Over at Killing the Buddha (which I also co-edit), we’ve got a really valuable conversation today between the radical of many causes Abe Osheroff and the activist/journalist Bob Jensen. It’s a reflection on intransigence, futility, and the failures of hope, which should be familiar themes to anyone who has put any time into struggling against the principalities and powers of injustice:

Robert Jensen: I’ve heard you use the term “long-distance runner” before. Is that the key—the notion that we have to be in it for the long haul and not expect things to change dramatically all at once?

Abe Osheroff: Not the long haul—the endless haul.

RJ: What’s the difference between long and endless?

AO: Oh yeah, there’s a difference. We will never win the fight. We will influence the players. We may be able to make life better in many ways. We will blunt the shit that the government and the corporations throw at us. But we’ll always be coping with things. My view is that there’s no destination for the train I’m on. No destination, just a direction. No final station on that train. There’s no final destination, no socialist society where we will all be able to sit back and have a wonderful life. Bullshit!

RJ: No utopias.

Read the rest at Killing the Buddha.

Among Catholics eager to stop and prevent war, matters can quickly become theoretical. The church, after all, generally teaches some form of just war theory, which allows for the possibility that war might be necessary and even right under certain circumstances. But in my interview with Andrea Bartoli of the Catholic lay organization Sant’Egidio, published today at The Immanent Frame, he suggests that the theoretical question has gotten more attention than it deserves. The gospel preaches peacemaking, and Christians should be hearing—and acting on—that call first and foremost. Practice matters more than theories.

NS: Since Augustine, Catholic tradition has upheld just war theory. Does Sant’Egidio see itself, like the Catholic Worker movement in the United States, as a challenge to that tradition? Or does its approach to peacebuilding fit within the just war framework?

AB: Augustine discusses peace about 2,500 times and war a couple of dozen. Everybody discusses what Augustine said about just war, but they usually fail to recognize that he speaks about just peace much more. Sant’Egidio focuses on the parts of Augustine that focus on peace. War is a possibility. War is a human choice. But from our perspective, the Christian position cannot be but a peaceful one, both in terms of being peaceful ourselves and in terms of being peacemakers. We don’t begin with theories. We work for peace because, to the poor, war is the worst of all conditions—Andrea Riccardi called it “the mother of all poverty.” Rather than holding a theoretical argument in favor of, or against, war, we need to be bound to practice. We’re more concerned with orthopraxis than orthodoxy. We want to be orthodox, but we have an even greater desire to actually practice the gospel.

Read more about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work in our  full interview at The Immanent Frame.

As a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as through essays in many newspapers and websites, Ira Chernus has spent decades bringing the tradition of nonviolence to bear on concrete current events, particularly American and Israeli foreign policy. What drives him most of all, though, is his fascination with nonviolence as a profound intellectual tradition, and the passionate thinkers whose minds and imaginations inspire the more visible work of public, performative activism.

On a recent trip to New York, Chernus took the time to talk with me about his work. He has written several books, but the one we discussed most of all is American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which is available in print through Orbis Books, as well as for free, in its entirety, on his website. Culled from the lecture notes of the course on nonviolence he has been teaching for years, it is a definitive chronicle of the major thinkers who shaped the distinctly American lineage of nonviolence.

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Here’s how it starts:

Waging Nonviolence: Why did you decide to write American Nonviolence as an intellectual history of nonviolence, specifically, as opposed to a history of movements and actions?

Ira Chernus: Part of the reason is just because that’s what I’m good at. If I’m good at anything, I’m good at ideas and being able to understand the underlying logic of a body of writing. Most of the major figures in the history of the nonviolence movement were not philosophers and certainly were not really theorists. They were leaders of movements that had to get jobs done. But in the course of their work, they offered a very, very rich body of ideas, but they didn’t lay them out systematically. Gandhi’s collected writings are, what, 93 volumes or something; he was writing at an incredibly rapid rate, and each thing he wrote was largely designed to meet the needs of a particular moment. He wasn’t thinking about laying out the overall intellectual architecture of his thought. He was not primarily a theorist. The same is true for Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, and any of the great leaders in the movement. But, as I read their work, I found that there was a very rich underlying intellectual structure there, and I believe—and maybe it’s just a leap of faith—that one of the things any successful movement needs is a strong intellectual structure.

For more, listen to the interview above.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I’ve got a report on last night’s event at Fordham University on St. Francis’ mysterious encounter with the sultan of Egypt. More and more, it is being remembered as an antidote to the “clash of civilizations” and a model for Christian-Muslim peacebuilding. But is the history really what we want it to be? And what do we need from history to take on the work of making peace today?

It’s tough to imagine a better run-up for today’s interfaith—or inter-civilizational, or whatever you want to call it—dialogue: at the height of the Fifth Crusade in the summer of 1219, St. Francis of Assisi traveled to the battlefield at Damietta, Egypt, went behind enemy lines, met with Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and then returned to Europe to continue his career as one of the greatest of medieval saints. There may even have been a miraculous gauntlet of fire involved, depending on which of the various contrasting reports from the period you read. Really, beside a few basic facts, the reports agree on very little, least of all what we might now want from the story most.

When I first learned about the story—it was the subject of a college paper I wrote in 2005—I could find few modern sources to draw from. As I gathered every early account I could, it amazed me that, in the proverbially post-9/11 world, a bigger deal wasn’t being made of Francis’ adventure. Now that has changed. On February 17th, with half the foreheads in the packed room marked by Ash Wednesday smears, Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture sponsored a forum with four authors who have recently written about it: two historians, a Franciscan sister, and a journalist.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

What was the Times expecting?

I hate to be tooting The New Yorker’s horn so much lately, but today they have a really nice blog post asking (rhetorically), “Are archivists today’s real peacemakers?” Meredith Blake reports on the “Archivist of the Year” awards last year at CUNY:

David Myers, the director of U.C.L.A.’s Center for Jewish Studies, spoke gracefully on the evening’s subject, saying that “the potential of the archive is not merely to preserve, but to liberate.” His belief is that through the dedicated work of archivists, it may be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to “craft a shared history that honors, with self-critical honesty, both traditions.” As possible inspiration, he cited “Histoire-Geschichte,” a history textbook about post-war Europe co-authored by French and German experts.

Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi, though a shade or two more skeptical than Myers, was nevertheless insistent that preserving the records of the Palestinian people was a critical step in the peace process, particularly in the ongoing absence of a Palestinian state or even a centralized archive. Vital as it may be, preservation often takes a back seat to more dire needs, said Khalidi. “There always seem to be more pressing needs elsewhere.”

We don’t have an “Archiving” category here at Waging Nonviolence, and certainly not one under “Actions.” But something like this is an important reminder that not all nonviolent, self-sacrificing acts for the sake of justice come in the form of direct protest. Take, for example, the dangers of archival work in post-invasion Iraq:

Previous “Archivist of the Year” honoree Saad Eskander proves just how dangerous—and how urgent—the work of an archivist can be. The former Kurdish fighter returned to his native Iraq in 2003 to work as director of the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad. In a captivating online diary, Eskander chronicled his brave efforts at reclaiming his nation’s history from a variety of threats: mold, car bombs, Baath loyalists, Muslim fundamentalists. The blog provided a window into the bipolar demands of his job, from mundane administrative questions, like where to install new air conditioners, to the virtually unthinkable—snipers, death threats, and even the kidnapping and murder of two staff librarians.

Though, for now, we do so under less mortal danger, this act of archiving is a form of activism that all of us who read, comment, and contribute at Waging Nonviolence undertake. We document, we remember; we insist, against the distraction of violence, that nonviolent struggle is at work in our world too, and more powerfully than the alternative.

What’s the most influential social movement in the United States today? When was the last time we heard, for instance, from ol’ Chairman Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party? And the Internet magic made for the Democrats’ 2008 electoral campaigns seems to have settled comfortably back into the self-satisfaction of recycling latte cups. Today, with health care, robber-baron big banks, and two disastrous wars in the balance, the people taking to the streets and capturing the media’s gaze are the so-called Tea Partiers, calling for an end to social services and a return to the joyful jingoism we felt the day after 9/11. Just the other day, they helped ensure the victory of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, perhaps dooming the chances of the Democrats’ health care plan.

In the February 1st issue of The New Yorker, Ben McGrath gives a truly carpetbagging account of middle American Tea Partiers in action. Here’s one of many striking passages:

[Keli Carender, a.k.a. the Liberty Belle] identified a tactic that would prove invaluable in the months of raucous town-hall meetings and demonstrations to follow: adopting the idealistic energy of liberal college students. “Unlike the melodramatic lefties, I do not want to get arrested,” she wrote. “I do, however, want to take a page from their playbook and be loud, obnoxious, and in their faces.”

Read the rest of this article »

After more than half a century of intransigent injustice, the Palestine/Israel “conflict”—or “disaster,” or whatever you want to call it—only seems to get worse. In the last few years, Israel has pummeled both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip with devastating impunity and, especially in the Strip, forcibly prevented its victims from making any kind of meaningful recovery. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian activism in Israeli civil society is reportedly on the decline. But, in one of a series of events since returning from the partly-thwarted Gaza Freedom March, a group of activists spoke of their experiences on Thursday at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, telling a packed room of more than 200 people, “We are here to celebrate an achievement.”

The Egyptian government didn’t let most of the over 1,300 protesters from around the world into Gaza for the planned march, but those at Judson said that they witnessed a new stage in the emergence of a global movement, facilitated by the Internet, that may well be poised to end the international support that makes Israel’s policies possible. The linchpin of the movement, the Cairo Declaration of the Gaza Freedom March, was drafted by would-be marchers while they waited in Egypt. It includes commitments to:

Palestinian Self-Determination

Ending the Occupation

Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine

The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees

The Declaration also calls for comprehensive boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and the interests that enable its occupation. Read the rest of this article »

Buddhism is often thought of as the exception. It’s a religion without gods (at least in some forms), to the chagrin of those who want to define religion as something along the lines of “belief in gods.” By the same token, as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism take the blame for some of history’s most savage violence, we tend to think of Buddhism as the sole nonviolent world religion.

A new book by Mark Juergensmeyer and Michael Jerryson (both of UC Santa Barbara’s religious studies department), Buddhist Warfare, reveals a Buddhism that is more complex than that and, the authors claim, more human. Jerryson writes, over at Religion Dispatches today:

Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence.

Before his fieldwork between 2006 and 2008 in Thailand, Jerryson thought of Buddhism as basically peaceful too. He actually went there to study Buddhist peacemaking. But what he found were militarized monks carrying guns and stockpiling weapons. It caused him to question the sources of his knowledge about the religion back home:

It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.

Yet these mystical depictions did not remove the two-dimensional nature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity.

Buddhist violence is certainly not limited to Jerryson’s experiences of it. For decades, Sri Lankan Buddhists have been carrying on a brutal civil war against a Tamil insurgency. For thousands of years, Buddhists have led and fought in armies, just as adherents of other religions have.

Does, Jerryson’s phrasing forces me to ask, violence equal humanity? Do we only know that our image of someone is human if it includes the specter of cruelty? I suspect that there is some truth to this. Just as Augustine of Hippo believed that faith begins with the recognition of one’s own sinfulness, Gandhi’s form of nonviolence was built on an intensive awareness of the temptation to violence within oneself. The power of his example suggests that even radical nonviolence depends on the recognition that violence is integral to human nature.

In the hands of Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, this book is not meant to be a glorification of violence, or an excuse for it. (Earlier in his career, it should be noted, Juergensmeyer wrote a fine little book called Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution, and he has since written important works on religious violence around the world.) Instead, they insist that we focus on Buddhist violence partly in order to fully appreciate the challenge of the alternative. Buddhist Warfare is likely to hit home most of all among American-born Buddhists, who have enjoyed the selective vision of a religion in which violence seems happily absent.

A HAPPY Canadian emigre in Costa Rica. Photo by author.

Nicholas Kristof has a happy-go-lucky column today in the Times about Costa Rica that reads as part tourism advertisement, part political common sense. He goes on and on about how the country is consistently ranked high in “happiness” surveys. This is true. How, then, did they get that way?

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Wow, wait, there’s more. Not only do they bother to educate each other, but they make efforts not to destroy the environment—a turn that came only after decades of incredibly destructive government policies, often financed by American business interests.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

This is an understatement. Certain areas of Costa Rica are crawling with Americans. In addition to high happiness rankings, the country is also #1 in the world for lost or stolen US passports, an embassy official there told me.

A poster in a Costa Rican beach town. Prostitution is legal there, just not with children. Note that the sign is in English.

A pressing question, then, is what effect this influx of Americans is having there. When I spent a month last summer with the photographer Lucas Foglia traveling around Costa Rica meeting American expats, there were two main patterns we found: a leisure class intent on exploiting the locals as much as possible in search of a low-cost paradise, and an idealistic frenzy of folks Going Back to the Land in search of a better, more sustainable way of life—and it wasn’t always easy to separate the one from the other. Often the “English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast” that Kristof looks forward to are the least sustainable things going, and they charge prices beyond what the locals can afford. (He also neglects to mention the flourishing sex trade, which is what brings so many aging American men down there in the first place.)

Costa Rica’s example is an incredibly instructive one, but we should be careful not to let it turn into another prime opportunity for careless exploitation. Rather than migrating en masse to benefit from that tiny country’s good decisions—and possibly ruining their effects in the process—Americans should work to follow its example ourselves, at home.

I began my recent dip into Slavoj Zizek’s Violence with a question that he raises but never quite answers: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” What he offers, instead, is an analysis of the violence that goes unacknowledged simply because we are so accustomed to it, because it is woven into the systemic order of society’s power relationships. But the crucial importance of this question to those of us invested in the theory and practice of nonviolence—forced to notice that it threatens to undermine our entire enterprise—kept me looking for other texts to help me think through it. At the end of that post, I promised a turn to Judith Butler’s Frames of War, which is what I’ll do now.

Butler is, says Cornel West on the dustjacket, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” A professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, she has played a defining role in the poststructural analysis of gender and sexuality, bringing Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, and others to bear on the foundational questions of human identity. I quote West most of all because I’ve mainly encountered Butler on panels alongside him, and their remarkable repartee has conditioned some of the most riveting intellectual experiences of my life. West plays the prophet and Butler the meticulous artificer, whose inventions tread along subtle gears to astonishing results. Together, they give me hope that the disciplined imagination still has something to say to our ever-more technocratic way of doing politics.

Frames of War is a series of essays on the horrific violence of US power during the last Bush administration. The book’s subtitle is When Is Life Grievable?, and it points to the heart of Butler’s argument: the senselessness of this violence stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to grieve for the human beings who fall victim to our weapons. Implicitly, we don’t even seem to consider those people really alive. She calls for “a new bodily ontology” (Butler’s prose is infamously technical) that allows us to recognize how intertwined we are with them. Other human beings are inevitably woven into, as she puts it, the conditions that make life livable for us, and consequently we have obligations to them. Grief would be a start.

What suggested to me the relevance of this text to the issue at hand was the discovery, while perusing it in Bluestockings bookstore, of the problem that orients its final chapter, titled “The Claim of Non-Violence.” It is a restatement of Zizek’s unanswered question:

I was asked by the philosopher Catherine Mills to consider an apparent paradox. Mills points out that there is a violence through which the subject is formed, and that the norms that found the subject are by definition violent. She asks how, then, if this is the case, I can make a call for non-violence.

Read the rest of this article »

The earliest Christian emperors (including Constantine I himself), as a matter of course, waited until their deathbeds to be baptized. They knew, in a way so many of our Christian leaders have forgotten, that the violence they felt compelled to enact in office was utterly antithetical to Christian teaching. Only when they knew they would do no evil—when they knew they couldn’t possibly do anything else‚ actually—was it safe to wash their sins away in baptismal water.

As he accepts his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo today, only days after announcing his decision to commit tens of thousands more American troops to Afghanistan (not to mention contractors and drones), President Barack Obama sounds like he wishes he could do as the emperors did. Receiving a prize for peace is something he’d like, perhaps—just not yet, while there’s still dirty work to be done.

I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. … But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. … I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

Nevertheless, he took the opportunity to insist on the inevitability and necessity of making war in today’s world. He begins by justifying the ever-familiar disjuncture in American politics: celebrating the nonviolent legacy of civil rights while retaining the right to exercise catastrophic violence abroad:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Once again, it is breathtaking to hear a politician declare that violence is the best answer to the threat of al Qaeda after it has been failing for seven profoundly costly years. Or that the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen was the best possible response to the crisis in Europe of the 1930s and 40s. We say no; we say better ways are possible (see, for instance, Bryan’s recent essay on WWII). They’re simply not tried with the appalling tenacity, commitment, and perseverance that we seem so eager to devote to war-making.

As the Nobel Committee itself said, the prize came to Obama as a challenge, a “call to action.” So far, he has failed to live up to it. He has failed, in turn, to challenge the world order to live up to higher ideals, to renounce violence and imperial habits. He knows that his practice falls far short of even his ideals. But why should a president be expected to do differently than Rome’s emperors?

I think it’s time, finally, that one should.

At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Mark Johnson, executive director of the pioneering Christian pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (I wrote about the Fellowship in a recent book review for Commonweal.) We discuss the FOR’s current work, its legacy, and how it is adapting to the the challenges of religious (and non-religious) diversity in its ranks.

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

Rhetorically, an old question in the theory and practice of nonviolence: “How can one wholly repudiate violence when struggle and aggression are part of life?” (63) It is with that question that I come to Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, a short book published last year by the trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (forgive my leaving out the diacritical marks). But I say “rhetorically” above because that is not, principally, his question, and he won’t properly answer it. He doesn’t propose, as we do here, to build a movement devoted to the purgation of violence; he calls, rather, for a subtler analysis of it and, possibly, scandalously, a withdraw—“doing nothing.” Or, in the very preceding sentence, he suggests that the “historical monsters” (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) “were not violent enough” to enact meaningful social change.

Bearing through such apparent self-contradiction is to be expected when wading through Zizek’s books. His “parallax” mode of analysis, combined with a mind and body so frenetic as to seem closer to the pace of a hummingbird than a person, ensures that there will be some coincidence of opposites. Nevertheless there is at least a gist to it all, and, in the thick of it, a great many surprising insights. When reading a Zizek text, one does better not to cling too steadfastly to one’s own starting questions. Follow the odd ways the reasoning goes, or risk missing out on a clever tangent or a good Soviet joke. Unfortunately for me, attempting to summarize it all can’t help rendering one squarer than he.

Read the rest of this article »

Dr. Timothy George, one of the document's authors, at the National Press Club.

We’ve been following here with interest the growth of protest activism on the part of the American Right since Obama came into office. They’ve been adapting the methods and language that have traditionally been the purview of the Left and, in the process, getting far more mainstream media attention.

The latest example of this trend comes in a statement released on November 20th, the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.” Chuck Colson was one of the drafters, and signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Thus begins Laurie Goodstein’s report in the New York Times:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

The document’s preamble goes further, citing past Christian opposition to slavery, Roman infanticide, women’s suffrage, human trafficking, and sexual slavery. At the conclusion, after rehearsing their convictions about abortion, euthanasia, and marriage, the authors and signers commit themselves to act:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.  We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

For many people, this promise of nonviolent resistance really amounts to violence: restricting women’s access to abortions, barring same-sex couples from marriage (or even blessing), and threatening the progress of medical research. But one might say the same thing about a boycott that threatens workers’ jobs. Yes, active nonviolence is a weapon, and it forcibly shapes society. (Be sure to catch Sarah Posner’s excellent analysis, for instance, of the political machinations at work in this declaration.) If these people are truly intending to take the suffering that they see in the world onto themselves as a statement against it, I cannot but accept the testimony of their consciences. I’m certainly far more willing to listen to an action like this than to the murder of an abortion provider.

Active, creative democracy is messy, and it forces us to listen to and hear out the voices of those we might deeply disagree with. Those of us who don’t like it are perfectly welcome to take up acts of conscience of our own.