AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

...Why are we faithless...

...This opportunity of the Southern Negro to witness to his faith has not been perfect, because he is willy-nilly there seeking his own...

...Face the fact," he has always said, "that self-preservation is the first law of nature, including human nature...

...If only his faith did not require works which in turn require the surrender of force to suffering for the sake of the redemption of the enemy one loves...

...So the "happy" Negro—the patient, wheedling Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima—was born...

...He who rejects nonviolence now has got to reject it because it is Christian, not because it is ineffective...

...And if they admitted that it was relevant in India "because the British were civilized," they were the same people who called the white Southerner (or the Nazi or the Communist) uncivilized...

...So the age of violence is at an end, and it is not a matter of win, lose, or draw, but lose, lose, or lose—unless the faithless are wrong and there is another way...

...The Christians' Christ had another way, and the heathen black half-understood it...

...The 1941-45 war was the last one the faithless American will positively enjoy...

...He knows that force even in a just cause affects its user so that he sees the face of the evildoer in the mirror...

...They had been black heathen, and their Christian masters had given them Christ...

...It takes more than a self-preserving human nature to fear injuring more than injury, killing more than dying, and disgracefulness more than disgrace...

...from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee and especially from a still more obscure organization called the Congress of Racial Equality...

...The "cake of custom"—the "Southern way of life"—crumbled the instant the law was non-violently violated...

...And this is why he is faithless...

...They had been slaves, and were still slaves, for the measure of slavery is not law but dignity...

...Ain't no such animal," he says...

...They liked Him because He was the only freedom they could imagine...

...cheap votes...

...It takes a supernature, which comes to even the most blessed of men only in their greatest moments...

...These Kennedys and these Nixons, Catholics, Quakers, what have you, call for more violence and praise non-violence...

...Backward people, to whom the supernatural was more tolerable than the natural...

...And when he wanted to be elected to Washington, the gradual became imperceptible and the promises transparent...

...But he sees no other way...

...So they prayed and prayed—hadn't their Christ Himself prayed in the Garden?—that their courage to suffer be fortified and their faith not fail them when they were clubbed and spat upon...

...Has the black man found the way to soften the white man's heart...

...for the enemy believes (or is always believed to believe) that there is an alternative to peace and is capable of using it...

...What then...

...And the black man saw that there might be a chance some day—just an outside chance, but better than no chance at all—that he could touch the Southern white man's heart in the name of Christ...

...And of superhuman nature...

...But there is...

...There was something else...

...He knows that force is at least as often on the side of injustice as it is on the side of justice...

...The Cause is a Christian cause among a faithless people with a perfunctory routine of faith, of non-rational people among rational people whose reason has come to a dead end...

...There was something else...

...Or the discovery of old...

...I think this is being engineered by the Communists," says Harry Truman of the sit-ins...

...Those who rejected non-violence as "politically irrelevant" were always the faithless, including those who, rejecting it, rejected Christ while they professed Him...

...But when his faith was strong he saw that they half-understood something else: The white Southerners, themselves oppressed, held fast to the facade of the Church, the mumbo-jumbo of an almost emptied faith...

...Last spring, when three hundred fifty Negro students were arrested in Orangeburg for sitting down at the lunch counters, the governor of South Carolina said: "They think they can violate any law, especially if they have a Bible in their hands...

...And so the American (like the Russian) has gone on shedding blood and depending on the whip, the club, the dirk, and the pistol, on the chain, the lock, the bars, and the handcuffs...

...Will the Negro's present experience prepare him to participate when the perfect opportunity comes to him...

...Through no fault of his own—his history, too, had been hard—the white Southerner loved violence...

...denounce lawlessness and support law-breaking...

...He knows that the enemy does not even seem to understand force...

...The Negro boy kept walking . . ." We Americans are a faithless people, and the rest of the week betrays the one hour on Sunday when we go through the perfunction of proclaming our faith (or hire men to proclaim it for us, and to visit our sick, and to bury our dead...

...There was nothing wrong with gradualism for a patient people, except that the white man, even in Washington, decided what was gradual and what was not...

...What if the Negroes of America—the people to whom Christianity was given and who used it— were to show the whites another way at the end of the age of violence...

...They don't call it a movement...

...But if there is no alternative to peace, and if there is no other way than violence to achieve social justice, then there is no way to achieve social justice at all, and surrender is as inevitable as it is ignominious...

...And the law struck with all its violence, and with its volunteer janizaries...

...What if America became a Christian country...

...If there was any way at all, there had to be another way...

...So the faithless American has to retreat to his last unprepared line of defense: If you can't use violence abroad any more, you can still use it at home...

...Many men have broken the law...

...But not like this...

...There was something else...

...There is no alternative to peace," says General Eisenhower...

...Absolute violence—enough to destroy everything and incapable of destroying less—turns out to be absolute impotence...

...Maybe anyone can if he has enough faith...

...We have denied the authority of philosophy and of faith, of man and of God...

...And the Jim Crow Church is silent still, like the press and the public forum and the President...

...This from the New York Times...

...If emancipation had been less gradual, the Negroes' faith might have waned like the white man's in the face of Progress...

...Four hundred years before Christ, Socrates of Athens said, "We ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we have suffered from him...

...And when the clubbing was over the Southern whites were left with their broken laws in their hands and the lunch counters open...

...Even when they hated and killed, they burned a Cross...

...But it was gradual...

...The way of the faithful—to love and to suffer—not only has no chance of achieving social justice but penalizes the just man and hands the unjust their victory on a platter...

...It is the beginning of new things," says Lillian Smith...

...controlled doses of archaic forms of violence to protect the outer margins of the Free World dictatorships, or to save Congo's uranium, Cuba's sugar, or Salvador's coffee from the enemy...

...That couldn't be the remedy for the minority...

...And the Southern whites had all the violence on their side in support of all the laws, good laws against trespass, loitering, obstruction of traffic, incitement to riot, criminal anarchy (in Louisiana), and conspiracy to interfere with trade (in Tennessee...

...There was faith in God, Who was always on the side of the helpless and Whose power was greater than all violence and Whose Son had promised emancipation from indignity: Neither bond nor free, neither Greek nor Jew...

...But that was still a kind of violence, called democracy, where the majority elected the lawmakers and enforced the laws and did anything they wanted to the minority...

...This wasn't civil disobedience...

...and as their slavery continued their faith was not beguiled by their understanding...

...And six years after the violent enforcement of law in the schools, the Southern way of life fights on to the end...

...they call it the Cause...

...The whites sat down at the lunch counters with the blacks as if they had never done anything else...

...and Martin Luther King knew it and had known that it would come to pass, and he said, "We must fill the jails...

...now you can do anything with a hydrogen bomb but use it...

...He knows that it is the white student—Northern, but especially Southern—who sits there with him and seeks not his own who has the perfect opportunity...

...Man himself is God, and the earth (and now the heavens) manifest his handiwork...

...If this is faith, when all experience proves that the enemy "doesn't understand anything but force"— True, the faithless man is uneasy in his dependence on force...

...and their lawful violence was as useless as the lawless violence of the world at the end of the age of violence...

...The concerned because they are persuaded that the Church as a whole is the agent and apologist for social injustice—or at best its silent partner...

...And now the pattern is set— Christ's technique all the way and everywhere—at the parks and the beaches and the libraries and the movies and the voter registration desks and the real estate offices and the employment agencies and the hotels and hospitals and buses...

...But their understanding grew as their slavery continued...

...Now they have a way to achieve their purpose...

...for if their faith failed them they would return evil for evil and be destroyed...

...Blacks could vote now, if they could register...

...There were a few new laws—and a new interpretation of an old one by an unelected Court—and years and years of commissions and reports and conferences...

...Nor was it Christ's way at all, and even the illiterate among the black minority, the Gullahs, for instance, had heard of Christ's way, so ardent had their masters been to implant it in them...

...They had a purpose in life all the time...

...so he just talks...

...And when they had prayed and prayed, they broke the law...

...Will the black man, after he redeems us from the racism in our hearts, help redeem us from the money in our hearts and the indifference in our hearts and the war in our hearts...

...This was non-violence...

...Maybe they can...

...and it comes from the supernatural...

...Liberty won, and violence lost...

...What if we were to heed it...

...John Brown, Al Capone...

...If you're afraid you'll fight back," the students told each other in the South, "then you're not ready...

...For votes, you say...

...If for cheap votes, they buy the cheap votes dearly, for they promote the end of the age of the violence on which their authority, and their uneasy country's, rests...

...Gradually" their outward condition improved, by force of the white man's law in Washington and his violence supporting law...

...What would the Russians do then...

...Then you have a police action, with one police force in Mississippi or two in Korea...

...But his law and his violence were in Jackson and Montgomery and Baton Rouge, too, and they were closer home and much, much surer and less gradual...

...but on Sunday their faith was strong again...

...The nuclear weapon became obsolete on August 9, 1945...

...The Army, the Navy, and the Marines have found the way to soften his skull, the way of civil war at home and the end of the world abroad...

...And the lunch counters opened, unsegregated...

...A Jew could reason with a Nazi easier than a black could reason with a Southern white...

...But down in the deep dark American South there has been all this time a people of faith...

...And if you don't enjoy it, and can't survive it, violence is dead...

...And in this melancholy case he arrives at the end of the age of violence...

...There has not been a report of violence at an unsegregated lunch counter...

...If there were enough of them up North who could register and vote some day, a candidate for President would have his brother 'phone a white judge in the South and advise him to let one of their leaders out of jail...

...They used to say that you could do anything with a bayonet but sit on it...

...And they filled the jails and did the hardest thing of all: They blessed them that cursed them...

...When the black man's faith was weak he was tempted to say of the Southern whites, "They don't understand anything but force...

...Those who told the pacifist that they respect his view—but, did not respect his view...

...and love seeks not its own...

...You hate and kill the criminal, and crime increases...

...If there is no other way now to get what he wants—social justice, say, or liberty, or security—then there is no way at all...

...He knows these things...

...Gerhardt Burckhardt, the German physicist who plays with mathematical projection, says that a one-hour attack with present firepower would leave one billion dead "and casualties would be roughly equal among those who were at war and those who were not...

...coerce the judge by telephone or put the Nisei in concentration camps in an "emergency" or even amend the Fifth Amendment (and any other...

...And in the North, where the young had no purpose in life, and where disillusionment with a rotten time was entire, "this issue appears to have aroused the present campus generation as have few others...

...But this faithless American, concerned or unconcerned for social justice, would be faithless for the same reason the Second Century Christian was already faithless: He would not mind adoring the Cross if only he didn't have to carry it too...

...They were not good or great people, and their faith failed them on Saturday night...

...The lawbreakers were clubbed and whipped, hosed and burned...

...We were waiting for leadership to come from the South," says Martin Smolin, a member of CORE at Columbia...

...The history of slave revolutions, with violence a monopoly, was unexceptionable...

...To win anything at all when you were powerless—a slab of sowbelly or a handful of collard greens—you had to love or pretend to love and make the master sorry for you...

...In hoc signo...

...But he knows this because he knows Christ...

...And even in their secular societies like the NAACP they began their meetings with an invocation and ended them with a benediction and cried out "Amen," and not "Pour it on," when the speaker spoke of liberty...

...But there was something else...

...And those who skip the perfunctory hour include most of the Americans who concern themselves with social justice...

...Last month the chain store managements reported that there had been no loss of business since integration...

...With the unconfessed (and perhaps undiscerned) recognition that violence is ended, the faithless American has gone on talking about using it to put out "brush fires" abroad...

...These people preached Christ's technique and told the marveling blacks that Christ's technique might even be the way to achieve social justice within a living black man's lifetime...

...Above all, He spoke to their condition, for their condition was, above all, helpless to use violence as a remedy...

...One by one the lunch counters opened—all the lunch counters of the four major variety stores organizations in 112 cities in the course of the past eight months...

...from the most benighted people in the benighted South...

...uneasy in his dependence but triumphant in his argument: There is no other way...

...By and by little bands of grey-flanneled angels came to strengthen their faith and their hands, from the North and even from the South...

...The question is not, Who lost or won...

...And the schools...

...But for the first time in post-revolutionary American history the great political parties endorse law-breaking, in their late platform planks on the sit-ins...

...They liked this Christ...

...but, What lost or won...

...The unconcerned because they are so enchanted with the works of their own hands that they cannot imagine the necessity for Man the Maker to have help...

...We are waiting for leadership to come from the South, and to come soon and help us overcome the "cold pogrom" racism of the North, the hatred compounded by the hypocrisy that keeps the Northern black man from knowing where he can sleep and eat and where he can't...

...it can cope with violence...

...Their masters may have understood something other than force—but at least they understood force and had a monopoly of it and had no need of Christ...

...You can make laws to achieve social justice (or whatever you want) and monopolize archaic forms of violence in the police who enforce the law...

...Four hundred years after Socrates, Christ said it "as one having authority...

...But even as he talks, he knows that violence and control are incompatible concepts...

...cry up order and approve of holy disorder...