2026/07/09 by Sefa Secen · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Indian History and Philosophy #Thoreau and American Literature #Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment
paper · doi:10.1163/27727882-bja00066
openalex publication_date 2026/07/09 · openalex created_date 2026/07/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/10
Abstract This article traces the genealogy of nonviolent thought from two parallel traditions of religious pacifism—the Russian Spiritual Christians (Molokans, Doukhobors) and the historic peace churches (Brethren, Mennonites, Quakers)—through the New England non-resistants Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison and the pivotal mediating figures of Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, to Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha and Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent direct action. It argues that a crucial transformation occurred along this genealogical line: the rejection of violence evolved from a separatist religious ethic grounded in scriptural obedience and communal withdrawal into an activist political strategy designed to confront and transform unjust social orders. The article’s contribution is twofold: it recovers the comparatively understudied role of the Russian Spiritual Christians in this lineage and integrates them into a single analytic frame with the Anglo-American non-resistance tradition; and it develops a four-dimensional analytical framework—shifts from withdrawal to confrontation, obedience to agency, communal purity to political solidarity, and intrinsic end to constitutive means—that distinguishes the underlying logic of separatist pacifism from that of activist nonviolence. The article also clarifies the terminological and exegetical commonalities and divergences across the tradition, situating the rejection of violence within a shared engagement with the Sermon on the Mount alongside distinctive theological frameworks (Anabaptist two-kingdom theology, Quaker Inward Light, Tolstoyan Christian anarchism, Gandhian syncretism, and King’s synthesis of the Black church prophetic tradition with Gandhian method).