The God Squad: King and nonviolence

Holidays are supposed to have rituals and beliefs. Having just traversed the winter religious holidays of Hanukkah and Christmas and the secular holidays of Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day we prepare this coming Monday for a holiday that is not really a holiday and has no agreed upon rituals and that is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This saddens me because I so admired Dr. King and so want this day to have a deeper significance than just a day with no postal delivery.

I have no idea what rituals might eventually grow around this day of memorial for the last great American leader, but I do have a strong idea about what belief we should lift up in his memory. It is the belief in non-violence.

The greatest support for nonviolence comes from the eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism’s doctrine of ahimsa embraced by Gandhi and King as a foundational spiritual and political value. As the Buddha taught, “The only way that wrath can be conquered is by non-wrath.”

There is also a proof text in the Christian Testament in the famous passage about turning the other cheek in Matthew 5:38-48,

“But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.”

I freely admit that both Judaism and Islam have much to learn from Christianity and the Eastern faiths about nonviolence but it is also true that Jesus’ and Gandhi’s teachings were not always followed. The reason for this is complicated but it comes down to the need to overcome evil “by any means necessary.” Collective or individual self-defense is also a moral good because it prevents the victory of evil doers. It is simply naïve or self-destructive to imagine defeating evil through non-violent resistance.

A good way to see the challenge of nonviolence is to just remember the lives of King and Gandhi. Both were overcome by the forces of violence. King’s inclusive non-violent approach to the struggle for civil rights was overwhelmed by the more strident and violent elements of the movement. Gandhi was murdered as well and India does not even pretend to employ nonviolence in its struggle against its enemies. The victims of the mass murders at the Mother Emanuel AME Church forgave the murderer immediately but in the end they are dead.

My view is that nonviolence is like vegetarianism. It is one of those spiritual goals we set for ourselves that is sadly impossible to fulfill on a large scale because of the realities of our need to defend ourselves with force and our carnivorous urges which are deep in us. I can live with that. I think faith is not only about teaching us what we can do but teaching us what we cannot do now but may grow to be able to do someday. This is the reason I consider King not just a political leader but also a prophet in our time.

As King developed his own version of nonviolence, there were six main principles:

“Principle one: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. It is active nonviolent resistance to evil. It is aggressive spiritually, mentally and emotionally.

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