In his recent book The Writing on the Wall: Signs of Faith Against Fascism, Eric Martin unearths resources from religious traditions resisting the rise of overtly fascist violence in the United States. As one of the few Catholics among the faith-based coalition of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally, Martin draws on firsthand accounts of the faith communities in Charlottesville to offer a prophetic vision for a theology animating anti-fascist action. Earlier this year, he joined Mary Kate Holman for an interview about the book, which has been edited here for brevity.
Mary Kate Holman (MKH): Eric, it was a moving experience to read your book. Could you start by describing the emotions that informed this project? Your deep love of the community in Charlottesville that organized against the Unite the Right Rally is evident, as is your deep disappointment that so few Catholics responded to the call for clergy to join this counter-witness, and your subsequent disappointment in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ response. Besides deep love and deep disappointment, were there other emotions with you as you were writing?
Eric Martin (EM): Good question. Anger. You said disappointment… that’s definitely there. But it was much stronger. I was irate with parts of my church. I read the USCCB’s 2018 document “Open Wide Our Hearts” when it came out at the kitchen table of Reverend Seth Wispelway (a co-founder of Congregate Charlottesville, mobilizing clergy to perform non-violent direct action). I’m in the home of this person who’s put a lot on the line naming the ways he’s privileged as a straight white man in this situation. Reading this document was more than disappointing, but angering, in dealing with white supremacy (which it won’t acknowledge, it calls it racism). The contrast between what the bishops as a body produced, and the witness of the person whose home I was in, was really striking and upsetting. I grew impatient. Something very beautiful is happening in Charlottesville in the face of all this ugliness and brutality, and I wanted people to know about it. Some people got sick of me saying “someone has to write about all this.” Eventually someone just told me, “I think you should write this, Eric.” So it was impatience with some wings of my church, and then impatience to have people know the story of this wonderful community coming out of Charlottesville.
MKH: You foreground the theologies of other folks, activists and preachers, both from the more nuclear community in Charlottesville and these wider networks of people thinking through how to resist fascism through the lens of faith. Could you speak to why that felt important to you?
EM: Sure. I remember being very taken with Natalia Imperatori-Lee’s book, Cuéntame, which is all about sharing stories, as the title suggests. In stories, a theology from below emerges. Dorothy Day embodies, acted out, a theology, same with the Berrigans, and much less famous people too – such as any Catholic worker or activist community working out of a space of faith. I wanted to pull out those theologies from these enfleshed actions. But some of the individuals involved in Charlottesville did have written theologies. Reverend Smash the Patriarchy had just written her ordination papers the month before Unite the Right, so I can literally capture how she’s expressing on the page her theology that is animating anti-fascist action. There’s a big difference between her theology and the one in “Open Wide Our Hearts.” I wanted to trace the theologies that led to action in specific events. That’s why I’m sharing not only Reverend Osagyefo Sekou’s story, but also his views on who Christ is, who God is, what the Trinity is, and how it is enmeshed with the Black Lives Matter movement, for example. Also people who haven’t written, like the person who is holding that sign that says “We love you” when we’re all locked out of the jail that our friends were locked up in (42). It’s theology in action. The lines between theology and story are blended. Sometimes I’m leaning more heavily on one side or the other, but to me they’re both wrapped up in each other.
MKH: Scripture stories permeate your writing. What feels important about that to you?
EM: It’s like asking me why my blood is important to me. I’ll give an example. One night I was at the type of meeting where everyone sticks their phones in the microwave. This was all in encrypted communication, but the invitation to the meeting was a Bible verse about idolatry. I was fascinated by that. This wasn’t a meeting of a faith group, but the Biblical imagination was an animating force in the community and the movement I’m writing about. It’s impossible to tell the story without it. You have Reverend Traci Blackmon using the story of David and Goliath to frame the night of August 11th, the night before Unite the Right, at the exact moment when the white supremacists were marching around saying Nazi slogans like “Jews will not replace us, Blood and soil,” right before assaulting people on campus with their flames (82-88).
Also, I’m trained, as a Catholic theologian, to draw on Scripture, delving into how the Biblical imagination expands our understanding of what constitutes faithful action. Certain responses to what happened in Charlottesville were very unimaginative and ended up being a self-serving understanding of Scripture. I include a chapter on nonviolence, because that particularly was being wielded as a weapon against people, basically suggesting, if you’re Christian, if you want to be faithful to the Bible, you can’t be showing up with antifa. You can’t ally yourself them. And what that meant was, we’re ready to outsource violence into vulnerable people rather than showing up and enfleshing nonviolence ourselves. So the book was also a corrective for how we as a people of faith, specifically in the Catholic community, understand the role of Scripture.
MKH: You mentioned the Nonviolence chapter, which gets to the heart of the problem with many Christian responses to genuine threats of violence. You construct what you call “fanciful thought experiments” on violence which struck me as a creative way to lead your reader through an argument in a way that that cultivates empathy. I’m curious if your own understanding of nonviolence was changed by this experience in Charlottesville. You’ve participated in civil disobedience actions in the past. Was there something about your understanding of nonviolence that was sharpened, or nuanced, or challenged or exploded in the experience of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally?
EM: Yes. I’d like to bracket that for just one second and address something inherent in your question. Why weave these fanciful thought experiments into storytelling? Grace Aheron, who created Charis, this anti-fascist House church in Charlottesville, wrote this great essay for the Anglican Theological Review telling the story of Charis. To turn that into a systematic theology would do violence to what her witness expresses and how she’s expressing her ideas. It wouldn’t just fail to capture something about this story and animated theology I’m trying to tell, but actively undo and make it harder to understand. These fanciful thought experiments are sort of blending these lines too.
There’s this great book called Light of Days, the story of Jewish girls and women who had to decide to either fall passive victims to Nazis or to smuggle bombs in their skirts to Jewish ghettos, seducing Nazis and then killing them. The question isn’t whether it’s okay to punch Richard Spencer in the face when he’s playing out a vision for a white ethno-state. That’s not where the conversation around violence begins. It begins with this violent situation communities have thrown Jewish girls and women into, where they have to face that decision: what type of violence is going to happen?
These thought experiments are a way of getting at exactly what changed in my notions of nonviolence throughout Charlottesville. There has to be a way of resisting that’s nonviolent and that will convert people. Maybe not immediately; maybe not everybody. But you plant those seeds, and some of them will grow. Seeing images of nonviolent people being harmed will not only be effective in garnering support from outsiders, but also, ideally and hopefully, change people. This is a form of loving your enemies, converting them. Turning a sword into a plowshare. What I hadn’t worked out in myself was, fully at least, was considering all the different roles different people inhabit and the responsibility of ascribing or prescribing nonviolence to other people. The clergy wasn’t doing that. Reverend Smash and everyone were very clear: we’re not here to police anybody. We’re here to show up with them and we will embody the nonviolence we believe is inherent in our faith lives. But we’re at the service of this community. They sort of enfleshed a corrective to me. It made my understanding of nonviolence much more specific.
Someone I know and love was very agitated after A12 (Unite the Right) that our clergy group showed up with Antifa. Cornel West said “Antifa saved our lives.” This person said, “just keep in mind that Dorothy Day would have never approved of that mindset.” And from this particular person, who sacrificed a lot for other people and spent time in prison for nonviolent actions, that’s a constructive conversation. But I heard it from a lot of people who have not put in actual nonviolent witness. I lost a lot of patience for people who talk about nonviolence after A12.
MKH: Well, you’re very clear in the book, even as you are grappling with the nuance of nonviolence, you write, “we who say we are committed to nonviolence should organize the force of truth in a politically effective manner, or accept that an inevitable consequence of our failure will be that some oppressed peoples and some who love them will resist with another kind of force.” (112)
EM: The reason I use “we” in that situation (and identify myself as committed to nonviolence) is because a reader could potentially be distracted from the point I’m making if it’s unclear where I stand on nonviolence. I am… I would like to be increasingly committed to nonviolence. At least, that’s what I aspire for. I wanted to make clear that this critique of the rhetoric of nonviolence is coming from someone who is trying to commit himself to it.
MKH: Two interrelated ideas in the last chapters struck me as deeply challenging. Both have to do with love. One is the notion of love of enemies, which connects to some of the things we were discussing earlier with nonviolence. You seem to be arguing that enemy- love doesn’t mean not having enemies. It explicitly acknowledges that there are enemies which feels uncomfortable in a “civil” community, that doesn’t like to acknowledge the existence of enemies. The other challenging notion is the role of God’s love in the face of enmity and oppression. You discuss a God that both invites us to love our enemies, already incredibly challenging, and a God that also seems to allow, endorse, or sometimes invite violence against the oppressor in certain scriptural texts. Both are hard theological pills to swallow. What is it about enemy love, and about God’s love in the face of enmity and oppression that felt important to untangle, to hold in tension in the concluding chapters of this book?
EM: It came out of a deep frustration with how anti-fascist movements were generally being portrayed as immature, wantonly violent, chaotic people, whereas I saw deep love on display, verbally and unspoken. I wanted to make clear that the type of love that was being displayed harmonizes with a lot of understandings of love that are in the Bible. Generally speaking, much of our Christian community at large in Charlottesville lacked the imagination that is right there in the Bible when it comes to love. They had a narrow understanding of what love looked like, a parody of Jesus, not even an accurate reflection of Jesus in the Gospels. I wanted to make clear that the Bible, as a set of documents written across centuries by different communities, contains tension and contradiction.
I think the best part of the book are the interviews. There’s one with Ramona Martinez, an artist who put this anti-fascist Mary on display for the uprisings after George Floyd was murdered, right downtown in Charlottesville. I asked her why she made it, and she responded that Mary’s arms are open, because at the end of the day, anti-fascism is about love and inviting people in.
When you say that we don’t, generally speaking, have space for enemies, I think enemies actually have a primary place. I think we tend to make enemies of vulnerable people that we should be defending. Immigrants coming up from the border. Trans people. Whereas it seems clear to me, Jesus, according to the Sermon on the Mount, presumes that his followers are going to have enemies, and that you should love them. The character of God across different books clearly assumes the presence of enemies and recommends actions against them.
My point is to make clear that the drama of the story of God, as handed down in what Christians would call revelation, contains a much more vast and broad space than I saw Christians in Charlottesville willing to make space for. I wanted to highlight that broadness, even if it’s discomforting. To paraphrase what Reverend Traci Blackmon said in her August 11 sermon, “I know that makes some of you uncomfortable that David beheaded Goliath. But that’s there in our Scriptures right? And that’s what we need to do with white supremacy, the KKK.” Which is different than saying we need to behead white supremacists and Klan members.
I thought that was beautiful. It came from a place of love. God also, like anti-fascist Mary, has open arms, representing different approaches to love. I want to highlight one approach from Jonah, which is an extreme, almost absurd openness to loving enemies and forgiving them. Jonah comes off looking comical, but it’s very understandable, given the context that he did not want Nineveh to survive for the evil they’ve done. You also have the God of Exodus who kills the proto-Confederate army, the enslavers in Egypt, which gets celebrated in the psalms, celebrated by dancing and Miriam. I find this fascinating, and I wanted to present those two open arms given to us by the Biblical God. The Bible itself invites people into that tension. I saw a lot of failure to engage that tension, and I see that function in a way that makes it more likely that vulnerable people will face violence. With the election cycle coming up again, we need more than ever to wrestle with that tension and that complexity.
MKH: I sincerely hope that many people in this coming year do read your book. You’ve provided us with a resource to engage the reality of violence of the politics around us a little bit better than we have in the past. Thank you for this book.
Share This
Share this post with your friends!