Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are concluding our series on nonviolent action by recapping the season and providing some of the major takeaways that I'd like to emphasize. We begin our season by pointing out that one of the driving forces among humans is fear. Whenever you see someone who is lacking integrity, you can almost always be certain that fear is there somewhere. Bullies might fear rejection or having to come face to face with their own hardship with their emotions.

The greedy may fear the sting of wants or the dullness of an existence which can't hide the temporal fleeting nature of life by drowning out the monotony of existence without a god. The soldier may fear for his family and for his people. And our list of course could go on. Fear is a driving force for many of our actions and it drives us to either fight, flee or freeze. Now Satan uses this fear to drive us to evil, evil responses.

I recently heard someone explain how lion roars work. Now I don't know if this is true, I didn't actually research it, but it makes a good analogy, so I'm going to use it. I'm going assume it's true. There's probably some creature out there that does this, and if there's not, there should be. So this guy said that Satan is likened to a lion in the Bible, and lions roar, right?

You know, he goes about and he roars at us. And lion roars only occur in one of like three situations in general. So when they have just secured a kill and it's kind of like celebratory like they're just sitting, chilling and big, Oh yeah, that was awesome, I got them. And so they roar. Or if they're trying to intimidate, they might use roar.

Or when there's a lone lion who's trying to drive prey into the opposite direction to run directly into a larger group of lions. So it's kind of like an ambush. And I think that's probably true in regard to us being the prey of Satan who is called the lion. Satan often roars at us through our circumstances and fear drives us to make a decision which ends up ensnaring us in different ways. But we talked about how the way of Jesus, which in this sense focuses on Agape Love is expressed through enemy love and non violence.

This way of Jesus puts us back in control. Augustine recognized that it was wrong to kill even though he's famous for just war theory and advancing that. Augustine thinks it's wrong to kill for self defense because you can't divorce it from your passions. You're acting out of fear and self protection. We talked over and over about the cycle of violence and how it's so ensnaring and talked a lot about the movie The Kingdom where you see that play out exactly.

But cyclical violence is just it happens all the time. So Satan ensnares us through our our caving to using violence and and our throwing off this concept of enemy love. Rather than allow fear to drive us towards ensnaring evil in cycles of violence or cowardice, what we need to do especially as Christians is that we need to make decisions of moral integrity and value. After looking at fear as a force which frequently drives us, we took a look at an overview of nonviolent action. We talked about how nonviolent action is far more effective than violent action in most situations, and discussed how that works, like it doesn't make intuitive sense, so how does that happen?

And largely works because non violence is able to mobilize a much greater portion of the community. There's so much more participation in buy in including from groups considered weaker and violent conflicts like women and children. The cost of buy in is small, there aren't many skills that it takes to be non violent. You can go out in the street and just show up a lot of times or boycott a store or something like that. So the cost is smaller and you have less of a chance of of being killed whereas if you're carrying a gun and you're out there shooting at somebody, you know, you're engaged in direct violence and direct violence is going to come back on you.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword, right? On top of incorporating women and children, nonviolent action also has a lower threshold for buy in, in the ways that we just mentioned. And it tends to not risk escalating violent responses. So diversity among classes is often created, which is vital to pressing any regime because boycotts across classes and institutions apply significantly more pressure than if you just have one class who is demonstrating. And in all this, the non violent nature of an event tends to make violent response by the government more detrimental to their cause as non violent protesters are hard to construe as violent enemies deserving of slaughter.

If the government does create a massacre, then they tend to get international sentiment against them and it tends to just tick the people off more and then more people come out and show up. After we looked at how nonviolence works, we covered a broad range of nonviolent actions from before Christ all the way to the present. We looked at Jewish nonviolent resistance in antiquity, we saw nonviolence prior to the American Revolution, we looked at Gandhi, we looked at nonviolence in Nazi Germany, Iran, in the Cold War, the Philippines, etc. In each of those episodes, we highlighted some of the ideas that were prominently displayed, how some of their successes worked, and how some of these campaigns failed in certain ways. Finally, we looked at modern day peacemakers in inner cities and unarmed citizen protectors or UCPs across the globe and how they are using non violence to protect vulnerable groups and to assist in reconciliation efforts.

In the series, I also had two episodes which looked at what I think is a Christian aversion to sacrifice and discussed how most Christians explain away suffering that we really ought to be okay with embracing. We so often cherry pick the Bible in regard to both what we consider sins and what we consider commands, proscriptions and prescriptions. The left and the right both tend to do it and we've largely interpreted the Bible in a way that suits us, that helps us to stay comfortable. I talked about how I'm still struggling with these implications and trying to figure out what this all means for me and my engagement in non violent action. All in all, I had a great time making this season.

I learned a ton in researching non violent action, and I hope you did as well. Hopefully, I'll be able to update this throughout the future as I learn more and draw some more solid conclusions. And in the meantime, listen to the rest of our seasons and follow the endless stream of resources that I've posted in all of these episodes. That could keep you busy for quite a while. But that's all for now.

So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.