Soulforce is originally founded around the philosophy of nonviolence as gleaned through the studies by our founding members of the legacies of several practitioners, including the Catholic Workers Movement, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement, Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for civil rights in the US.
Nonviolence is many things to many people, and over the course of two decades, we have learned and reflected a lot on this activist praxis. This is why we have created an online video course on practicing nonviolent activism that resists white Christian Supremacist values: Refreshing Nonviolence.
We will also give you our best, most Soulforce-tested explanation here as a place for you to begin defining it for yourself:
For some, nonviolence is a spiritual practice, a way of life, a means to stay safer, a tactic, or all of the above. Your path is valid, and we don’t preach what your level of steeping in nonviolence ought to be.
For Soulforce, nonviolence is about getting outside of over/under power dynamics, where we “win” and someone else “loses”. Doing nonviolence includes eschewing acts of violence that destroy our own soul in the process, but it does not stop there. It is proactive: nonviolent struggle topples power structures, brings about personal transformation, and creates new modes of existence through doing justice.
Soulforce is originally founded around the philosophy of nonviolence as gleaned through the studies by our founding members of the legacies of several practitioners, including the Catholic Workers Movement, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement, Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for civil rights in the US.
Nonviolence is many things to many people, and over the course of two decades, we have learned and reflected a lot on this activist praxis. This is why we have created an online video course on practicing nonviolent activism that resists white Christian Supremacist values: Refreshing Nonviolence.
We will also give you our best, most Soulforce-tested explanation here as a place for you to begin defining it for yourself:
For some, nonviolence is a spiritual practice, a way of life, a means to stay safer, a tactic, or all of the above. Your path is valid, and we don’t preach what your level of steeping in nonviolence ought to be.
For Soulforce, nonviolence is about getting outside of over/under power dynamics, where we “win” and someone else “loses”. Doing nonviolence includes eschewing acts of violence that destroy our own soul in the process, but it does not stop there. It is proactive: nonviolent struggle topples power structures, brings about personal transformation, and creates new modes of existence through doing justice.
It is kinetic in its mental, emotional, spiritual or physical labor. It can be loud, assertive, aggressive, disruptive, unapologetic, unnerving, challenging; politeness is not the price we need to pay to be dignified with recognition. Confrontation is not inherently violent, and marginalized people speaking out and disrupting those who carry out violence is not violent.
Nonviolence is not the opposite of violence; these are not mutually exclusive opposites, and they are not mirrored in how they function. Nonviolence is a process of creation, evolution, and seeking shifts in power, awareness, and heart. This is why we use the term “not violent” as well as “nonviolence.” If “not violent” is the absence of physical, verbal, or spiritual harm, “nonviolence” is the dedicated creation of a world in which violence is no longer a currency by which we delineate relationships, borders, and social positioning.
Love propels this work; we love those who are victimized and suffering under violence and we validate their right to fight for themselves. We extend compassion, understanding, patience and love towards victims of violence, including us, and seek to see livelihoods improved, identities respected, and bodies and souls healed. It is through this self-love that we can both seek justice and extend compassion to our adversaries.
We work to heal our own trauma and center the survivors of violence. In this, nonviolence does the work of empathy, care, and love through action and demands for change. Reclamation and healing is the goal. In this way, it transforms the activist in the struggle. It does not call us to ask for permission to exist as marginalized people, but to actively demand that the world recognize our humanity and adjust to justice.
This mindset, by the way, is the same we apply to understanding and constructing just theologies.
This is a journey, a struggle in shades of gray to work for change in a way that honors our souls and the souls of our adversaries, while never taking injustice for an answer.
Some of us actively choose a nonviolent struggle, but not for the sake of moral superiority or joining the club of acceptable and anointed activists.
It’s important that we be critical of what we have learned about the meaning of nonviolence and the choice to practice it, as cultural narratives of nonviolence and the re-telling of its history have been whitewashed and gentrified by dominant culture. They have spun the story of nonviolence to keep the victims of violence from confronting their aggressors in ways that would truly change social structures.
Nonviolence and all its ancestors call Soulforce to study and be active across movements. Violence shows up in our lives in complex and layered ways, so Soulforce must pay attention to how fundamentalism works as a self-righteous violence across issues, including but not limited to sex, sexuality, and gender.
Fundamentalism takes center stage within our theory of change, so our purpose also calls us to be active across many issues and do work that reflects the complexity of our lives as raced, classed, sexed, gendered, embodied beings.
We support activism that doesn’t cause us to destroy our own souls. We seek to be transformed in our collective humanity as we fight for a just world. Soulforce offers support, affirmation, resources, and a place for all who are committed to what is valuable about nonviolent struggle.
Study up on Soulforce’s principles of nonviolence with our video series, Refreshing Nonviolence.
