Preparing for the Violence of Non-Violence
When the moment comes, we need you to be ready. We need you to be able to look violence in its dead eyes and sing to it.
Approximately 2000 No Kings Marches filled streets, boulevards, and avenues across the U.S. on President Donald Trump’s birthday, June 14, 2025. An estimated 5 million marchers took to the streets in protest of Trump’s limp attempt at a North Korean-style military parade. The masses marched in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, but this time, most dissenters were white. They marched to state capitals, city halls, and town squares. They marched in protest of voter suppression, destructive DOGE cuts, the end of the rule of law, and newly minted tariffs. Marchers were angry. They were creative. They were organized. And they were non-violent, with few exceptions. At the time of this writing, the No Kings organizers project nearly doubled attendance for the second March.
Today’s marching public is fairly green. They are rising to the call to fill the streets with a tacit understanding that democracy needs them to survive. There is safety in numbers. Plus, the majority is shielded by white skin, so they are less likely to suffer white nationalist violence—or so the thinking goes.
This core spews the same theology that justified antebellum slavery and Jim Crow lynchings, separation, and peonage. It was violent then. It is violent now. And that violence will not be limited to Black and Brown bodies. Should protesters expect the absence of violence in their dissent? No.
But, a critical event happened between June 14th and today. Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right college recruiting arm of the MAGA-verse, Turning Point USA, was gunned down while speaking at a college event. In the wake of his murder and subsequent Christian Nationalist memorial service, the MAGA movement has framed Kirk’s death, not as a senseless murder, but rather as the first shot in a holy war. The religious war framework offers justification for political violence against opponents. Only in this new era, MAGA’S opponents are not only those who pose a threat to white supremacy within a democracy, but those who threaten MAGA’s vision of a Christo-fascist nation. Opponents are all those who do not read the scripture as they do, all who revere the U.S. Constitution, and all who seek to restore and protect democracy. Democracy needs the rule of law. The democratic rule of law is a mortal threat to authoritarianism.
As time marches on, the MAGA movement is revealing its pure core. This core burns with the embers of book-burning bonfires and cuts with the shards of Kristallnacht’s broken glass. This core spews the same theology that justified antebellum slavery and Jim Crow lynchings, separation, and peonage. It was violent then. It is violent now. And that violence will not be limited to Black and Brown bodies. Should protesters expect the absence of violence in their dissent? No.
From 1882 to 1968, 1297 white people were lynched, mostly Latino, mostly near the Texas border. But, included in that number, sprinkled across the South, several non-Latino white people were also lynched, usually for trying to protect people of color.
The non-violent Civil Rights Movement was not actually non-violent. Participants were trained to encounter the violence of unbridled hate. They learned to absorb it into their bodies and metabolize it through their systems. Rev. James Lawson trained young people to take a punch. CORE members had to write their wills before boarding the Freedom Ride buses. Civil Rights dissenters were beaten by mobs, jailed for months, whipped by mounted police, and turned up dead—on the side of a road or buried in an earthen dam. The violence of the opposition was expected, prepared for, and absorbed by the foot soldiers of the mid-20th century’s non-violent struggle for Civil Rights.
Likewise, non-violent organizers of the Abolitionist movement expected violence and were not deterred when they came face to face with rocks and fire. In 1838, the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia raised one million dollars to erect the majestic Pennsylvania Hall to house the second-ever Convention of women abolitionists. A white male mob, angered by the mixed-race female leadership, with men in the audience, broke all the windows and burned the Hall to the ground on the second day of the Convention. Undeterred, the women moved their convention to a local school and carried on.
Nonviolence is not the absence of violence. It is a rooted commitment to a non-violent future with flourishing for all.
Can you imagine carrying on today? I can barely imagine it. We would be shocked by that level of violence. It would drive us to paralysis and finger-pointing, as it did in the days following the carnage in Charlottesville. That was one town, one event, one act of wanton violence. What will we do when lethal fascist violence comes, not from the lone civilian, but from the government, as it was levied on the bodies of Civil Rights dissenters? Will we be able to carry on? Or will fascism win?
Nonviolence is not the absence of violence. It is a rooted commitment to a non-violent future with flourishing for all. Nonviolence stands in the cesspool of fascist violence, southern slavocracy, and Jim Crow mobs, and it calls us to live the future we want right there—surrounded by the sulfuric stench of present-day barbarism. Nonviolence understands that the path determines the destination. We build the world we envision with each step through vicious terrain. The ethics of our march will lay the foundations for the world we win.
Nonviolence understands that violence ensnares us in the narrative of our oppressor. If we struggle as objects within our oppressor’s story, we cannot win. By definition, it is their story. They are the protagonist. They are setting the terms and shaping the terrain. Rather, we must extricate ourselves from the oppressor’s story and become our own protagonists through creative nonviolent action.
Paul wrote from jail: “I appeal to you therefore, brother and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual act of worship.” (Romans 12:1)
The tactics of Rome were brutal. According to the Jewish historian, Josephus, the year Jesus was born, a Roman General squashed a rebellion by marching through Northern Galilee and crucifying 500 people per day. Rome salted the land it colonized to starve the indigenous peoples. This made them dependent and compliant. Jesus lived and moved in this context of violent suppression. When Peter drew his sword, he commanded him to put it back. “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword,” he said. Jesus demanded non-violent intervention.
In Charlottesville, we were warned by the organizers: “If you march on the streets with us, we cannot guarantee your safety.” Scores of faith leaders took a moment to consider the cost of their symbolic resistance to the rise of Christo-fascism. Each leader was offered the opportunity to gracefully stay back. And some did. Eighty filed out of the church one block from the now infamous park where mayhem exploded hours later. They took their place in formation on the street.
I was torn. What would my mother do if I died? She was sick and needed me to be there for her. How would my death impact my family? They need me, I thought to myself. I sat with my head in my hands, bowled over in prayer on the front pew. Then I heard it. It was a whisper in my bones. “Take up your cross and follow me,” the whisper said. I understood the call. This was the substance of actual faith—not intellectual belief, but kinetic, embodied, grounded faith.
I joined the faith leaders’ formation, and we walked. Locked arm in arm, each step was an actual prayer. We approached the park and fanned out to flank one full block. Militia men stood opposite us, carrying AR-15s to block us from entering the park.
We faced off with the opposition for two hours, singing every Freedom Song we could remember. “This Little Light of Mine” was our favorite. This dainty Sunday school song expanded in the space between us, matching firepower with moral power. In the middle of the singing I looked in the eyes of my counterpart. His eyes hard, his stance at the ready, I called to him. He ignored me. Filled with the truth of the presence of God in the present moment, I called to him: “I love you.”
He looked at me, stunned.
“I know,” he said.
I rejoined our collective declaration: This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine!
During the rise of the Third Reich, there was a window when nonviolence had a chance to win in Germany.
The Trump regime is building up ICE and military presence in cities across the country, snatching Black and Brown people from their beds, the streets, their jobs, and their court appearances. People are disappearing into a lawless prison and deportation system. As the regime attempts to establish the pretense to declare martial law, the United States of America faces the prospect of a future that echoes fascist dictatorships of the past.
During the rise of the Third Reich, there was a window when nonviolence had a chance to win in Germany. There came a time when Jewish and international non-violence only protected and prolonged the Reich’s capacity for violence. In those nascent years, in the face of fascist takeover, the only people group with the ability to mount effective non-violent resistance was the Germans themselves. Only they possessed the social and political power to stand up en masse and say “No.” En masse, they could have laid down their arms. En masse, they could have challenged the direction of their nation. They could have marched and gotten in the way. But not enough did. Too many obeyed fear, not faith. Thus, the only way to stop the slaughter became war.
In the Trump era, White Americans, especially White Christians, possess the same social and political power to present their bodies as living sacrifices. They are best positioned to engage nonviolent resistance in the struggle to stop the march of fascism in the U.S. and around the world. But people in bodies deemed white in the U.S. are not well prepared to absorb state violence.
Beloveds, it is time to prepare. When the moment comes, we need you to be ready. We need you to be able to look violence in its dead eyes and sing to it: This little light of mine.
President and founder of FreedomRoad.us, Lisa Sharon Harper is a writer, podcaster and public theologian. Lisa is author of critically acclaimed book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World—And How To Repair It All.
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Lisa, I understand what you mean about that “window” when nonviolence might have changed Germany’s course. Theoretically yes, but in reality, that window was almost nonexistent. The concept of nonviolence as collective resistance simply didn’t exist in German consciousness at the time.
People had been raised under the German Empire, steeped in hierarchy and obedience. Law and order were seen as virtues, not instruments of control. Civil disobedience wasn’t just rare — it was inconceivable. Most Germans didn’t speak English, and Gandhi’s ideas never reached them; Britain and France were still seen as enemy nations after WWI, so foreign moral models held no sway.
Resistance did exist — from the Protestant Confessing Church and from the political Left — but both paid dearly for it. In the Third Reich, as later in the GDR, noncompliance often meant imprisonment or death. Once Hitler consolidated power, opposing him wasn’t a moral choice anymore; it was an act of survival.
And interestingly, even in the GDR, it was again the Protestant pastors who initiated the nonviolent protests that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. There’s a reason Angela Merkel — a pastor’s daughter — could navigate that cultural terrain so effectively later on.
So yes, there were always people who refused, but there was never a shared framework for nonviolence on a societal scale. Germany’s cultural reflex has long been obedience — you still see it when people wait at red lights with no car in sight.
Sobering…