Why is violence bad or wrong? And why is nonviolence good or right?
I raise these questions as someone who has taught the Ethics of War and Peace for the last 20 years at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit Catholic institution in Santa Clara, CA. I write with great respect and support for the efforts of many to integrate nonviolence more fully into Catholic teaching and practice. And I write as a Catholic ethicist who accepts the possibility of the just use of violent physical force for the sake of defense of the common good. In any case, I raise these questions to help advance the integration of nonviolence into Catholic teaching and practice, not to slow it down.
One of the principal challenges to a greater integration of nonviolence in Catholic social teaching arises from a lack of clarity in the current theological and popular discourse about the meaning and moral significance of violence and nonviolence. In this essay, I would like to note three ways – moral, systemic, and political – in which the rhetoric of “violence” and “nonviolence” is insufficiently clear and, thus, is limited in its appeal to those who may not affiliate or be familiar with Christian moral traditions of pacifism and nonviolence (a good way to describe most of the general education students who have taken my class over the years). In order to extend the teaching and practice of nonviolence, we have to appeal to a more general audience.
Nonviolence standing alone
Count me among those frustrated by what seems like the ever-shifting meaning of nonviolence. Is nonviolence a technique or a practice or a virtue or a spirit or a way of life or a zeitgeist? Does it have moral significance as such? Does it meaningfully exist apart from human intentionality? Is it possible or even useful to say what it is apart from the contexts and purposes in which it is deployed?
Of course, Christian advocates of nonviolence infuse nonviolence with meaning drawn from the story of the Gospels and from the wisdom of theorists like Richard B.B. Gregg, who wrote in The Power of Non-violence of the character required by the nonviolent resister: “He must have primarily that disposition best known as love; – and interest in people so deep and determined, and lasting as to be creative; a profound knowledge of or faith in the ultimate possibilities of human nature”(34).
But I think even discussions that embed nonviolence within a moral and theological framework too often lapse into using “nonviolence” in a rhetorical but not substantive way. For instance, John Dear in the last decades has been among the leading popular Catholic commentators on nonviolence. Dear links the value of the practice of nonviolence with the intention of love and with faith in the possibilities of creativity that follow from nonviolent action. In “The Vow of Nonviolence,” Dear notes in a rhetorically powerful but conceptually fuzzy way: “The greatest challenge facing us as individuals and as a race is to become people of creative nonviolence, which means from now on, we need to be nonviolent to our spouses, children, parents, relatives, neighbors, and everyone we meet, as well as nonviolent to ourselves, nonviolent in our work, nonviolent in our language, nonviolent in our politics and policies and attitudes toward humanity and creation itself.” It’s hard to disagree with the general sentiment expressed here. It’s also hard to understand what this means. For instance, being “nonviolent to our spouses” obviously and importantly suggests not being physically harmful. Being “nonviolent in our language” suggests a manner of speech that seeks to persuade, not bombard. Being “nonviolent in our work” could mean many things: not working in the arms industry or being a team player in the office and not imposing edicts on employees. But in all of these examples, the word “nonviolence” is working far more as a rhetorical signal than as a substantive claim. It’s as if “nonviolence” in itself is a moral good that is comprehensible on its own apart from specification in terms of relationships or virtues or values or moral purpose. But that is insufficient as a matter of ethics.
Postmodern suspicion is one culprit in this tendency to detach nonviolence from moral contexts. Nonviolence in itself becomes a technique on which we can all agree because we are reluctant to make stronger moral claims about character formation and the beloved community. Another culprit is the spread of discourse theory and its underlying materialist assumptions that reduce words and argument to contests of physical power.
As a teacher, I have found the concept of nonviolence makes far more sense to students when it is embedded within a context and purpose – like the Gospels or the American civil rights movement or the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan on the success of nonviolent civil resistance. Moreover, I have found that teaching on nonviolence should presume nothing – not because my students or, for that matter, the people of God are thick-headed but because there’s nothing self-evident about the moral meaning of nonviolence. In order for the Church to enhance its teaching and practice of it, we need to do the hard and constant work of specifying the meaning of nonviolence within a world of contexts and moral and theological purpose. Here, among others, the work on virtues, nonviolence, and peacemaking by Eli McCarthy can help to point the way.
Violence, abstraction, and systems
That vast systems act violently on persons is intuitively apparent. But how those systems act in such a way is difficult to specify and often marked by gradations of compulsion ranging from the overt, to the cultural, and extending to far more subtle modes of coercion. Here I recognize the important work of social theorists like Johan Galtung and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who have engaged the reality of systemic violence (Galtung via his argument that “violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” and Spivak via her criticism of the “epistemic violence” that imperialist systems impose on colonized others). Too often, though, the word “violence” is applied to systems without a sufficient degree of specification. Without such clarity, I think it is more difficult for Catholic social teaching to identify and condemn the morally degrading nature of such violence.
Postmodern discourse is again a culprit here. In the phrasing of advocates for nonviolence both within and outside the Church, the word “violence” has become a catch-all abstraction to explain and condemn the malevolent meaning of complex processes. In representative fashion, a recent article said of occasions when the police compel the closure of a homeless encampment: “’Sweeping’ people is not a solution to homelessness, but is rather a form of violence.” Behind this way of thinking is the implicit materialism that undergirds much postmodern thought: in the end, there is only the push and pull of material force. Thus any moral concepts or purposes that might attach for good or ill to such a situation are obscured behind the catch-all negative explanation of “violence.” We don’t get a sense for why such a sweep may be an injustice because, for instance, the unhoused have nowhere indoors to go to; or because they were given no warning before their sense of safety and privacy was torn down along with their tents; or because their property was summarily stripped from them and thrown in a dumpster. Moreover, we don’t get a sense of the possible moral complexity of such a situation in which the coercive force of the police may have a compelling justification on the grounds of public health or safety (any such justified coercion is reduced to the catch-all negative of “violence”). We don’t have to be in support of what can be profoundly unjust police sweeps to find the word “violence” an insufficient explanation for why they happen. By defaulting too quickly to such an insufficient explanation, we miss the opportunity to speak to a larger public about why such sweeps are wrong.
Another manifestation of imprecise language about violence and systems arises from the application of the word “violence” to natural systems. This is evident, for instance, in the document called “Gospel nonviolence for a Laudato si future” issued by Pax Christi. In its discussions of the violent effects on the earth of war and militarization, the document makes clear and persuasive arguments. As it turns to more general matters, this clarity and persuasiveness fall away. Thus the document notes that the “Cry of the Earth is a global, anguished call for nonviolent solutions to the violence of climate change, loss of biodiversity, destruction of habitat, the lack of access to clean water, and the enormous impact of human violence on the biosphere.” Here, again, the word “violence” works more rhetorically than substantively and more as a catch-all explanation for a host of moral problems than as a clear specification for why something is wrong or bad. For instance, I can see connections between violence and climate change in light of realities like huge militaries in the United States, China, and Russia that churn through fossil fuels and pour carbon into the atmosphere. But I don’t see how applying the word “violence” provides a substantive, clarifying key to grasping the moral gravity of a climate-change-related scenario like the January 2025 catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. Utterly reckless consumption of fossil fuels isn’t wrong because it’s violent: It’s wrong because of its unjust use of resources and its callous indifference to the harm inflicted on people and the earth. We can think of the vast systemic and cultural forces that shaped the choices that people made to bring about the severity of the destruction in Los Angeles. We can also look at the smoldering foundation of a house in Los Angeles and think of the wild violence of fire that burned it to the ground. But explaining all of this in terms of “violence” obscures all of these crucial moral and empirical distinctions. And without such distinctions, we cannot say what is happening and why it is wrong and bad.
One way to counter this lack of clarity is to confine the use of the word “violence” only to those systematic scenarios where its application is manifestly clear. Another helpful way to increase the specification of the meaning of violence is to unpack consistently what violence does to persons. Here, for instance, the article “Why Violence is Bad” by Vittorio Bufacci points the way. Bufacci argues that we can’t really understand violence unless we start from the assumption that persons are embedded in relationships. By acknowledging that, we move more clearly into a world of intentionality. Violence doesn’t happen on its own. Instead it’s something that persons do to each other whether that is interpersonally or in the working of systems. Moreover, Bufacci argues, violence exposes our vulnerability and powerlessness to the person or system wielding violence against us. Thus in the course of experiencing violence, we are harmed: We experience the “bad” of physical pain. And, in the course of this experience, we are also wronged: The imposition of such force violates our sense of self-respect. To be sure, there are other accounts of why violence is bad or wrong. But I think Bufacci’s account provides a concrete example of the kind of specification that would better allow persons to understand why Catholic social teaching affirms that violence can be bad and wrong. Even in its systemic dimensions, violence is wielded by persons against other persons and against the earth. We need to show clearly how that is the case.
Violence and the political
In his powerful essay about Russia’s war against Ukraine, Paul Griffiths argues that political sovereignty itself is a willfully violent project destined for endless war. Griffiths’ arguments mirror other dismal views of sovereignty held by radical Christian advocates of nonviolence. I don’t agree with these arguments. I think the fact that, in the face of Russian aggression, Ukraine is desperately fighting to retain its sovereignty for the sake of basic human rights provides a real-time contradiction to such claims. But I think the more general problem with such arguments is that they mistake the violent excesses of a particular, specific regime for the violent excesses allegedly inherent in the sovereignty of the modern state itself.
I note that problem because I think too often arguments in favor of nonviolence implicitly carry with them the tenor of Griffith’s argument and, in doing so, diminish the importance and possibilities of politics. In effect, the state is understood primarily as an engine of violence or, in Max Weber’s famous description, the state is the “human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” By contrast, nonviolence is associated with things like prophetic witness or social movements or community activism. But nonviolence is not explicitly connected – other than in a rejectionist spirit – to the hard questions of political authority.
It is imperative to respect the claims of conscience behind the pacifist convictions often associated with the rejection of the modern state. But if Catholic social teaching is going to incorporate nonviolence more fully, it also must develop the connection between nonviolence and modern politics. Pope Francis described his noted World Day of Peace address as a reflection on “on nonviolence as a style of politics for peace.” And, to be sure, the work of Chenoweth and Stephan has powerfully argued on behalf of the efficacy of nonviolence for the maintenance of political democracy. But more needs to be done here and we could do worse than re-visiting Hannah Arendt’s careful distinctions in On Violence between states founded on violence and states founded on consent. For nonviolence to have more traction in Catholic social teaching, it must have a more explicit connection to politics and especially to the vexing issues of sovereignty and authority.
Conclusion
My claims in this piece arise primarily from the challenges I have encountered in teaching the ethics of war and peace to general education undergraduates. Over the years of teaching the class, I have added extensive materials on nonviolence, pacifism, and peacemaking. But in making such changes in the class, I have also increasingly encountered the challenges of clarifying the moral meanings of violence and nonviolence. I recognize that many of these challenges arise amid a context in which any moral traditions are called into question and in which the role of systems is increasingly and rightfully recognized. But I think this context requires us to clarify our moral arguments. I hope in this brief essay to have shared some of the challenges arising out of such classroom work in service to the goal of deepening the integration of nonviolence into Catholic teaching and practice.
