A tradition of ethical and political thought and practice that refuses violence as a means even in the pursuit of just ends, and holds that the means employed in a struggle shape the world that the struggle produces. Nonviolence has religious roots in several traditions — the Jain principle of ahimsa, the Sermon on the Mount, parts of the Buddhist and Quaker traditions — and a modern political articulation that runs through Tolstoy, Gandhi, and the African American freedom struggle.
Mohandas Gandhi's satyagraha ("truth-force"), developed in South Africa and applied across the Indian independence movement, is the central 20th-century elaboration: a disciplined practice of accepting suffering rather than inflicting it, refusing cooperation with unjust laws, and confronting the adversary in ways designed to convert rather than merely defeat. The transmission into the American civil-rights movement ran in part through Howard Thurman, whose 1935 delegation met with Gandhi in India and brought back the conviction that Gandhian methods could be wedded to Black Christian theology. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the synthesis its public form: nonviolence as a way of life and a tactic, grounded in agape love, aimed at the Beloved Community in which the adversary too is reconciled rather than destroyed.
Nonviolence in this tradition is not pacifism in the weak sense of refusing to act. It is an active, demanding, often dangerous practice that requires training, organization, and a willingness to accept consequences without retaliation. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement gave it American Catholic form; Thomas Merton gave it a contemplative theology; Bonhoeffer famously concluded that under Nazism the principle reached its limit. The argument over whether and when nonviolence is the right discipline — and how its meaning shifts in conditions of state violence — remains live.