Protest and drive for social change must have a spiritual basis. Without a spiritual base, protest has no root, nor an intuitively beautiful driving vision. Protest just turns in to endless personal interest vs. personal interest.
The most successful sustained protest movement in modern American history was the non-violent civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s led by Martin Luther King Jr. This movement was explicitly spiritual, drawing broadly on Christian belief, and being led mainly by black churches in America. Because of this root, the movement had:
A beautiful driving vision which drew people intuitively and naturally (the end of segregation resulting in “the beloved community” – “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man”)
An eschatological hope for the individual which created the possibility of sustaining a non-violent ethic even in the face of persecution and possibly death
The weapon of change in the non-violent civil rights movement was love, and participants were encouraged again and again not to stoop so low as to hate or be bitter toward their oppressor. They were not fighting people, but injustice itself, which hurt the souls of both oppressor and oppressed. The end goal was not winning a victory over a personal opponent or flipping power dynamics but reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community. The end goal was also to be the good of the oppressor, and engaging in hate campaigns or letting personal animosity fester within one’s own spirit did not lead to this end. And the fact that the participants in the movement had an eschatological hope – beyond the temporariness of their current situation – in which “all would be well,” allowed them to sustain a non-violent ethic – an ethic of love. They could sacrifice, and even become martyrs, because, in Christian terms, Friday isn’t the end, Sunday is coming. MLK believed in and wrote about the redemptive nature of even unearned suffering. Without eschatological hope, or, at least in some sense, a spiritual worldview, this makes no sense.
A parallel movement to the American civil rights movement was the non-violent movement led by Gandhi in seeking Indian independence from Britain.
Modern protest movements must have a spiritual basis, or they will simply devolve into my interest vs. yours. In our pluralistic society, that basis likely cannot be a shared systematic philosophy or religious structure, but it could come from the shared contemplative experience of our common Source – our Ground, the Image of God in all people, Atman, the Base of Consciousness, True Nature, Tao Within, Nibbana/the Unborn, etc. This experience, spoken of in various ways by the mystics of varying traditions, is an experience of Oneness, which is directly available to all people. The natural outflowing of this experience is a vision of Oneness in all of life – the beloved community of all things. To hurt another being is to hurt oneself. To help another being is to help oneself. Embedded within the meditative experience is a feeling of Interconnectedness and Inter-being. The ethic flowing forth from the experience of Oneness is, by nature, non-violent and loving. One immersed in the experience of Oneness increasingly cannot harm another being. And although various models of eschatology exist within the various spiritual traditions, there is a hope, also embedded in the experience of Oneness, that, in the final analysis, “all will be well.” As in the civil rights movement, this hope allows the means of change to remain non-violent, loving, and pure.
The natural outflowing of experiencing Oneness at the Source is the vision of the beloved community of all beings and the naturally outflowing method of achieving this vision is the non-violent ethic of lovingkindness – creatively embodying the final vision as if it is already here, and thereby bringing it into reality.
Without a genuinely spiritual base, however it is frameworked, movements for social change will always devolve away from this vision, and toward one group over another, power vs. power. If the people involved are operating from the separate self which gets its life from defining itself against others – it’s all in vain. Samsaric. Endless “Othering,” hatred toward the enemy, etc.
This (Oneness) should be the place from which a contemplative lives their day to day life anyway. All that changes is a mass amount of people living it – experiencing Oneness and embodying it in the world. Perhaps one could think of themselves as leading an individual, protest and social change movement, every day, simply by the way you live.
Just do your spiritual practice, commit yourself to the good of the world, and live. That’s real protest and real social change, every day.
In the methods and language of modern protest movements, it’s accomplished non-coercively and naturally – by Singing.