Is All Protest Work Morally Equal?

ABSTRACT

Often used as a tool for raising public awareness about issues that are deemed morally dubious, protests have a long and storied tradition in the history of social change in the United States. The recent ubiquity of protesting and counter-protesting in American public life has raised to the problem of false equivalency, leaving bystanders sometimes confused about how to evaluate the respective “protest” movements. In this piece, I briefly root the history and moral meaning of protest work in the Protestant Reformation and outline a set of questions that can serve as criteria for evaluating whether the moral work of contemporary protest movements is morally efficacious or morally destructive.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• protest movements
• Black Lives Matter
• abortion
• liberation theologies
• lived religion
• Christian social ethics
• feminist ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Buchanan, Bui, and Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.”

2 For a trenchant theological analysis of the Trayvon Martin case, see Douglas, Stand Your Ground.

3 For more detailed discussion of the problematic nature of the notion of “color-blind” in race relations in the US, see Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

4 Peters, Solidarity Ethics.

5 Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” 54.

6 Jordan, “U.S. Shutters Warehouse Where Migrants Were Kept in ‘Cages’.”

7 In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents multiple ways that seemingly “race-blind” public policies are implemented in ways that disproportionately harm Black citizens.

8 For a detailed analysis of how Christianity and Christian activists have distorted the abortion debate in the US, see Peters, Trust Women.

9 Gary Dorrien offers a historical analysis of social Christianity in his book, Soul in Society.

10 “Speak Truth to Power.”

11 Vellem, “Black Theology of Liberation,” 5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Todd Peters

Rebecca Todd Peters is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Poverty and Social Justice Program at Elon University. Her work as a feminist social ethicist is focused on globalization, economic, environmental, and reproductive justice. Her most recent book is Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice (Beacon Press, 2018). She received the 2018 Walter Wink Scholar-Activist Award from Auburn Seminary in recognition of her work on reproductive justice and poverty and economic justice and is currently a Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).