Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-03, Section: A, page: 0998.

Director: Jean-Christophe Agnew.

This project charts the emergence of a modern form of Christian nonviolence and its surprising influence on American social thought and political culture. I focus on the intellectuals and reformers who became leaders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a radical Christian pacifist organization. Between World War I and the Montgomery bus boycott, they transformed American democracy through the development of "spectacles of conscience," public displays of moral dissent such as sit-ins, boycotts, interracial association, and conscientious objection to war. Fellowship leaders, including such figures as A. J. Muste and Bayard Rustin, became the most important pioneers of nonviolent direct action, particularly through their interpretation and application of the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi. By using moral dramas as nonviolent weapons, these radical Christian pacifists influenced the labor movement, black freedom struggles, and the New Left. This project thus cuts across the political history of American liberalism and radicalism, the intellectual and religious history of ideas about violence, and the cultural development of modern forms of mass media, sympathy, and spectatorship.

The project begins by showing how radical Christian pacifism emerged out of opposition to World War I. Then I go on to demonstrate how the Fellowship's antiwar position led the group in the 1920s to a broader critique of violence that addressed questions of language, economics, race, and the family. Next, my focus shifts to the figure of Richard Gregg, a disciple of Gandhi who became the first American theorist of militant nonviolence as a pragmatic method of political action. I also discuss the struggles between pacifists and Communists on the American left during the 1930s. The last part of the project analyzes the increasing importance of Christian nonviolence in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss three aspects of World War II where the Fellowship played crucial roles: conscientious objection, opposition to Japanese-American internment, and early civil rights initiatives. The project concludes with an analysis of the postwar period and an interpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott, which marked a culmination of the development of Christian nonviolence during the previous four decades.