Reform or Revolution? A Comparison of the Resistance Narratives of Henry Highland Garnet and Christian Führer

This paper compares two narratives of resistance—one advocating for violence, and the other nonviolence, one a pastor from a marginalized group and another a consummate “insider.” Henry Highland Garnet was a New York Presbyterian minister and black abolitionist who famously argued for slaves and other Black Americans to take agency for their own liberation. Christian Führer was the Lutheran pastor of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, who used nonviolence to resist the East German state and help bring about its downfall through the “Revolution of Candles.” Historically, such narrative studies have been seen as “too sectarian,” but by expanding the inquiry beyond internal communal narratives to include legal and hegemonic narratives that shape and impact the path of resistance, comparison yields a deeper understanding of why narratives of resistance find expression in terms of reform or revolution. I argue that, by illuminating the constant interplay of narrative worlds within structures of power, privilege, and repression, such comparisons not only open new fields of inquiry for narrative ethics, but are capable of expressing normative claims about the conditional nature of law and justice, while utilizing emerging scholarship in law, human rights, and social justice.