A Preference for Resistance
So, in my head all week I’ve been calling this today’s sermon Beyond Rebellion, but on Friday, when I went to create the Facebook post, I discovered that the title I put in the newsletter was A Preference for Resistance. That semantic stumbling block pretty much characterizes my prep for today!
Author, activist and ecofeminist Starhawk has posited
"Rebellion, unless it can transform itself into resistance, inevitably becomes self-destructive. When we rebel without challenging the framework of reality the system has constructed, we remain trapped... Resistance differs from rebellion because it embodies a reality incongruent with that of domination. We do more than defy reality: we present its alternatives, communicating our beliefs and values."
I’m intrigued by Starhawk’s differentiation between rebellion and resistance, and I sense more or less intuitively that it is a powerful differentiation. But I struggled to call to mind real life examples. Part of my struggle was, as I said, semantic. A conversation with several church members at Lisa on the Loose on Thursday confirmed this. Which word–rebellion or resistance–signifies the more radical departure from status quo and therefore the most potent possibility for real and lasting change, for manifesting a reality incongruent with dominion?
Starhawk herself obviously believes resistance is the more radical of the two, the one that more faithfully communicates our beliefs and values, the one that challenges the framework of reality that has brought us to whatever state we’re in now that needs changing. But one of the participants at Lisa on the Loose wasn’t convinced. She pointed out that the people of the Confederacy were labeled, or claimed for themselves the label, “rebels”. Unfortunately, the language of the Civil War is a vast and complex topic I have neither the time nor the historical and linguistic grounding to speak about today. For now I’m going to accept Starhawk’s premise that we generally need to move beyond rebellion, claiming a preference for resistance in order to effect lasting and meaningful change.
Take, for example, the Tennessee Three–Reps. Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson–rebelled by speaking out of order, from the well of the House floor. It was contrary to the rules of decorum, and even some people sympathetic to their outrage have pointed out how young and inexperienced they are as legislators, and have suggested that learning the decorum and paying their dues as freshmen legislators will allow them to stay around long enough to do the work they were sent to do. Their actions were clearly rebellion no matter how just their cause. And as such, likely to have had little lasting effect had it not been for the reaction, overreaction, of the Speaker of the Tennessee House and his majority party. Nashville’s Metro Council and the Shelby County commissioners, on the other hand, resisted by sending Pearson and Jones right back to the legislature, refusing to let the legal though petty and unjust action of the majority members of the Legislature stand for more than a day or two.
Rosa Parks (and before her, Claudette Colvin) rebelled by refusing to give up their seats. The people of Montgomery resisted by boycotting the buses, arranging carpools, raising money and supporting one another through a long year of navigating daily life in a city without using public transportation. The resistance carried the cause that the rebellion sparked to a hard won new reality, one incongruent with dominion.
A colleague has suggested that the difference between rebellion and resistance is one of duration. Rebellion being a one time, in-the-moment action. And resistance, on-going, in-it-for-the-long-haul. That fits the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It could also be that the difference between rebellion and resistance is a matter of scope–rebellion affects a limited number of people; resistance has a more far-reaching effect. Again, two women, one at a time, refused to give up their seats, but hundreds, thousands of people refused to ride the buses at all. Rebellion turned into resistance–over time and with numbers.
But for how long or how many must rebellion stretch before it becomes resistance? Maybe the poets offer a more useful clue to when one becomes the other.
Rebelling is a first step, a sort in your face, digging in of heels. Resisting is doing “something that does not compute”. The Republican legislators in Tennessee, in their outrage, couldn’t conceive of or foresee the elegant, immediate, and lawful procedure by which Reps. Pearson and Jones were returned to the legislature. It didn’t compute, even though it shouldn’t have been unexpected. In their playing to win, to get their way, to score points with their base, the concept of allowing the people to be represented by the people they elected to represent them, might as well have been written in a language from another galaxy.
It is significant that Starhawk doesn’t dismiss or disavow rebellion; she simply cautions against stopping with rebellion. Figuring out what doesn’t compute, in a particular circumstance or situation, might take some time. The heroes have to find one another in the tangled wood before they can get on with strategizing. But once that’s accomplished, an initial rebellious act or acts interrupt business as usual so the resistance can take root.
Another person at Lisa on the Loose on Thursday suggested that in our personal lives what looks like rebellion might in fact be resistance. Transteens, for example, who show up to school and work and family life every day, as themselves, their true selves, despite the cost of lack of understanding and bullying. Inhabiting their lives and living in the world despite all the people for whom their very existence does not compute.
And what of the rest of us? How do we resist? Wendell Berry published MANIFESTO: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front 50 years ago. What might we do today that does not compute? Reject fast fashion, leave Twitter, join Buy Nothing, engage in mutual aid, learn to reduce food waste, vote and march and spend our dollars as though Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter and bodily autonomy matters. And perhaps, by embracing the role and the lot of the younger son or the marginalized step-sister of the fairy tale. The ones who are overlooked, who don’t inherit title or position or fortune. The ones with the freedom, therefore, to pursue dreams and alternative paths and adventures not defined by expectation and inheritance. What might we do with that freedom? This is more complicated than other means of resisting by doing that which does not compute.
From one perspective, not one of us is the eldest child, granted power as our birthright, guaranteed the kingdom, unchallenged in our privilege. All that is reserved for the one-percent-ers, the inheritors of vast wealth and vastly greater power. On the other hand, almost every one of us, by virtue of our race or educational level or citizenship or gender or physical ability or some combination thereof, is the eldest child–holder of more wealth and power and privilege than so many of our neighbors and co-inhabitants on the planet Earth. We are bound by expectations, and the need to provide for families or preserve our retirement savings. Even if we’re not in the C-Suite, we can find it difficult or frightening to roam the woods in search of other heroes with whom to conspire in kindness and cleverness to win the battle and the day and the future. Still, the best part of resistance, what prevents the self-destruction of individual rebellion, is that because it is for the long haul, not in the moment, one-and-done, we have the time to find the others, even if it is difficult or frightening to set out on the quest.
Someone once told me that church work should never be done alone. Every task, large or small, should be done by partners or a group, small or large. To share the load, lighten the burden, and even more so to build relationships and strengthen community. So it is with resistance. The poet Marge Piercy put it this way:
"Remember that we were most beautiful not by twos,
never in formless plenaries or mumbly caterpillar meetings
but in small high holy groups shifting like starfish."
What in your corner of Savannah or your career or educational institution or your area of interest in the larger world needs changing? I guarantee you there are others whose answer to that question is the same as yours. Find those people and you’ll have found your co-heroes, your small high holy group and be halfway to manifesting an alternative reality already.
May it be so. Amen.