Yesterday evening 70 of us gathered at the church for the Mennonite Action Training Tour “To Build Our Courage.” Notably, about half of the participants were from beyond the Columbus Mennonite community. We started in the fellowship hall with a soup and bread meal, then moved to the sanctuary. Our presenters were Mennonite Action staffer Lorren O and Germantown Mennonite Church pastor Jay B.
Some highlights:
Lorren highlighted Anabaptism’s 500 year Christian witness as a theological framing for noncooperation with state violence and a counter to Christian Nationalism and other theologies of supremacy. We sang “My Soul Cries Out” and other hymns that embody these teachings.
Authoritarianism follows a familiar script wherever it shows up such as silencing or criminalizing critics, giving license to lawbreaking, domestic deployment of the military, and law enforcement overreach. We often conceive of power as a top down pyramid, but it more accurately functions like the image on the right – inherently unstable, relying on pillars of support to prop it up.
These pillars include labor and unions, media, universities, business, political parties, police, and religious organizations. When those pillars refuse to cooperate or remove their support, the system cannot stand.
Noncooperation and Mutual Aid are two strategies for confronting authoritarianism. Noncooperation traditionally involves things like strikes, boycotts, school walkouts, and tax resistance but includes any form of expression that questions or counters the dominant narrative. Mutual aid is a collective commitment making sure everyone has what they need, especially when government safety nets fail, or when someone is targeted with arrest or deportation, affecting a whole household or community. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago
Gaining Allies is not impossible.
Our trainers suggested that although a minority of people are active allies in upholding democratic institutions, so too with those actively opposed. The key isn’t to focus on the vocal minority opposition, but to bring passive allies and even passive opposition further along in the practices of mutual aid and noncooperation with authoritarianism.
We ended the evening with an everyone-in role-playing scenario in which a group of students are protesting outside of a county jail where fellow students have been detained due to immigration status. A church group joins in support, with police, media, agitators, song leaders, de-escalators, food support, and spokespersons all converging on the scene. It was a bit chaotic, by design. But in playing our roles and debriefing on the experience we each gained some insight into how to be better prepared should we find ourselves in a similar setting.
Being in a room with like-minded folks, singing and building relationships, was a good in itself. And I’m hopeful the evening will continue to bear fruit as we better organize ourselves to live out our faith in these times.
Joel