Join us for our summer lay-led service: Civil Resistance: What You Need to Know with Colin Warwick.
You might find it counterintuitive that non-violent resistance movements work better than violent ones. But this is indeed the conclusion of Erica Chenoweth’s books, Civil Resistance: What You Need to Know and Why Civil Resistance Works. Her study of 300 movements from 1900 to 2006 revealed, “No government withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it.” She explains that it is almost impossible to get 3.5% of the population to join a violent movement, but non-violent movements can. Even so, achieving 3.5% is no mean feat: in the US, it would mean mobilizing more than 12 million people, each of whom risks arrest and cannot rely on the government to forgo violent reprisal. I’ll begin with Thoreau’s unsuccessful but influential civil disobedience, then move on to more modern, successful examples.
The service will be held in-person only.