The Army of Civility

Being civil doesn't mean being weak. It requires being strong.

(How many people see civility.)

Author's note: I'm changing my publication schedule so that I can spend more time each Saturday with my beautiful wife. From now on, weekly posts should be published every Thursday.

Whenever I advocate for civility, a frequent response is the idea that civility is the coward's way out. Critics argue that civility amounts to refusing to fight. They dismiss it as waving the white flag of surrender in the face of hostility. They categorize it, as my friend Angel Eduardo and I wrote for Quillette, as "appeals to sing 'kumbaya' with people who would destroy or erase you if they had the chance."

Why do so many of us dismiss civility in this way? I think one reason is that, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed 60 years ago, civility and nonviolence go against our ideals of what it means to be a man. As King put it in Why We Can't Wait:

"The eye-for-an-eye philosophy, the impulse to defend oneself when attacked, has always been held as the highest measure of American manhood. We are a nation that worships the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice."

When we think of heroes in our society, we most often think of superheroes. We think of Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker, of Clark Kent and Black Widow. It's hard to imagine Black Widow turning the other cheek. It's hard to imagine Batman telling Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, "Go ahead and hit me; I won't fight back. And when you hit me, your violence will show the people of this city how bad you really are."

I think a second reason that so many people see civility as the coward's way out is that we talk like we're in a war. Our cultural conflict isn't an academic and disinterested search for truth; it's a war with fronts and soldiers, victories and defeats. And in a war, you want to kill the enemy. Caring for his soul and saying nice things to him is frowned upon.

I've experienced this impulse towards violence in my own life. About a year ago, my wife and I were in a situation with an active shooter. As we barricaded ourselves in a room, the only question in my mind was: if the shooter kicked down that door, would I have the requisite courage to jump on him and take his shots, and either kill him or (more likely) let my bullet-riddled body serve as a shield so that my wife could escape? Having never been in a life-and-death situation before, that was an open question (fortunately, the police came and so it remains an open one). But one question that wasn't on my mind: how do I best love and care for the shooter? As far as I was concerned, he could die if it meant my wife lived. In a real war with physical weapons, I think the desire to kill our enemies is no bad thing.

But is this criticism–that civility is the coward's way out–fair? In spite of the above arguments, I don't think so.

In Why We Can't Wait, King noted that the civil rights protestors had to adhere to civility and nonviolence as a foundational ideal. When protestors were kicked and beaten in the streets, King didn't just urge them not to fight back with their fists. He exhorted them to eschew all violence, even the violence of hating their oppressors inside the confines of their own mind. He asked protestors to sign a pledge that they would, among other things, "REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart."

In spite of–or perhaps because of–this requirement, King called the protestors an army. Here's how he described it:

"We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. It was an army that would move but not maul. It was an army that would sing but not slay. It was an army that would flank but not falter. It was an army to storm bastions of hatred, to lay siege to the fortresses of segregation, to surround symbols of discrimination."

This army didn't use traditional weapons. As King proudly writes, none of them wielded so much as a pocket knife to fend off the police and vicious dogs that Eugene "Bull" Connor set on them. Instead they had a better weapon. King again:

"At the same time, we urged the volunteers to give up any possible weapons that they might have on their persons….We proved to them that we needed no weapons—not so much as a toothpick. We proved that we possessed the most formidable weapon of all—the conviction that we were right. We had the protection of our knowledge that we were more concerned about realizing our righteous aims than about saving our skins."

When we respond to our political opponents with kindness and love, we are not refusing to fight. We too are part of an army. I call it the Army of Civility.

Of course, I'm not attempting to equate people who engage civilly with their political opponents today with the heroic protestors of the 1950s and 1960s. The protestors had a far more difficult job. In 2024, being civil means refraining from the violence of "tongue" and "heart". For the civil rights protestors, it meant giving up their bodies to the fists of their oppressors. In 2024, being civil means loving the person who insults us. That is no easy task, but it is far easier than the task of King and his followers: to love and pray for the policeman who beat them or the Klansmen who bombed their homes.

Nonetheless, I think King's exhortations to and descriptions of nonviolence can provide a blueprint when it comes to navigating our own political conflict. In particular, I think King's metaphor of the nonviolent movement as an army is more accurate than the modern-day notion that civility is the coward's way out. When we engage our political opponents with civility, we are not waving the white flag of surrender. We are still fighting in the culture war (for instance, anyone who reads me regularly knows that I criticize the ideology of Social Justice Fundamentalism on a very regular basis). 

But we are using different–and, I would argue, more powerful–weapons.

But there's more to King's metaphor of people who treat their opponents with civility as an army. Being in an army requires something of us. It requires self-sacrifice. It requires dedication. It requires fortitude. It requires digging deep so that we can clear the hurdles to enrollment and mission success–no-one becomes a Navy SEAL just by sitting on the couch.

Being a soldier in the Army of Civility requires the same. It is not an easy path. It requires discipline and courage.

When someone lashes out at us, civility requires that we master ourselves rather than let our ego run the show. We have to meditate on and act on what I personally think of as Jesus' hardest teaching (Matthew 5:44, "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," (NIV))*** rather than falling into the all-too-human desire to lash out in return. It takes discipline to not fight fire with fire.

When someone lashes out at us, we also have to open ourselves up in a spirit of love and vulnerability in order to keep trying to win their soul. This is no small thing. It requires letting go of our fear of them. It is much easier to approach those who hurt us with armor on and swords raised than it is to take off our armor and let them cut us because we know that the latter move will do more for our overall mission.

When we have an opportunity to dunk on a political opponent on social media, the creed of civility requires that we forgo the dopamine-inducing likes and retweets that our in-group would give us and instead keep our eye on the broader objective (winning hearts and minds).

Being a soldier in the Army of Civility is hard. It demands something from us that simply fighting fire with fire does not. But it is also worth it. When we practice civility, our objectives come into reach.

An organization that I volunteer with, Braver Angels, is dedicated to reducing affective polarization and restoring trust and civility to our politics. One tenet of The Braver Angels Way is that "none of us are not worth talking to." A corollary of this tenet is that no-one is unwinnable. Jamie Winship is a Christian pastor who made a career out of meeting Islamic terrorists with love and kindness and convincing them to put down their weapons. Daryl Davis, a black musician, has convinced hundreds of Klansmen to hang up their robes and disavow their old hatred through the transformative power of friendship. King led a nonviolent protest movement that transformed the hearts and minds of an entire nation.

If the power of civility can win over Klansmen and Islamic terrorists, it can certainly win over our political opponents.

And, unlike a traditional army, the Army of Civility needs only a few volunteers. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote of Gandhi that, "Mahatma Gandhi never had more than one hundred persons absolutely committed to his philosophy. But with this small group of devoted followers, he galvanized the whole of India, and through a magnificent feat of nonviolence challenged the might of the British Empire and won freedom for his people."

King also quoted Henry David Thoreau:

“I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name—if ten honest men only—aye, if one honest man, in the state of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from the copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be, what is once well done is done forever.”

This is more true today than it ever was. King's nonviolent army needed the attention of the press in order to reach the eyes and change the hearts of people far away. But we have social media. So many of our political disagreements take place on social media; and on social media, every one of us is in a fishbowl. When we are civil to our opponents on X, thousands of people see that interaction–and think just a little bit better of our cause as a result.

So here's our exercise this week, as a community of practice. Next time someone insults you or attacks your politics, take the time to respond with civility and love. Afterwards, check your own psychology and ask yourself if that was harder or easier than fighting fire with fire.

And let us know what you discover.

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