Nonviolence

Ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, monuments are fenced off, streets are closed and 20,000 National Guard members are positioned around Washington, D.C. But some local organizations are more focused on the safety of Washingtonians — especially the safety of Black and brown Washingtonians who may be at greater risk of being targeted by right-wing groups, many of which have ties to white nationalism.

According to a recent survey, nearly 70 percent of people in the U.S. are worried voters will be harassed or intimidated on Election Day; the same survey found that more than three-quarters of Americans worry there will not be a peaceful transition of power after the election. But community leaders and clergy are determined to avoid a violent outcome.

NONVIOLENT PEACEFORCE is an international nonprofit that works with communities facing violence to implement nonviolent strategies to help keep them safe. They have worked with communities around the world, including in Sri Lanka, Iraq, South Sudan, and Guatemala. Mel Duncan, Rosemary Kabaki, and Jessica Skelly of Nonviolent Peaceforce spoke in mid-September with Sojourners’ Betsy Shirley about their newest project location: the United States.

Sojourners: Why did you start projects here in the U.S. this fall?

Mel Duncan: We recognize that right now there are many indicators of looming violence, whether it be strife over police brutality and racism, or the chaos that is being stirred up around the election, or the catastrophic experiences we’re seeing with climate change—all of these can trigger violence.

What risks do you see?

Jessica Skelly: As we look toward the elections and beyond, we can see some indicators for flashpoints of violence—election tampering, delays in the election, perhaps continued police brutality, instigation by agents provocateurs—and people want to know how they can mobilize in responsible and constructive ways and help de-escalate some of that violence and protect themselves.

The attack by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into a convoy carrying Soleimani was neither impulsive nor a retaliatory response. It was not undertaken to protect Americans. It was not an act of patriotism. It was not done to defend the U.S. embassy in Baghdad after the “dramatic but bloodless” siege. If anything, it was in response to Trump’s increasingly untenable situation at home.

“Blessed are the peace lovers,” for they shall be called righteous — on the right side. They will be known for what they will not do, for being against war, for preferring peace, for not fighting, for staying out of conflicts.

But that is not what Jesus said.

When the U.S. Capitol Police issued three warnings for us to disperse, most of those gathered stepped back behind the police line, but five stepped forward and laid down in the shape of a cross in the center of the rotunda. A cross of human bodies. Dozens more formed a eucharistic circle around this cross.

THE MAP is not the territory, wrote Polish scientist Alfred Korzybski, “but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

When I glanced through the participants list at the second Vatican consultation on nonviolence and just peace, I recalled Korzybski. The list was organized by ecclesial rank. Cardinals on top, followed by archbishops, bishops, monsignors, and reverend fathers. Next were women in religious orders, then male and female laity with titles, finally misters and Mses. My name was last.

When new people come to our Mennonite church in North Carolina, whether from other traditions or from no church background, I imagine they are stirred by our views on peace and violence. The strangest part of our religious life is not that we believe that dead people come back to life, or that we try to live like a peasant we believe was God — it is our disposition toward military service.

AS AN OUTSIDER, Virginia Woolf eschewed labels that attempted to relegate her to tidy boxes. The label “feminist” should die, the British novelist wrote in Three Guineas, an essay published in 1938 that married equal opportunities and pay for women with how a society might prevent fascism and war.

Likewise, despite her disdain for war, she would not claim herself a “pacifist.” The only label she allowed for herself was “outsider,” and perhaps because of that, many of her novels are concerned with outsiders. But it wasn’t just outsider status that fascinated her: It was the way patriarchal structures punished outsiders for failing to conform to and live within their confines, most notably those associated with war.

Woolf’s intellectual and social concerns form the subtext of many of her novels. While Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway has not traditionally been labeled an anti-war novel, it reveals a rich theology of hospitality, an antidote to war and the moral injury that results from the ways that war wastes human life. Outsiders hold the key to this theology in the way they form their peculiar values despite the patriarchal structure’s insistence that they are frivolous, cowardly, or only after personal gain.