Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience

• In Event: Authenticity and Resistance

Abstract

This article examines the meaning of love in the theory and history of civil disobedience in the context of the “long” Civil Rights movement. It argues that fidelity to love, rather than fidelity to law, is the core concept of a vernacular black political theology of resistance. The first section situates the origins of civil disobedience in the works of black social gospel theologians in the 1930s and 40s who sought to learn lessons from India’s anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed. The second section contextualizes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s early sermons on moral injury, self-respect, and personalism within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom’s account of how nonviolent resistance triumphs over fear and gives birth to a “new sense of dignity and destiny.” The third section examines love and fear from across the veil, so to speak, to reconceptualize the moral psychology of the white citizen and the power of nonviolence. King’s notion of aggressive love, it argues, names the challenge of binding political confrontation with political pedagogy defining civil disobedience. The article concludes that the shortcomings of King’s vision of civil disobedience are better addressed through a more thoroughgoing embrace of love as an idiom of liberation rather than through renewed insistence on disobedience’s legal foundations.

Author

• Alexander Livingston, Cornell University