Jesus & Alinsky

Jesus' Third Way

Seize the moral initiative.

Find a creative alternative to violence.

Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person.

Meet force with ridicule or humor.

Break the cycle of humiliation.

Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position.

Expose the injustice of the system.

Take control of the power dynamic.

Shame the oppressor into repentance.

Stand your ground.

Force the Powers into decisions for which they are not prepared.

Recognize your own power.

Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate.

Force the oppressor to see you in a new light.

Deprive the oppressor of a situation where force is effective.

Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws.

It is too bad Jesus did not provide fifteen or twenty more examples since we do not tend toward this new response naturally. Some examples from political history might help engrave it more deeply in our minds:

In Alagamar, Brazil, a group of peasants organized a long-term struggle to preserve their lands against attempts at illegal expropriation by national and international firms (with the connivance of local politicians and the military). Some of the peasants were arrested and jailed in town. Their companions decided they were all equally responsible. Hundreds marched to town. They filled the house of the judge, demanding to be jailed with those who had been arrested. The judge was finally obliged to send them all home, including the prisoners.

During the Vietnam War, one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax. They were not legal dependents, of course, so were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned by indiscriminate United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal Revenue Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was doing. Of course she "lost" the case, but she made her point.

During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all Jews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. He and most of the population of Copenhagen donned yellow armbands as well. His stand was affirmed by the Bishop of Sjaelland and other Lutheran clergy. The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order.

It is important to repeat such stories to extend our imaginations for creative nonviolence. Since it is not a natural response, we need to be schooled in it. We need models, and we need to rehearse nonviolence in our daily lives if we ever hope to resort to it in crises.

Maybe it would help to juxtapose Jesus' teachings with legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky's principles for nonviolent community action (in his Rules for Radicals) to gain a clearer sense of their practicality and pertinence to the struggles of our time. Among rules Alinsky developed in his attempts to organize American workers and minority communities are these:

(1) Power is not only what you have but what your enemy thinks you have.

(2) Never go outside the experience of your people.

(3) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

Jesus, like Alinsky, recommended using your experience of being belittled, insulted, or dispossessed in such a way as to seize the initiative from the oppressor, who finds reactions like going the second mile, stripping naked, or turning the other cheek totally outside his experience. This forces him her to take your power seriously and perhaps even to recognize your humanity.

Alinsky offers other suggestions. Again we see the parallels:

(4) Make your enemies live up to their own book of rules.

(5) Ridicule is your most potent weapon.

(6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

(7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

The debtor in Jesus' example turned the law against his creditor by obeying it, following the letter of the law, but throwing in his underwear as well. The creditor's greed is exposed by his own ruthlessness, and this happens quickly and in a way that could only regale the debtor's sympathizers, just as Alinsky suggests. This puts all other such creditors on notice and arms all other debtors with a new sense of possibilities. Alinsky's list continues:

(8) Keep the pressure on.

(9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

(10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.

Jesus, in his three brief examples, does not lay out the basis of a sustained movement, but his ministry as a whole is a model of long-term social struggle that maintains a constant pressure. Mark depicts Jesus' movements as a blitzkrieg. His teaching poses immediate and continuing threats to the authorities. The good he brings is misperceived as evil, his following is overestimated, his militancy is misread as sedition, and his proclamation of the coming Reign of God is mistaken as a manifesto for military revolution.

Disavowing violence, Jesus wades into the hostility of Jerusalem openhanded, setting simple truth against force. Terrified by the threat of this man and his following, the authorities resort to their ultimate deterrent, death, only to discover it impotent and themselves unmasked. The cross, hideous and macabre, becomes the symbol of liberation. The movement that should have died becomes a world religion.

Alinsky offers three last suggestions:

(11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through to its counterside.

(12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

(13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Alinsky delighted in using the most vicious behavior of his opponents-burglaries of movement headquarters, attempted blackmail, and failed assassinations-to destroy their public credibility. Here were elected officials, respected corporations, and trusted police, engaging in patent illegalities to maintain privilege.

In the same way, Jesus suggests amplifying an injustice (turning the other cheek, removing your undergarment, going the second mile) to expose the fundamental wrongness of legalized oppression. The law is "compassionate" in requiring that the debtor's cloak be returned at sunset, yes; but Judaism in its most lucid moments knew that the whole system of usury and indebtedness was itself the root of injustice and should never have been condoned (Exodus 22:25). The restriction of enforced labor to carrying the soldier's pack a single mile was a great advance over unlimited impressment, but occupation troops had no right to be on Jewish soil in the first place.

Jesus was not content merely to empower the powerless, however. Here his teachings fundamentally transcend Alinsky's. Jesus did not advocate non-violence merely as a technique for outwitting the enemy but as a just means of opposing the enemy in such a way as to hold open the possibility of the enemy's becoming just as well.

...read it all: Jesus & Alinsky by Walter Wink