Focusing on historical and contemporary examples, these papers address questions related to the ethics of resistance. In particular, the presenters analyze how resisters have justified the use of violence or nonviolent practices in their movements for justice. Specific issues treated include resistance against racism, oppressive governments, and environmental injustice.
The urgent prioritization of resistance has recently reemerged as a prominent feature in religious and social ethics. This paper simultaneously celebrates this theme and argues for its integration with two others: reimagination and reconstruction. Though distinct, these tasks are interrelated. Resisting injustice and oppression, in their ideological underpinnings and material effects alike, is essential; resistance by itself, however, risks devolving into reactive pugnacity, ceding the initiative to malefactors. An expanded imagination, which envisions abundant life on the other side of the struggle, is also indispensable for social change; yet, reimagining alone is likewise insufficient, since isolated from action, it can function as escapist fantasy. Meanwhile, amidst institutional and societal unraveling, people need somewhere to live; thus, rebuilding—short-term and long-term, conceptual and communal, structural and systemic—is in order. Such reconstruction only finds coherence, however, in tandem with the deconstructive ground clearing of resistance and the creative foresight of reimagining.
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.
Nonviolence is widely assumed to be the most effective form of religious-moral resistance. I argue this assumption is (1) ahistorical and (2) harmful to ongoing struggles to create positive social change worldwide. More specifically, I focus on how contemporary environmental activism is rendered ineffective due to its blind allegiance to nonviolence—a fidelity that religious studies and ethics have done little to assuage. I propose we change this, starting with examining why strategic acts of violence (property) might not simply be permissible but moral and necessary given our climate crisis. First, I provide a counter reading of the civil rights movement—one that shows that the possibility of violence was essential to creating social change (e.g., 1964 Voting Rights Act). I then turn to Eco-Leninism, Antonio Gramsci, and just war theory to construct a foundation for religious ethics to reflect on strategic violence’s moral role in seeking climate justice.