Protest: Personal or Communal?

       In Chapter 4 of his book God’s Politics, entitled “Protest Is Good; Alternatives are Better”, Jim Wallis argues that communal protest can have enormous “transformational” power if channeled into the form of an “alternative”. Wallis breaks his chapter down into two main points:     

         1. Saying “no” (e.g. protesting) is good, but proposing alternatives is better.

   2. During our “most difficult and darkest moments” we must reconnect with relationships that nurture us and our faith in the sanctity of life.

Wallis, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners, wrote in reflection upon his experience protesting the Iraq war. Up until the “eleventh hour”, Wallis promoted his “Six-Point Plan” (a document detailing a peaceful alternative to war) in both the United States and overseas. Rather than merely protesting Bush’s decision to go to war, Wallis and his like-minded peers advocated for an alternative. Together these Americans presented a strong protestation to their own government’s foreign policy. Wallis claims this form of protest is powerful, “effective and transformational”, and able to “illumine a society to its need for change.” For Wallis, “protest should be making a promise”: An explicit promise made by a community.

There are several important weaknesses to this view of protest:

• Wallis assumes that one or both of the two major sides might be willing (or made willing) to listen to a legitimate alternative. It seems historically that frequently the major power players in politics are driven by irrational thinking. Fear, greed, and anger are blinding and compelling at the same time and politicians are not afraid to manipulate their constituents using these emotions. I’m no Machiavellian, but the reality I’ve seen is that legitimate alternatives are not given legitimate consideration because other priorities take over.

• Wallis assumes that the public are disciplined and educated enough to seriously consider an alternative (international quake zone summit or Michael Jackson’s memorial service?).

• The kind of diplomacy Wallis advocates would require a degree of unity nationally and globally I have never witnessed in my life. In order for a plan like Wallis’s to be taken seriously, Americans and nations across the globe would have to wholly commit to the values of the doctrine and its authors: in this case pacifism and trust. As honorable as I believe these values to be, for any alternative to gain momentum, it would have to appeal to large, but different groups. In the process of gaining support, the original supporters risk watering down the original alternative, simplifying, and reducing it into a simple black and white option. This tends to happen in American politics because Americans naturally prefer bipartisan politics: it’s easiest for us to react in black and white ways.

As for my understanding of protest, I have been heavily influenced by Wendell Berry’s essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope.” Communal protest for a counterculture alternative is an ideal I admire, but when it comes to daily life I find Berry’s view far more powerful and far more comforting:

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

What do you think?