Martin Luther King, Jr. knew about the value of unity and organization to nonviolent public witness. His book Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story is about the 1955-56 boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in an effort to break segregation. Ultimately, the boycott worked, though it took a year.
Impatience and violence would have undermined the effort. In his book, King outlined some aspects of nonviolence that were critical to the Montgomery effort.
- Nonviolent resistance isn’t for cowards. It is passive physically, but strongly active spiritually. King pointed out that the weekly mass meetings associated with the boycott always included prayer, and that ministers took the lead exhorting participants to Christian love and nonviolence.
- Nonviolence does not seek to defeat or humiliate an opponent, but rather to win friendship and understanding.
- Nonviolence is directed against the forces of evil rather than the persons doing evil.
- Willingness to accept suffering without retaliation is crucial. King frequently repeated the theme that unearned suffering is redemptive.
- Have faith in the future and in God’s Providence; “the universe is on the side of justice.”
- Avoid not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. Motivation must be love, not hate.
All those things ring true where the right to life is concerned, except that the last item – avoiding internal “violence of spirit” – gives me pause. Abortion kills children. The abortion industry fights to prevent accountability for outcomes to women’s health. It wants my money. It has destroyed my confidence in the medical arts, as I see abortion apologists at the state house fight conscience protections for health care professionals who choose not to participate in abortion.
I can’t pretend to view the landscape calmly. There is real urgency to the call to build a culture of life. To do so with conviction and persuasiveness, without giving way to anger – the “violence of spirit” of which Dr. King wrote – is a challenge I’ll probably have to face every day of my life.
