In a previous newsletter, we looked at a picture making the rounds on social media, of a Hatian refugee being driven back from Del Rio by the Texas Border guard on horseback, reins flying. One of the key things I suggested then that was, rather than rush to jump into the fray of action, we need to sit with the image—not to defer doing something, but to be able to better do something.
A friend pushed back on that notion, saying that they detected an overlap between what I was saying and a famous essay by 20th century ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr (best known for his book Christ and Culture), an essay entitled “The Grace of Doing Nothing.” In that essay, Niebuhr defends a form of Christian pacifism rooted in patience, that the “doing something” which Christians are called to do in the face of atrocity is not to attempt to fix everything, but to pray, that “while it does nothing it knows that something is being done, something which is divine both in its threat and in its promise.”
I have to confess: I kind of hate this essay, not because Niebuhr is wrong in saying that prayer is in fact the “doing something” which Christians should do much more of, but because I take his account of Christian action in the face of disaster to be a kind of dodge. I do think that our tendency to “do something” is frequently a bad tendency: we act, assuming that our intentions to do good are sufficient, when even our intentions are suffused with ignorance about not only what the problems are, but what might be done and in what way something should be done. We want something done, and let’s not let thinking get in the way of it.
But Niebuhr’s account of patience gets into trouble, because in rooting prayer into an eschatological patience, he ensures that we will never be able to do other than pray without compromising what Christians are called to do. By wanting to set before us the importance of prayer, and to do the deeper work of healing the problems as opposed to simply stopping the immediate conflict, we become paralyzed to ever doing. We never come to the place of having to risk being wrong, or of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Put differently: Niebuhr puts us in the trap of cloaking fear of acting behind the necessity of prayer.
In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr. excoriates his white ministerial colleagues in Birmingham for analogous reasons to what I’ve outlined here, namely that their action has been limited, cloaked in the language of prudence and patience:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant “Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
The issue that King identifies is not simply that it’s easy to call for patience when you are not the one suffering, but rather, that patience must be indexed not to a particular time for action, but to a particular way of action. The white ministers, like Niebuhr, think of patience as having to do with enduring a span of time, while King thinks of patience as a way of acting.
Earlier in the letter, King describes his method of engaging in civil disobedience, writing that it begins with assessing the situation, then moving to negotiation, followed by self-purification of hatred, and finally, to nonviolent direct action. In this, we see patience not as a deferral for action, but intrinsic to acting well: all along the way, King is intervening in a patient mode. He does not jump into the street at every opportunity, but begins with gathering intelligence and with conversation, and then with more confrontational methods which have been bathed in the ability to act deliberately and not rashly.
The contrast between this and the ways in which social media compels us to jump straight into the direct action—bypassing the necessary steps of assessment, negotiation, and self-purification—could not be more clear. In an age of immediacy, any deferral of immediate action looks just like Niebuhr, and the mode of King, in which one patiently acts, seems like a relic.
But it doesn’t really matter if it seems archaic or outdated: King is still right. Most violence is slow violence, and as such, requires us to see it well in order to act directly and provocatively on it. Patience does not mean deferral in favor of prayer, as Niebuhr argued, transposing “doing something” into a hyper-pietistic form, but embedding our engagement with the patience of prayer and the deliberateness of courage.