The following reflection was written by Frank Panopoulos, a member of the Pax Christi USA national council. Frank is a human rights attorney who has participated in multiple civil disobedience actions, including two Plowshares actions (AVCO and Trident II).
Twice this past summer I participated in election scenario exercises with large, diverse groups of Catholics, in order to prepare and organize local groups in anticipation of the Trump administration’s coöpting next week’s elections. The exercises entailed randomly moving people into small groups representing various civic and religious organizations, e.g., religious orders, a peace and justice organization, a national labor union, a national legal civil rights organization, a group that has been organizing decentralized demonstrations against the administration, etc. Members of each small group were then tasked with deciding on a response to a hypothetical election scenario based on events currently unfolding in the United States.
The scenario presented four [hypothetical] stages:
- In September, the administration claims potential fraud and foreign interference in the elections and has announced that it would send federal agents and National Guard nationwide to act as poll watchers.
- Intimidation and violence at the polls on election day has resulted in low turnout and subsequent challenges by the administration to the vote count.
- Several swing states announce that they cannot certify the election results by the post-election deadlines.
- The Speaker of the House refuses to swear in the new members of Congress on January 3, 2027.
The realistic nature of this scenario cannot be gainsaid. In July, President Trump announced that there was “irrefutable” evidence of Chinese interference in our elections. Several Republican candidates for governor already have suggested deploying ICE and National Guard at polling places and when asked, President Trump did not rule out such (unconstitutional) deployments. In addition, the administration has made efforts to limit mail-in ballots and enact legislation (the SAVE Act) that would require, among other things, everyone registering to vote in person at an election office with proof of citizenship.
In my experiences this past summer, participants in the exercise responded with ordinary dissent measures: contacting sympathetic politicians, supporting state election officials, training poll watchers and poll chaplains, filing legal challenges, and demonstrating. The union groups proposed organizing a general strike, but only after election day. No group suggested working with others to organize massive and sustained nonviolent civil disobedience at any point before or after election day. The person who helped create and lead the exercise told us he has offered this experience more than 30 times, including once with seven bishops; participants rarely suggest organizing massive nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience.
Given a scenario that would be an extraordinary political and moral crisis — a de facto coup calling each of us to choose how to resist or remain silent – I found the responses in the two exercises I participated in disconcerting.
It would be too late to wait for the crisis to happen in November before we take any semblance of nonviolent direct action against the administration. The crisis is already here and has been upon us for some time now. Call it authoritarian or fascist, but Donald Trump and those who back him have made it clear they intend to destroy the constitutional system governing this country and reconstitute it in their fanatical ideology. Pope Leo XIV explains this crisis in Magnificat Humanitas as one born from a “culture of power” that is destroying the international multilateral system through unfettered globalization and nationalism:
In our time, a culture of power is taking hold, in which the availability of resources and the ability to dominate tend to dictate the agenda and criteria for decision-making. In this way, the common good of humanity is relegated to the background and the concrete tragedy of peoples at war is reduced to a secondary consideration in relation to strategic interests. This culture of power infiltrates society, changes relationships and behaviors, and grows by normalizing war, pursuing ever-greater military power, taking advantage of the crisis of multilateralism and fueling a false realism that insists that there is no alternative. (188).
Ordinary measures of dissent are fine in-and-of themselves but to me, in light of this crisis, they are inadequate to counter the administration’s domestic and foreign lethality. What is needed now is resistance.
As Phil Berrigan astutely noted, dissent without resistance is complicity. His brother Dan put it more succinctly: If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood. Jesus calls us to carry our wood. In the end, nonviolent civil disobedience — on a massive and sustained scale — cannot be avoided if we are to avoid the election scenario described above. Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. King promoted such a strategy. They urged followers in their civil disobedience campaigns not to hesitate risking arrest and filling the jails to overcome, respectively, British colonialism and Jim Crow segregation1. The nonviolent revolutions we witnessed in the past 50 years — Poland, South Africa, the Philippines, Ukraine, Egypt and the Arab Spring, to name a few – all entailed large numbers of people putting their bodies on the front lines in civil disobedience campaigns.
So why isn’t this happening now in the US? It has happened before: During the Birmingham Children’s Crusade from May 2-3, 1965, close to 2,000 children and young students were arrested and filled the jails to capacity, leading Bull Connor to turn water hoses and dogs on the children that continued marching, thereby exposing the state brutality that maintained segregation and garnering wider support for the civil rights struggle. During the 1971 May Day anti-war protests to shut down Washington DC, more than 12,000 people in small affinity groups were arrested over the course of three days for blocking government buildings and streets. Since the District did not have the jail capacity, they kept those arrested in a make-shift open air prison at RFK Stadium, thereby exposing the police state the US had become under President Nixon and leading to a major turning point against the Vietnam War.
We need to move to the kind of resistance people risked in Birmingham in 1965 and Washington, DC. in 1971, if we are serious about turning back all the evils the Trump administration and its supporters have wrought and continue to wreak here and abroad. Indeed, Pope Leo invites us to do so. In Magnificat Humanitas, he urges us not to be passive, but to actively resist evil:
Even in the darkest nights, the Lord raises up men and women who refuse to give up, who persevere in doing good, who protect the vulnerable and open pathways to reconciliation. The memory of the saints, righteous people and the oft-forgotten peacemakers, show us that grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good. (211).
One reason I think we haven’t moved in the direction of active resistance is that activists and organizers don’t apply the strategy of mass nonviolent civil disobedience. Whether because they haven’t studied the history of civil disobedience in this country, or believe civil disobedience is ineffective, or won’t urge their base towards it, the end result is the same: a superficial strategy of social change, with the simple message to vote. But, as Dr. King showed us, the two strategies, civil disobedience and voting, work together.
Another reason is that most activists and organizers work on their institutional agendas and remain single issue or single base. Yet, the injustices perpetrated by the administration and its supporters are interconnected and must be dealt with together. Dr. Angela Davis identifies this interconnecting of issues as “the intersectionality of struggles.”2 The “culture of power” that Pope Leo identifies stands on the triple evils of racism, militarism, and materialism/economic exploitation that Dr. King identified as “lurking within our body politic from its beginning” and “the plague of western civilization.” In his 1967 speech The Three Evils of Society, Dr. King interconnects these evils:
The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad. . . . [T]he problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. . . . Squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military might destroy cities in a far-off land to support oligarchy, to intervene in domestic conflict. . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense then on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death3.
There is an apropos line in Peter Maurin’s Easy Essay Self-Organization: “And when the organizers don’t organize themselves, nobody organizes himself.” Organizers should take this to heart. Unless groups and organizations organize themselves into a coalition to implement a strategy of massive and sustained nonviolent civil disobedience that fills the jails, groups will expend time and resources on their individual campaigns and the crisis will not abate but worsen. That’s been the reality thus far.
Moreover, the absence of organizing such a nonviolent resistance campaign can only lead to ceding resisting the administration to the violent. Although vastly outnumbered by the far-right’s show of force and weapons at demonstrations (not to mention the police’s), people on “the left” are arming themselves at demonstrations. Without the leadership of active nonviolent civil disobedience at anti-government demonstrations to show people there is a way to resist the state without resort to violent acts or rhetoric, we can expect protestors to fall back on violent means of protest, for example rock throwing, arson, or worse.
The benefit of people engaging in nonviolent direct action is that one also learns to change their own life away from violence. Gandhi’s and Dr. King’s campaigns did not require participants to be totally nonviolent before joining. Instead, they required participants to commit to several practical rules or principles of nonviolent behavior during the campaign. From that commitment, a seed is planted that can transform the person.
Walter Wink makes the same point in his book, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. There he writes that Jesus’s Third Way in response to evil is active nonviolence, which is also the way of the cross4. He concludes the book by urging us to unite and take up that cross, that struggle:
[I]t seems to me that those who have held back from throwing the full weight of moral authority into a nonviolent mode of struggle need do so no longer. The question is not pacifism, but a more effective, united struggle for goals shared by all. There would not even be the need for people to reach theoretical agreement on nonviolence as a total philosophy, as long as they were agreed that in specific campaigns they would remain nonviolent…
Seen in this light, Jesus’ Third Way is not an insuperable counsel to perfection attainable only by the few. It is simply the right way to live, and can be pursued by many. The more who attempt it, the more mutual support there will be in following it.5”
Luke writes that when Jesus drew near to Jerusalem “and saw the city he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.’” Luke 19:41-42 (RSV). It is no surprise that Jesus said this during what was a nonviolent direct action involving multitudes of His disciples and people: His entry into Jerusalem. We know today the things that make for peace in our time. It’s only a matter of opening our eyes and trusting in God a commitment to active nonviolence.
- In his February 16, 1960 speech “A Creative Protest” to North Carolina students at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, Dr. King consoled: “Let us not fear going to jail. If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South. Maybe it will take this willingness to stay in jail to arouse the dozing conscience of our nation.” Available at https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/experience/collective-sound/. In the cover page of The Pilgrims’ March, Gandhi writes: “We must widen the gates of prisons and we must enter them as a bridegroom enters the bride’s chamber. Freedom is to be wooed only inside prison walls and sometimes on the gallows, never in the council chambers, courts or the schoolroom.” The Pilgrims’ March: Their Messages (Ganesh & Co. 1921), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pilgrims%27_March.
↩︎ - “[W]hat I think is most interesting is the conceptualization of the intersectionality of struggles. . . . [H]ow do we talk about bringing various social justice struggles together, across national borders. So we are talking about Ferguson and Palestine.” Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, 19 (Haymarket Press 2016).
↩︎ - Black Agenda Report, SPEECH: The Three Evils of Society, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967, (17 Jan. 2024), https://www.blackagendareport.com/speech-three-evils-society-martin-luther-king-jr-1967.
↩︎ - Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way, 12, 87 (Fortress Press 2003).
↩︎ - Ibid. ↩︎