theology | Gandhi, Graffiti, and Christian Ethics

If one looks at the percentage of the history of the United States that have been spent at war or is aware of our current disillusionment with our current war, then it makes sense why I'm frequently asked about my commitment to Christian non-violence. I've promised to post a set of responses to questions I've received, a promise I intend to keep, but have not yet fulfilled. Elsewhere I have suggested that the killed or be killed scenarios that people often rhetorically paint may be the result of a limited imagination. Here, I'd like to point briefly to something that Mahatma Gandhi and a UK graffiti artist, Paul Curtis aka Moose, have in common which might prove suggestive for Christian imagination.

Everyone should be familiar with Gandhi's use of non-cooperation and peaceful resistance in his pursuit of justice. Like the Christian non-violence I support, Gandhi's ideas were anything but passive. He called for a nationwide protest against the Rowlatt Acts. This included the call to close all offices and factories, withdrawal from Raj-sponsored schools, police services, the military and the civil services, and lawyers to leave the Raj's courts. Not stopping there, he wanted a boycott of public transportation and foreign-manufactured goods, but Gandhi did not want force or coercion used by the protesters. Gandhi's life and teaching demonstrate a rigorous attachment to notions of truth, faith, and courage. Gandhi was aware that his commitment to nonviolence required incredible faith and courage, which he realized not everyone possessed. This raised the worry that supporters of nonviolence may support it out of cowardice. As Joan Bondurant recounts in her book, Gandhi wrote, "I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence."[1] This isn't too far from my claim that given the attractiveness of despair during the Nazi regime, I would probably take Bonhoeffer's path even though I'm a pacifist. There was a unresting character to Gandhi's life; he did not celebrate independence with the rest of India, but mourned the partition, knowing that there was still work to be done.

There's a lot of dirt in life. I recently came across an interesting NPR piece from 2004:

"A British street artist known as Moose creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

Moose, whose real name is Paul Curtis, tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that he got the idea when he saw that people had written their names with their fingers on dirty tunnel walls in his hometown of Leeds. Moose does some freehand drawing, but also uses the grid from wall tiles to create perfect shapes and letters.

The tools are simple: A shoe brush, water and elbow grease, he says.

British authorities aren't sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. 'I'm waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks,' he jokes."

I think there are similarities between Gandhi's non-cooperation and nonviolence, this reverse graffiti and the kind of imagination which Christianity demands. Though Gandhi was jailed multiple times as a result of his views and political activities, he could always appeal to the British law, moral convictions, and argue that he was no enemy as his only weapon was a walking stick. This made Gandhi difficult to demonize and allowed him to say, "At every meeting I repeated the warning that unless they felt that in non-violence they had come into possession of a force infinitely superior to the one they had and in the use of which they were adept, they should have nothing to do with non-violence and resume the arms they possessed before." This should also expose a significant if not fatal flaw of so-called Christian anarchism, namely, that by rightly or wrongly making themselves easy to demonize, they problematize any attempts to build coalitions, which will be increasingly necessary when facing global economic/political structures that are much larger than the state. In the piece on reverse graffiti, one sees British authorities in a similar quandary as the one produced by Gandhi. How do you criminalize someone who goes around with a walking stick or cleaning public grounds with water? Christians should constantly be looking for ways to exert peaceful resistance in ways that puzzle typical responses.

Bourgeois suburban Christianity is limited in practice to largely interpersonal matters. It tends to see the command to love others as elevating the personal encounter with another person over working to alleviate the structural conditions that enslave others. [Given the impersonal nature of people's daily lives, this may seem right, but one cannot claim love while failing to address the structures of poverty and classism.] So, they send teenagers on mission trips dressed in GAP clothing, largely unconcerned with their own suburban exclusion, greed, and perpetuation of poverty. "It is stronger on adultery than on armaments...Its view of democracy...is the abstract one of the ballot box, rather than a specific, living and practical democracy which might also concern" the moral reasoning about war in the Defense Department and the effect of buying a morning latte at Starbucks. By largely sharing the anemic American view of individual freedom, its "view of individual freedom is similarly abstract: the freedom of any particular individual is crippled and parasitic as long as it depends on the futile labor and active oppression of others."[2]

To get past such unfaithful embodiment of Christianity, to refuse to cooperate in daily practices that cripple others, to be a artist in world of dirt, sometimes it doesn't take much: courage - one's willingness to stand with others, an imagination that goes beyond the ballot box, and resources - sometimes as little as a sock, water, and elbow grease.

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[1] Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988).
[2] Here Terry Eagleton is actually writing about liberal humanism. I've applied his words to middle-class Christianity in part to make the point that because capitalism makes discussion of class difficult and therefore classism invisible, Christians often have more in common with their class than with their Gospel. Eagleton calls liberal humanism a suburban moral ideology, which in my opinion becomes the suburban Christian ideology. Eagleton, Literary Theory, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 207-8.

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