This post is written against the background of a dreadful political malaise. I use the word dreadful because there is indeed much to fear. Millions of people are feeling profound angst because of the election of Donald Trump again to be President of the United States of America.
So much hope seems to be dashed. The environment in which our children and grandchildren will live is in acute danger. There are appalling wars going on, with tens of thousands of people killed and an active genocide, which is supported by people we might have hoped were at least decent human beings.
And in the wider world, even when new governments are elected on policies for social justice, support for the less well off, and so forth, they prove to be powerless, intimidated by the mass media, powerful lobby groups, and are barely distinguishable from the right wing governments they replaced.
What can we hope for, we might well ask? Is the world in fact captured by the forces of money, power, racism, aggression, and repression? Is our life on this planet doomed?
And where in all this might a person of faith, a Christian perhaps, to stand? What does that faith call us to be and do, in the face of this situation?
I dissent.
It is vital to reclaim what I think has been overwhelmingly lost in recent times, the identity of dissenters. A desire for solidarity, for support of many groups who have felt excluded, a vision for a community made whole has perhaps led us to a false sense that participation in the processes will be sufficient to achieve the vision of a just and peaceful world.
How wrong we have been.
We need to reclaim the position of standing over-against the ‘powers and principalities of this world’: Dissent.
Contemporary Christians, and indeed almost all other people of faith, I suggest, need to realise that our present situation is more like the position of Christians and Jews in the ancient world, particularly the Roman Empire. The Hebrew people had for centuries been ridiculed for their resolute commitment to a single, invisible God, whose name may not be uttered. Christians likewise were ridiculed for their adherence to a ‘lord’ who had been executed as a criminal—and who now they claimed could be known through eating bread and drinking a little wine.
These people did not belong to the ’empire’ and never wanted to. They belonged to a different vision and hope, a transformation of that power and economy, into something Jesus had called the commonwealth of God, where the first would be last, and the poor and disparaged would be celebrated, fed, clothed, and at home.
Dissent from the political economy of this world and yet commitment to its transformation has perpetually been the calling of Christians, and indeed those of the Jewish and Islamic faiths.
This is also true of First Nations people, who struggle to be heard when they have so much to teach us about how we might live more justly and peacefully with country, and each other.
Throughout Western history there have been so many movements and peoples who have stood against the power of empire, hoping to witness to another way of life: Huguenots, Baptist, Quakers, and many other groups of the ‘Reformation’ era; but equally so within the Catholic and Orthodox traditions there have been numerous creative movements of dissent and renewal. Reformation is not an exclusively ‘Protestant’ impulse.
In the last century, figures such as Mahatma Ghandi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela have demonstrated the power of non-violent dissent. ‘Underground’ movements in so many contexts have drawn inspiration from their ideas and example.
Now it is our time to say, ‘I dissent’—though ideally we move very quickly from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’, for we must find each other and move together. But it has to begin with each ‘I’.
To dissent is to refuse to be defined by the dominant power structures and values.
- It is an identity which stands over-against the political economy defined by power, money, manipulation, control;
- It resists aggression;
- It engages actively to save the climate from catastrophic heating and the destruction of atmosphere;
- It resists the domination of the Church and other faith communities, where these have discriminated against women and so many people who are in some way considered ‘divergent’.
To dissent is not a negative stance, but a strongly visionary and positive commitment to hope—reaching out for a reality that is denied, hidden, downplayed by the dominant structures and influences.
Dissent is a stance for life, for justice, peace, and values beyond money, power, and self-preservation. It does not see the world as a business, but more like a vegetable garden, big enough to feed us all.
For these reasons dissent is our only hope.
We must dissent.
We do dissent.