Meg Mott is professor emerita of Marlboro College and Emerson College and describes herself as a "Constitution Wrangler." She was a moderator of a panel at the recent Brattleboro Indivisible exhibition "What Does Democracy Look Like?"
PUTNEY-The year 1949 was not a good year to be Black in America.
Having just risked their lives fighting fascism abroad, Black soldiers returned to Jim Crow laws and cross-burnings in the middle of the night. Literacy tests kept African Americans from voting, and occasional lynchings kept them "in their place."
There was no Fair Housing Act, there was no Civil Rights Act, and only a couple of Supreme Court cases prohibited Jim Crow from being enforced on inter-state transportation.
Howard Thurman, a religion professor at Howard University, looked at the situation and was reminded of the predicament of Jews under Roman occupation. The Jews had two options: to resist or not to resist. Non-resistance came in two shades: assimilation or cultural separation.
Some Jews, like Matthew of Gospel fame, became tax collectors and received special benefits from the occupiers. Most focused on their faith and stayed out of politics. As long as the Jews followed the laws of the Sanhedrin, a Jewish legislative and judicial assembly, the Romans would permit Jewish observances. But if the Sanhedrin could not control its people, Rome would take immediate charge.
While nonresistance looked weak, resistance brought its own set of problems, a greater likelihood of suffering being one of them.
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Like nonresistance, resistance came in two shades: violent and nonviolent. Some Jews joined the Zealots, a guerrilla operation that trained men how to kill Romans and betrayers most effectively.
The Zealots were persecuted by the Romans and feared by the Jewish authorities. If too many men engaged in armed resistance, Rome would take down the Jews' separate realm. No more rabbis, no more Jewish law, no more Jewish customs.
The only option left, says Thurman, was to take up the playbook of Jesus, "the poor Jew from Nazareth." In order to succeed, resistance would have to be nonviolent.
But it's one thing to say, "I'm following Jesus," and another thing entirely to bring down the powers of the Empire upon your mortal head.
Who would court that kind of suffering? Jesus.
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Christian faith figures largely in Thurman's accounting in his book Jesus and the Disinherited. But so does human psychology. Thurman focuses on the "hounds of hell" - fear, deception, and hatred - and how those passions secretly undermine nonviolent resistance by enlarging the capacities of the enemy in each person's mind.
The more you fear something, explains Thurman, the more you exaggerate their fearsomeness. The more you hate something, the more you exaggerate their hatefulness.
The trick to getting away from the hounds of hell is to turn and face your enemy with love.
The effect of this shift is both spiritual and practical. "One of the practical results following this new orientation," writes Thurman, "is the ability to make an objective, detached appraisal of other people, particularly one's antagonists."
Once you stop fearing them, you'll be able to see them at human size. Eventually you will notice how fear in particular led you astray: Your earlier perceptions were greatly exaggerated.
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Thurman convinced leaders in the civil rights movement to try the Jesus strategy. It worked. By most accounts, the civil rights movement was the most successful social movement in the history of the United States. Its successes can be measured in Supreme Court wins and legislative victories.
What is often missed is the spiritual success of the civil rights movement, the inner work that brought its own rewards. When Americans watched a group of protestors under attack by a merciless state, they not only wanted to join in the protest, they wanted to experience that sort of freedom. Oh, to walk the Earth unbridled by fear and hate, to be as loving as Jesus.
In 2025, fewer people may be persuaded by references to Jesus. Still, most acknowledge that a politics of fear, deception, and hate is not working. So how to build a politics of love?
The No Kings March showed that the resistance takes nonviolence seriously. Millions of people took to the streets and exercised their right to assemble and petition the government for grievances.
But is protest alone enough? In Brattleboro, Django Grace urged the protestors to abandon emotions that enhanced our differences.
"They want us to be divided," he said.
While not going so far as advocating a politics of love, Grace was reflecting back the destructiveness of a politics of fear and hate.
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In 1949, Thurman could use Christian references to build a case for a resistance of love: "Love your enemy that you may be children of your father who is in heaven."
A politics of love in the 21st century might say, "Love your enemy as part of a new orientation, one that affords you an objective and detached way of seeing each other. Abandon fear because it distorts your capacity to see the creative possibilities all around you. Give up on hate because it doesn't help your indigestion. And stop being deceptive with your words because you'll lose any grasp of the truth."
And here's the wonderful thing about a politics of love. If you look into any religious tradition you will find reasons not to be afraid. Sometimes its framed in terms of detachment and sometimes in terms of God's children and sometimes in the language of a higher power. Religious and secular guideposts abound.
All it takes is a few brave souls to put it into practice, and another courageous movement will be born. We may not all have faith in Jesus, but perhaps we can have faith in ourselves through a politics of love.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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