Last week, as images and stories once again emerged from Minneapolis—of violence, grief, outrage, murder, and communities crying out for justice—I had the privilege of traveling across the Southern United States on a Civil Rights Pilgrimage.
What I encountered there was not a distant history lesson. It is a living reality. The throughlines were impossible to miss—stretching from Selma to Minneapolis, from then to now—pressing on our streets, our headlines, and our collective conscience. There exists a clear and present temptation to respond to violence with more violence, and this pilgrimage confronted me with a hard and holy truth: the Civil Rights Movement did not merely diagnose America’s wounds—it offers us a way through them.
Nonviolence is not an idealistic relic of another era, but a disciplined, faithful response to the very crises that we are still living in today.
Our pilgrimage began in Atlanta (a place I called home from 2000–2007). From there, we traveled across the South—through rural Georgia, Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama—following the geography of the Civil Rights Movement and the contours of the struggle.
While in Atlanta, we attended the 41st annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. commemorative service at Ebeneezer Baptist Church. We heard the Rev. Dr. Bernice King remind us that nonviolence is not simply a strategy, but a way of life—a spiritual discipline rooted in the very heart of the gospel. Her words echoed her father’s insistence that the struggle for justice is, at its core, a struggle for the soul. Nonviolence is not merely about how we resist evil; it is about who we become in the process.
Dr. Martin Luther King understood sin not primarily as individual moral failure, as so many today like to think, but as something embedded in systems, structures, and habituated behaviors of domination. In “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” he named racism, extreme materialism, and militarism as the “three evils of society,” insisting that they are inseparable and mutually reinforcing.1 Together, they form what might rightly be called a theology of death—a worldview that normalizes violence, prioritizes profits over people, treats all of God’s creation as expendable, and sanctifies power at the expense of human dignity.
From this theological vantage point, violence is not only destructive. It is sinful. It ruptures relationship—with God, with neighbor, and with oneself. It deforms the image of God in both the one who suffers and the one who inflicts harm. As King warned, violence promises order but produces chaos; it claims to protect life while steadily eroding the moral foundations that make life together possible. “Returning violence for violence,” he preached, “multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”2
Nonviolence, then, is not passivity. It is repentance enacted. It is the disciplined refusal to participate in the lie that domination leads to freedom. It is the hard, ongoing turning away—from hatred, from fear, from the false security of power—and the turning toward God’s reign of justice and peace. Nonviolence names the sin without surrendering to it and resists evil without becoming evil.
A fellow pilgrim on the trip, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Wheeler, helped us see this even more clearly by naming white supremacy as the most dangerous and enduring theological heresy in American life. In his book US: The Resurrection of American Terror, he explains the danger of white supremacy.3 It is not merely an ideology; it is a false gospel. It distorts creation and denies the imago Dei. It trains us to believe that some lives are more valuable than others. It teaches domination instead of mutuality, silence instead of confession, and control instead of communion. And like all heresies, it requires repentance—not only personal, but communal and structural.
The repentance talked about here is not limited to remorse or apology. It is a total reorientation of life. It is the willingness to tell the truth about what has been done and what continues to be done. It names the harm without defensiveness. And it actively seeks repair rather than concealment. This kind of repentance – the kind of repentance that God is calling us to – demands proximity, nearness. It calls us to draw near to suffering rather than managing it at a distance. It calls us to courage, to refuse the comfort of silence when truth is costly.
This is where Dr. King’s vision of the Beloved Community comes into focus. The Beloved Community is not sentimental or abstract. It is the social embodiment of repentance made visible. It is a community shaped by justice, sustained by truth, and bound together by love that refuses to deny anyone’s humanity. The Beloved Community only becomes possible when sin is named, when violence is rejected, and when reconciliation is pursued without excuses or shortcuts.
What became unmistakably clear on this pilgrimage is that nonviolence is not the absence of conflict, as we so often think. But, instead, nonviolence is the presence of moral clarity. It asks us to stay present to the pain without numbing it, to tell the truth without hardening our hearts, and to trust that God’s justice is not advancing through coercion but through costly love.
Those who marched, organized, prayed, and endured brutality during the Civil Rights Movement chose this way not because it was safe, but because it was faithful. They bore suffering without returning it, and they trusted that God would bring life out of death.
In our current moment, when violence continues to dominate our public imagination, this Pilgrimage called me back to old truths that demand renewed obedience. Nonviolence is repentance lived out over time. It is faith with a body. It is the slow and painful work of becoming a people capable of the Beloved Community that God is bringing into being.
May we become those people.
- Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967. ↩︎
- Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 64-65. ↩︎
- Rev. Kenneth W. Wheeler, US: The Resurrection of American Terror. Precocity Press, 2022. ↩︎
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