Why should Christians care about nonviolent direct (climate) action?
In this first in our series on ethics, guest writers John Clements and Thalia Carr from Christian Climate Action discuss the theological rationale behind nonviolent direct action on behalf of the natural environment.
How should we as Christians respond to climate change: is Nonviolent Direct Action appropriate and theologically justified?
For too long, being green and caring about the environment has been seen as a special interest group in the church—for the cyclists, allotment holders, and mother earth types. Lip service has been paid to the fact that God is creator, “all things come from thee, and of thy own have we given thee” (1 Chronicles 29:14), and that we and all that we see, touch, hear, smell and taste is created or God-breathed. And yet we are part of creation—trees clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12); God is intrinsically involved in the natural world (Psalm 77:16-20); and promises never again to “curse the ground” and destroy “every living creature” after the flood (Genesis 8:21).
Some Christians have taken Genesis 1:26-31—“let them have dominion”—to mean that we as humans own creation and can do what we want with it. Indeed, we have historically and consistently followed a take-make-waste approach rather than a sustainable and renewable economic system as now proposed by many environmentalists and economists. We have extracted and thrown away the very things on which we depend and which we are part of, even though we can see God’s hand in every flower, bacteria, atom, star and puddle. We have been using up a finite resource which is designed to be everlasting and self-replenishing.
As a result of this approach, and of a widespread culture of individualistic greed, we are now in a position where our greenhouse gas emissions – largely but not solely from burning fossil fuels – and our rampant consumerism and disregard for the environment, are threatening the continuation of the natural and safe cycles of life on earth. The seasons, the delicate balance of ecosystems, the rain and the air are all affected. Climate change is already bringing poverty, homelessness, racial injustice and spiralling numbers of refugees, and we can expect civil unrest, societal collapse and war.
Christians are called by God to show the world what the divine image looks like, to repent of our shortcomings against that vision and to act to bring it about; to repent of our sins, our greed, our failure to act earlier and to act effectively to prevent the worst disaster happening. The core message of the gospel is to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves (Luke 10:27); if you see that someone is about to drown, love makes you shout out to them or get in there and rescue them. We are seeing people already drowning. According to a report commissioned by twenty governments, 400,000 deaths per year can be attributed to climate change, as a result of natural disasters, heatwaves, disruption to food production and distributions, and the spread of diseases.
Christian Climate Action has been a prophetic voice to the church and the world since 2014, though, like the lone voice of John the Baptist, their voice has been small. For example, on the first day of the Paris climate conference in November 2015, five members of Christian Climate Action exposed the hypocrisy of the Department of Energy and Climate Change by whitewashing its walls and rebranded it the ‘Department for Extreme Climate Change’ in black paint. The protesters were arrested and charged with criminal damage. Since then CCA has protested and acted repeatedly, sometimes breaking the law, to warn of the dangers of inaction in the face of climate crisis and to call for government and business to change direction. These are examples of nonviolent direct action (NVDA).
So, why choose nonviolent direct action? How do we, as Christians, justify the use of NVDA as a means of moving governments and institutions towards a more just and sustainable future? Why not instead write to MPs, campaign and march peacefully without disrupting public order or breaking laws?
Jesus started his ministry by using the correct channels; he taught in the synagogues and in the temple. But his radical message was not really heard until he started breaking with convention and putting his words into action,even going as far as completely disrupting the traders in the temple, pouring out their money and overturning tables (John 2: 13-17). Instead of associating with people of power and influence, he broke religious and cultural norms and ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. He constantly challenged tradition in very public ways and caught his opponents off balance by exposing their hypocrisy (Matthew 12:1-8, 15:1-20).
For many years now people of all faiths and none have been using the accepted routes for campaigning and influencing—petitions, marches, lobbying MPs—but the response has been totally inadequate. NVDA is our way of continuing to act out of love for God, humanity and the created world in a way which we hope will bring better and quicker results, whilst remaining true to our faith and eschewing violence.
First, we need to be clear about what is meant by NVDA in the Christian context. One recent definition is
an activist confrontation with evil that respects the personhood even of the 'enemy'and therefore seeks both to end the oppression and to reconcile the oppressor through nonviolent means. It includes things from verbal and symbolic persuasion through social, economic and political non-co-operation. [1]
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1958 Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, gives six characteristics of NVDA, which he defines as the courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love:
one can resist evil without resorting to violence;
nonviolence seeks to win the “friendship and understanding” of the opponent, not to humiliate him
evil itself, not the people committing evil acts, should be opposed;
those committed to nonviolence must be willing to suffer without retaliation as suffering itself can be redemptive
nonviolent resistance avoids “external physical violence” and “internal violence of spirit” as well and;
that the nonviolent resister must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “The universe is on the side of justice”.
As a Christian, King saw clearly that faith, hope and love have to be the foundation of all we do, and his six principles encapsulate this. Thus, faith identifies the evil to be resisted and gives us the strength to take action; hope gives us the assurance that evil will be overcome and to endure our own suffering; whilst love ensures that we treat our opponents with respect. King's own faith and strength came from the Bible, and we therefore turn to Scripture to see how that supports these principles.
The Jewish culture into which Jesus was born was no stranger to NVDA. In Exodus we read how Jewish midwives conspired to evade the command of the Egyptians to kill male babies (Ex. 1:15-21). In Jesus's own time, Josephus in his History of the Jewish Peoplegives examples of how the inhabitants of Jerusalem successfully stopped the Romans from erecting sacrilegious images in the city by what we would now call 'sit-ins', saying they would rather die than endure defilement. On the other hand, we also read in the Old Testament numerous examples of killing and violence in the name of God, which were used to justify violent action against oppressors and injustice. Consider, for example, the crusades of King David (e.g., 1 Chron. 18) and the slaughter by the prophet Elijah of the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18).
What made Jesus very different from his predecessors was his resolute stand against violence of any kind, although as someone immersed in the sacred literature of his own people, he would have been well aware of the examples of violence committed or aided by earlier prophets. This is not to deny that there appear to be some violent outcomes prophesied by Jesus for malcontents. In Matthew 13, for example, at the end of the world evildoers will be thrown into the fire, and later in chapter 18 in the parable of the unforgiving servant, the servant is handed over to be tortured. What differentiates the violence in these stories and parables from those in the Hebrew Bible, is that the violence is perpetrated by God on sinners, and not by humans on their political or religious enemies. Whether or not God holds the monopoly on violence is a difficult question, best left for another day. Suffice to say for now that these passages may be read as colourful metaphors for whatever fate does await the unrepentant, as imagined by the gospel writers.
At no point does Jesus advocate violence as a means of restoring Israel to greatness, even when violence is a live option, as when one of his disciples cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant (Matthew 26:51; Mark 14:47; Luke 22:50–51; John 18:10–11).
Nevertheless, Jesus's teaching was revolutionary, taking us beyond mere acceptance of rules and toward the motivations and meanings behind our actions—thus, for example, even looking with lust or anger is as bad as committing adultery or murder (Matt 5:21-30). Nor are rules to be conformed to blindly: where necessary Jesus breaks rules, such as when he heals on the Sabbath (Matt 12:9 -14). As Christians we too have to discern when the values and principles Jesus gave us are in conflict with the law of the land and we need to be prepared to do what is right. Such discernment is not always easy.
Perhaps the most direct statement of how we should behave in the face of oppression and provocation appears in Matthew 5: 38-48; it is this section of the Sermon on the Mount which is often used to illustrate Jesus's support for NVDA, most famously perhaps by Walter Wink. [2]
The three examples given by Jesus share the common objective of shaming or embarrassing the oppressor. Turning the other cheek to a back-handed slap makes it difficult for the person giving the slap to do so a second time, which might make them look foolish and make them think twice; carrying a Roman soldier's pack for more than one mile was forbidden by law, so carrying it for a second mile again puts the soldier (the oppressor) in a difficult position. Similarly, giving your creditor your last garment and appearing naked in court puts them in a bad light.
Each of these examples is a form of resistance, a form which turns the oppression onto the oppressor in a way that would make them think twice about what they were doing.
A difficulty often raised for this interpretation is that in Matt 5:38 Jesus says “do not resist”, but the apparent contradiction is removed if “resist” is interpreted to refer to armed resistance. In this case, the verse can be interpreted as calling us to transcend violence, to resist without violence.
We also see how Jesus uses the technique of turning the question back onto the questioner when he is challenged by the authorities, for example in Mark 3:1-6, another way of resisting their logic without being aggressive and yet still in public. Jesus constantly pushes back at those who represent a kind of authority seen as life-denying rather than life-enhancing, and this theme is continued by the apostles, as for example in Acts 5:29, where Peter answers “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”
Recently Christians have been amongst those who blockaded roads, blocked entrances to government buildings, glued themselves to the fence outside of Downing Street and stood on top of the Docklands Light Railway. We have also been at a mass lobby of MPs as well as sending letters and meeting our MPs locally. Which actions have caught the attention and made change happen? We believe it was those actions where the boundary between legal and illegal was crossed in the name of love and justice, but we engage in NVDA not just because we think it effective, but because it is theologically justified by meeting the need for Christians to act to restore God's creation and usher in the new world that Christ proclaimed.
Christian living is countercultural, the rule we live by is to love one another (John 13:34) and that can put us in conflict with societal norms and even the law, where human law conflicts with the necessity of observing God's law because it is founded on the sands of human obsessions with wealth and status. CCA is not alone in this view. Writing the afterword in Extinction Rebellion’s recent book[3], Rowan Williams says:
It might just work.....Anger, love and joy may sound like odd bedfellows, but these are the seeds of a new future that will offer life - not success, but life.
[1] Sider, Ronald J. Nonviolent action: what Christian ethics demands but most christians have never really tried. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos. (pp xv-xvi).
[2] Wink, W. (1992). Engaging the powers: discernment and resistance in a world of domination. Fortress Press (pp. 175-184).
[3] Extinction Rebellion. (2019). This is not a drill. London, UK: Penguin.
