Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History) [Hardcover]

Joseph Kosek (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231144180 | ISBN-13: 978-0231144186 | Publication Date: January 28, 2009

In response to the massive bloodshed that defined the twentieth century, American religious radicals developed a modern form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi, these "acts of conscience" included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes, and conscientious objection to war.

Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Kip Kosek traces the impact of A. J. Muste, Richard Gregg, and other radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice. These dissenters found little hope in the secular ideologies of Wilsonian Progressivism, revolutionary Marxism, and Cold War liberalism, all of which embraced organized killing at one time or another. The example of Jesus, they believed, demonstrated the immorality and futility of such violence under any circumstance and for any cause. Yet the theories of Christian nonviolence are anything but fixed. For decades, followers have actively reinterpreted the nonviolent tradition, keeping pace with developments in politics, technology, and culture.

Tracing the rise of militant nonviolence across a century of industrial conflict, imperialism, racial terror, and international warfare, Kosek recovers radical Christians' remarkable stance against the use of deadly force, even during World War II and other seemingly just causes. His research sheds new light on an interracial and transnational movement that posed a fundamental, and still relevant, challenge to the American political and religious mainstream.

(Vol 46 No 11)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is the best new work on the history of American pacifism to appear in many years. Joseph Kip Kosek offers a bold, original, and lucid brief for the importance of the tradition of Christian nonviolence in twentieth-century U.S. reform, and in the process resurrects such forgotten figures as Richard Gregg, a pioneering American advocate of Gandhian philosophy and tactics. Twenty-first-century scholars and activists alike would do well to give this book a careful reading and heed the lessons it has to teach.

(Maurice Isserman, James L. Ferguson Professor of History, Hamilton College, and author of If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left Dec 2009)

Joseph Kip Kosek effectively pushes the leaders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other radical Christian pacifists to the front ranks of the American left in the mid-twentieth century. His sympathetic, deeply-researched account of the stubborn, nonviolent resistance of his protagonists to the coercive injustice, imperial ambition, and crackpot realism of an earlier age might well instruct those who would muster the courage to challenge them again in our own time.

(Robert Westbrook, author of Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II Dec. 2010)

In focusing closely on the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Joseph Kip Kosek discerns a paradoxical realism at the heart of Christian nonviolence. Even if these pacifist proponents failed in their grander dreams of limiting international warfare, they nonetheless crafted—and shrewdly publicized—an unusually effective instrument of social and political change: nonviolent direct action. Kosek's perceptive account of this twentieth-century radical vanguard brings a transnational vision to the civil rights movement and, through FOR, unveils an activist network of spectacular ingenuity and courage.

(Leigh E. Schmidt, Princeton University )

A nuanced portrait of an important American social movement and a well-done combination of intellectual and social history.

(Choice )

Acts of Conscience deftly illuminates mainstream Protestant pacifism.

(Annals of Iowa )

Kosek has written a key work for all who are interested in the beliefs and causes that helped shape the United States during the twentieth century and beyond.

(Anne Klejment Journal of American History )

If you have even a remote interest in this topic, pick up this book and read.

(John F. Piper Jr. Church History )

A phenomenal book, one of the best we have now on the course of liberal Protestant pacifism in twentieth-century America.

(Perry Bush, Bluffton University The Mennonite Quarterly Review )

About the Author

Joseph Kip Kosek is associate professor of American studies at George Washington University.

(Summer 2010)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (January 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231144180
• ISBN-13: 978-0231144186
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,642,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important account of a little rembered history, March 8, 2010

By 

T. Grimsrud (Harrisonburg, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History) (Hardcover)

This well-written book makes an important contribution to a reassessment of the significance of Christian pacifism in 20th century America. Focusing especially on the legacy of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Kosek vividly portrays a generation of peacemakers who sought with great commitment and some important successes to resist the modern world's march to the abyss of overwhelming violence and injustice.

Kosek begins with an account of the experience of the Great War (World War I) and the disillusionment with warfare that emerged from that event. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in Europe in the midst of the War as a pacifist witness to international brotherhood, established a strong foothold in the United States in the 1920s, and many of its leaders gained positions of prominence in the then culturally potent world of American Protestantism. It is difficult for present-day Americans to imagine how prominent these pacifists were, especially in urban areas such as New York and Chicago.

In a particularly interesting emphasis, Kosek recovers the memory of Richard Gregg, a remarkable pacifist idealist who apprenticed under Mahatma Gandhi himself and through numerous books exerted significant influence among pacifists who sought to apply their convictions more broadly than simply saying no to war. Gregg's influence reached its apex during the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s when he was commonly cited by Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of his main inspirations.

Kosek tells the tragic story of the inability of the pacifists to stem the march toward World War II, and the increased marginalization of the FOR--with the important exception of the Civil Rights movement. The final, too short, chapter summarizes the evolution of pacifism in face of the disintegration of Civil Rights activism and the efforts to oppose atomic weapons and the Vietnam War.

I highly recommend this book. The writing is straightforward, clear, and engaging. The story is important, and it is told with a strong grounding in solid historical research. Kosek makes a persuasive case for the on-going relevance of the pacifist ideals and their under-recognized significance in the events of the past 100 years.

The only criticisms I can find to offer have to do with the book's relative brevity (the main text covers only 245 pages). I would have liked more reflection on the role of the Historic Peace Churches in this story. Quakers show up throughout the book, but aren't really given any stage time (for example, neither Rufus Jones nor Clarence Pickett, two remarkable Quaker peace leaders, receive attention). Kosek shares the lack of interest toward the Mennonite peace witness characteristic of most historians of this topic. It would also have been nice to have seen the Catholic Worker movement get more attention. Given how well Kosek writes, another 100 pages or so would not have been burdensome for the reader.

It is encouraging to have this book bring to mind again the work of a group of people who did their best to witness to an alternative to the blank check for total war most citizens gave their countries in the century of total war. This witness remains a window into the only way out for a world still all too caught up in the myth of redemptive violence.