If we reduce our understanding of violence to physical violence in the twentieth century we will miss the ways non-physical forms of violence impact everyday life. Violence in everyday life is multidimensional and sneaky; it is structural, cultural, and symbolic. Structural violence normalizes oppressive systems without necessarily inflicting death. It is encrusted in our systems of finance, law, education, politics, health, food, clean water, transportation, housing, interpersonal relationships, and even houses of worship. It is still defined as violence because it brings about harm, creating the conditions for the systemic flourishing of some while minimizing or denying that same flourishing to others. Structural violence forms dehumanizing social hierarchies across weaponized lines of human difference such as class, race, gender, age, sexuality, and ethnicity. Fueled by the interests of the dominant culture, it fabricates social stigmas to organize power around the privileged and undermine power around the underprivileged. There’s a reason why the north shore of Chicago is predominantly white and rich, and the south side Black and under-resourced. Structural violence doesn’t always kill but it always dehumanizes, segregates, and impoverishes. In stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, we tell ourselves we are safer. We are told that violence is redemptive—that our moral conscience and nationalistic exceptionalism is a force for good in the world. But is military domination really beneficent? If so, whose interests does it represent?
The sneakiness of structural violence is that those who benefit from it either deny it exists or don’t see that it exists at all. Structural violence is oppression camouflaged as the way things just are in one’s culture. This leads to cultural violence, which is a worldview and language of power that sanctions direct and structural violence against the marginalized. Here in the United States, the legacy of enslaving Africans to build a nation with free labor cast a long shadow of cultural violence fueled by white supremacy. White supremacy is cultural violence. It legitimizes the exploitation of Black bodies through an artificial racial caste system that is policed through structures (law, segregation, armed police) and direct violence (lynching, police brutality, mass incarceration). As Isabel Wilkerson writes of the Jim Crow era, “The dominant caste devised a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly….People on the bottom rung could be beaten or killed with impunity for any breach of the caste system, like not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough or trying to vote.”[4] The cycle is vicious: cultural violence can lead to death, but it can also create the conditions for long-term poverty and marginalization, stimulating what Johan Galtung calls a “silent holocaust” that slowly erodes a community’s well-being.[5]
Violence, then, is direct, structural, and cultural—but it is also symbolic. Symbolic violence is non-physical violence that lurks in the shadows of our social relations. Symbolic violence normalizes the imagined underdogs’ subordinate place in one’s culture. So women are inferior to men (patriarchy). Wealthy businessmen just work harder than the so-called poor (capitalism). America is more blessed and powerful than Mexico (ethnocentrism). Black bodies are inherently more violent than white bodies (racism). Immigrants increase crime (xenophobia). Taken together, these egregious social stigmas create power imbalances that normalize oppressive relationships. This can lead to direct violence against the imagined underdog, including sexualized violence and cultural marginalization.
Interrupting the Spiral of Violence
Structural violence doesn’t always kill but it always dehumanizes, segregates, and impoverishes. The sneakiness of structural violence is that those who benefit from it either deny it exists or don’t see that it exists at all. Structural violence is oppression camouflaged as the way things just are in one’s culture.How do we interrupt the kaleidoscopic nature of violence, make its sneakiness visible, and stop its cruel cycle? Can violent retaliation stop the cycle?
Hélder Câmara, a Brazilian Catholic Archbishop and liberation theologian, called this cruel cycle the “spiral of violence.”[6] The spiral of violence, according to Câmara, manifests in three forms: Violence No. 1, where the privileged oppress the underdog; Violence No. 2, where the oppressed underdog retaliates with violence; and Violence No. 3, where the privileged preserve their power by responding with overwhelming violent repression. In Câmara’s own words, “Violence attracts violence.”[7] The attraction is a magnetic and death-dealing force.
Violence begets violence.
Violence + violent retaliation = more violence.
Shooting your enemy means his/her friends might shoot back.
Violence is a cyclical diseased social imagination in need of repair.
What is the solution?
Nearly two thousand years ago a revolution of cosmic proportions took place to interrupt the spiral of violence. This revolution was not led by armed insurgents. It was led by God’s unarmed human one, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus claimed that God’s kingdom—a sphere of liberation, peace, and justice—was drawing near. The nearness of this kingdom stood in stark contrast to the palpable nearness of Rome’s military occupation of Jesus’ home country. Under the guise of “peace,” Rome pacified distant peoples, including Israel, through military domination (direct violence), taxation (structural violence), enslavement (cultural violence), and racialized stigmas (symbolic violence). Together, the empire called these mechanisms of violent domination the “Roman peace” (pax Romana). The propaganda of the Roman peace, however, referred to peace through coercion. Rome’s peace-ification of subordinate peoples is best exemplified in Roman crucifixion, a torture apparatus used to make subjects peaceful.
At every point of Jesus’ public ministry we witness God incarnate calling into existence a people who will interrupt pax through coercion with radical acts of neighborly love and nonviolent resistance. Jesus was not the first Jew to resist Rome’s manufactured peace through coercion. Jewish messianic pretenders, armed guerrilla warriors, and prophetic movements sought to overthrow Rome with Violence No. 2. Rome’s overwhelming military strength easily suppressed these resistance movements, culminating in Rome’s destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE through Violence No. 3. Violence begot violence. It is into this vicious spiral of violence that Jesus injected his own life and teachings. At every point of Jesus’ public ministry we witness God incarnate calling into existence a people who will interrupt pax through coercion with radical acts of neighborly love and nonviolent resistance.
In teaching to turn the other cheek, Jesus shamed Violence No. 1.
In teaching enemy love, Jesus disrupted Violence No. 2.
In teaching the things that make for peace, Jesus stymied Violence No. 3.
In proclaiming freedom for prisoners, Jesus interrupted structural violence.
In practicing inclusive table fellowship, Jesus flustered cultural violence.
In including women among his disciples, Jesus disoriented symbolic violence.
In proclaiming good news to the poor, Jesus undermined economic caste systems.
In eating with tax collectors, Jesus practiced enemy love.
In speaking woes to the rich, Jesus condemned hoarding and exploitation.
In blessing peacemakers, Jesus contested the efficacy of violent resistance.
In healing the diseased, Jesus showed the limitations of state and military power.
In forgiving sins, Jesus redefined power.
In publicly dying on a Roman cross, Jesus exposed the spiral of violence.
In rising from the dead, Jesus publicly disarmed and made a public spectacle of the pax Romana. Far from a call to passivity, the way of Jesus is a call to direct action and nonviolent resistance. It is an invitation to boldly step into the living rooms of empire and proclaim that peace is through Jesus Christ (Acts 10:36).Far from a call to passivity, the way of Jesus is a call to direct action and nonviolent resistance. It is an invitation to boldly step into the living rooms of empire and proclaim that peace is through Jesus Christ (Acts 10:36). As Martin Luther King Jr. recalls, “True nonviolent resistance is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflictor of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart” (My Trip to the Land of Gandhi, 1959).
Discipleship to Jesus is God’s way of repairing our diseased social imaginations. It is God’s way of reconciling humans to God and humans to one another. The way of Jesus is a social movement. It is an invitation to join this movement in a community and a covenant of peace. The way of Jesus is anti-violent. It exposes the myth of redemptive violence.
1 See American Historical Association: https://tinyurl.com/2ycddp5o
2 See www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html
3 See www.iraqbodycount.org
4 Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 4 8.
5 Johann Galtung, “Twenty-Five Years of Peace Research: Ten Challenges and Some Responses,” Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 2 (1985): 146-147.
6 Hélder Câmara, Spiral of Violence (London: Sheed and Ward, 1971), 25-36.7 Câmara, Spiral of Violence, 30.
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