Love and Justice

      In 1961 my wife, Jan, and I joined CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. We were 23 and I was in seminary in St. Louis.  Core was committed to breaking down the walls of segregation.  The organizing committee consisted of about ten people, holding meetings  Sunday evenings.  They were all professional people, older than we were. One young man by the name of Clay later became a U.S. Congressman.  We didn’t know much about the racial problems in St. Louis or about how to change things.  So we listened.  I was especially interested in the interplay between theory and strategy. 

      Mainline Protestants had developed a consensus about the priority of love. Love can be defined in many ways, from satisfying our needs to love of another or God without regard for oneself.  Given the priority of Jesus giving his life for service of God and neighbor, Protestants leaned toward thinking of the highest form of love as self-sacrifice for God and others. 

       But how does love as self-sacrifice relate to the struggles of justice which involve conflicting self-interests and struggles of power, or even restraining evil doers to protect the defenseless? And of course, many wanted to know how such self-sacrificing love related to the clash of national interests which demanded citizens to join military action against another state.  One solution was to argue that the church was bound by the standard of love, while the state was obligated and permitted to use power to resist evil and achieve justice. But that left some questions.  For example, were believers as Christians obligated to be pacifists?  Or, could Christians utilize power in politics or in the pursuit of justice in society?  My Father, a pastor, leaned strongly toward pacifism, although he supported WWII.  Yet he did not know what to make of political action, which routinely involved power.  His caution also extended to the direct action programs in the civil rights movement. As a result, the split between love and justice involved theoretical issues and personal decisions.

      In the face of this impasse, Reinhold Niebuhr had presented a bold alternative. He declared Christians must chose both: love as self-sacrifice was indeed the highest ethical standard but Christians were also obligated to pursue justice and protect the defenseless.  But here’s the catch: In most cases, justice in this world can only be achieved with various levels of coercion.  This was obvious for Niebuhr in WWII, but long before that he discovered that achieving justice in social struggles involved some form of coercion, as in the case of removing the practices of segregation. Then, having shocked all his liberal religious friends by arguing some degree of coercion is permitted, he turned and argued that non-violent coercion was morally and practically superior to violent coercion. 

      Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took this idea and developed a strategy for change, based on non-violent coercion.  Other groups, such as CORE, followed in developing effective strategies.  In our small group meetings we were asked to think about applying non-violent force to change segregation.  This meant we would interrupt business at “Whites Only” lunch counters at Woolworth’s,  but not do physical harm to people or property and not respond in word or act with violence if something happened to us.  We were also told that we could be arrested.  That caused us some pause.  We had never been arrested and we had no idea what effect such would have on Jan teaching in a public school or my being in seminary.  We knew that our parents would not be pleased about our getting arrested, or even just participating.  After weeks of discussion and soul searching we decided to go ahead.

      As I recall, the sit in succeeded in disrupting business as usual at the lunch counter.  Some white people were not very happy and said so.  A reporter took our names and we were listed the next day in the newspaper.  But no one got arrested.  This of course was small stuff compared to the sit-ins and demonstrations that would come across the south where demonstrators were beaten and some were killed.  Soon the City Council introduced a proposal to require public places to be open to all people. This brought an interesting twist.  At the CORE meeting prior to the vote, someone asked by anyone knew a respected member of the Council.  To everyone’s surprise, the student in the back row (me) raised his hand and I was asked to call him.  He was a member of the church my Father had serviced in St. Louis.  But I had last seen him when I was 8 years old.  Somewhat nervous I called him and we had a good talk and he said he would think about it.  He voted for the change.  Somehow, his own moral compass and his friendship to his pastor prompted him to reverse course.  Even in the rough and tough politics of City Hall, love and friendship still displayed great power.  We continued to be a part of the group until we went off to the east for further study.   

      During that time, I heard Dr. King in St. Louis.  One statement stuck with me:  he said he was not asking us to love black people but to refrain from lynching them.  That always reminded me that the issue was not an attempt to suddenly reach the highest level of moral achievement (loving one another, or the white fear of intermarriage) but justice as freedom from violent and repressive practices.  Segregation was and is a form of terrorism because it devalues some people.  It is state sponsored violence.  Those that deny that sin can be embedded in the social practices and laws of society need a history lesson.  People were suffering and dying.  Right then.  So what were we going to do about it?  Appeals to love seldom did much to change systemic racism and violence. Dr. King offered an alternative: An incremental plea based on a non-violent strategy to reduce violence against blacks and facilitate the possibility of living together. Now this may not sound like much, but back then it was a huge step forward.

      There was no doubt that non-violent coercion was a use of force.  At that lunch counter we prevented people from eating there. The sit in took money away from waitresses and Woolworth’s.  We could claim it was not violent but it still was coercion.  Was it justifiable?  For Dr. King (and Niebuhr) it was justifiable in light of the suffering and threat to life.  Read Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to get a sense of his deep disappointment when religious leaders told him he should be patient.  Patience and appeals to ethics had not changed much.  The same can be said when “thoughts and prayers” are extended to the victims of gun violence today, or when only condolences are offered to women denied medical relief by force in the face of rape and incest.  The disregard for suffering knows no bounds.  That is why Dr. King sought a third alternative of non-violent coercion in the cause of justice.  It is less than self-sacrifice, though many have been sacrificed in the process.  Acts of non-violent coercion are a form of justice that spares us the terrible consequences of violence and perhaps embodies the hope of reconciling love.  In spite of all the resistance and suffering, even Dr. King could dream.