‘This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response.’