Joseph Kip Kosek - Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy

ACTS OF CONSCIENCE

COLUMBIA STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN HISTORY

ACTS OF CONSCIENCE

Christian Nonviolence
and Modern American Democracy

Joseph Kip Kosek

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright 2009 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51305-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kosek, Joseph Kip.

Acts of conscience : Christian nonviolence and modern American democracy / Joseph Kip Kosek.

p. cm.(Columbia studies in contemporary American history)

Includes bibliographical refrences and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14418-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-51305-0 (electronic)

1. NonviolenceReligious aspectsChristianity. 2. Civil disobedienceReligious aspectsChristianity. 3. Christianity and politicsUnited States. 4. United StatesChurch history.

I. Title. II. Series.
BR517.K67 2009
261.80973dc22

2008013775

A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Chapter 3 originally published in a slightly different form in Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence, Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 13181348; Copyright Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been strook so to the soul, that presently

They have proclaimd their malefactions.

The plays the thing

Wherein Ill catch the conscience of the King.

Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act II, Scene ii)

I am a soldier of Christ, I cannot fight.

Martin of Tours (A.D. 356)

This book traces the history of a radical religious vanguard. The guiding principle of this group, which I call Christian nonviolence, has long been dismissed as marginal, eccentric, or impossibly saintly, but I take a more sophisticated approach. For these rebels, the example of Jesus showed the immorality and futility of organized violence in any circumstance and for any cause. Yet Christian nonviolence, for them, was not a matter of fixed dogma, but rather an active process of interpreting religion in the modern world. They believed that their uniquely gruesome era required new political formations and new ways of thinking. The Christian nonviolent tradition, by putting the problem of violence at the center of its theory and practice, offers an alternative model of political action and an alternative history of the twentieth century.

I believe, the radical Christian pacifist A. J. Muste wrote during World War II, that in the degree that anybody is any good it is because he has both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in himself and somehow effects a creative synthesis of them. Mustes acute awareness of the relationship between high ideals and practical tactics suggests the multidimensional qualities of Christian nonviolent acts of conscience, which ranged from sit-ins to conscientious objection to, sometimes, mere interracial socializing. At one level, these were extreme existential acts that broke sharply with the law, social convention, and even the practitioners own instinct for self-preservation. In another way, though, no instance of nonviolent action was a solely individual affair. These acts also contained a ritual dimension that fostered camaraderie and discipline in realms removed from ordinary life. This was never more true than during the Montgomery bus boycott of 19551956, when boycotters assembled in the sacred space of black churches to attend training workshops that simulated the experience of boarding integrated buses. Here, as they pretended to be peaceful riders or angry white supremacists, they rehearsed both their individual courage and their vision of a racially harmonious world. Those training sessions spoke as well to a third connotation of the word acts. Unlike antimodern pacifists such as the Amish, Muste and his associates turned nonviolence into a theatrical act, a calculated performance attuned to the sympathies of audiences, especially those created by new forms of mass media. Christian nonviolent acts of conscience, then, were not expressions of pure sainthood, nor were they shallow publicity stunts that cynically used faith as a cover for more important things. The existential, ritual, and spectacular dimensions of nonviolence all operated simultaneously. Acts of conscience were at once individual and social, at once sincerely spiritual and self-consciously spectacular, at once Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The virtuosos of Christian nonviolence in this story first coalesced during World War I in an antiwar organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The Fellowship attracted talent out of all proportion to its small size. The roster of people who were, at one time or another, leaders in the FOR reveals a hidden history of American political dissent. At the head of the list stands Muste, dubbed the No. 1 U.S. pacifist by Time magazine in 1939. He helped guide opposition to every major American military campaign from World War I to Vietnam, while also building industrial unionism well before the 1930s and promoting racial justice well before the 1960s. Norman Thomas, the head of the Socialist Party in the United States for decades, spent pivotal early years in the FOR, as did Reinhold Niebuhr, who later became the most important American theologian of the twentieth century and a severe critic of pacifism. Nowhere was the Fellowships effect more crucial, though, than in the civil rights movement. March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) director James Farmer, and James Lawson, whose leadership of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins helped spark the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were all products of this effervescent Christian nonviolent culture.