Love and Violence: Religion, Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Resistance

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores the ways in which religious ethicists, social critics, and activists have employed conceptions of love and violence for the purposes of criticizing and resisting oppressive political conditions, and for radically transforming existing social arrangements. We begin by exploring the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau concerning the moral status of civil disobedience in the context of the U.S. abolitionist struggle, with particular attention to the influence of the Bhagavad-Gita upon their thinking. We will examine the ways that both Thoreau's writings and the Gita influenced Mahatma Gandhi on questions of non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi's exploration of the power of non-violence in light of the Sermon on the Mount from the Christian New Testament, and his correspondence with the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. We will investigate how this entire mosaic of influences came to inform Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. during the 1960s, Malcolm X, and the black power movement. We will engage critical perspectives on these thinkers and ideas, such as criticisms of Gandhi by George Orwell and Arundhati Roy, Frantz Fanon's claims that colonialism is an essentially violent phenomenon that requires an essentially violent response, Malcolm's criticisms of Martin, arguments against pacifism on the basis of political realism by Max Weber. We conclude by brief examination of principled vs. strategic and revolutionary forms of non-violence in the work of Gene Sharp.