[Friday], the U.N. treaty [declared] that the manufacture, possession, use or threat to use nuclear weapons is illegal under international law, 75 years after their development and first use. Actions, events, vigils and celebrations will be held around the nation and the globe to mark this historic moment.

Even though I’ve spent most of my life working for the abolition of nuclear weapons, I never thought I’d live to see this day. The most striking test of faith came in none other than Oslo, Norway, where my friend, actor Martin Sheen, and I were invited to be the keynote speakers at the launch of something called “The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,” or ICAN, which went on to the win the Nobel Peace Prize.

I have been arrested dozens of times for nonviolent civil disobedience actions against nuclear weapons, including at the White House, the Pentagon, several Trident submarine bases, the SAC command base near Omaha, Nebraska, the Nevada Test Site and Livermore Labs. Since 2003, I have led the annual Hiroshima Day peace vigil outside the national nuclear weapons labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico. I had been planning with friends a major anti-nuclear vigil, rally and conference near Los Alamos, New Mexico to mark the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima, but instead, we held a powerful virtual online conference seen by thousands that featured Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility and one of the leaders of ICAN.

On Dec. 7, 1993, with Philip Berrigan and two friends, I walked on to the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, right through the middle of national war games, up to one of the nuclear-capable F15 fighter bombers and hammered on it, to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that some day people would “beat swords into plowshares and study war no more.” For that act, I faced 20 years in prison, was convicted on several felony counts, spent nine months in a tiny cell, several years under house arrest and continued to be heavily monitored by the government. My friends, Dan and Phil Berrigan, who launched the Plowshares movement dreamed of this day. Other friends sit in prisons across the nation today for their recent actions.

But this was something else. This was a first for me. We had been brought to Oslo by the Norwegian government. We stood before some 900 people that Saturday night, March 1, 2013, at the civic forum, which preceded the global gathering of representatives from over 132 nations. (Of course, the United States refused to attend.) The formal meeting would start Monday morning. As far as we could tell, there had never been such a conference before in history.

Martin began his talk by thanking ICAN for their work to build a global abolition movement, and encouraged everyone to keep at it. He read aloud their general call for nuclear-armed states to completely eliminate nuclear weapons — and a treaty banning any state from developing them.

For the next 48 hours we spoke non-stop, in workshops, to the press, to small groups and large groups. We were given a private tour of the Nobel Peace Prize museum, attended a reception with the Norwegian Parliament and met many members and politicians whom we urged to carry on their initiative for the abolition of nuclear weapons, including Norway’s foreign minister, the Vice President of Parliament, and the Mayor of Oslo.

It was there at that reception that we met Dr. Ira Helfand, who told us that — for the first time in four decades — he felt hopeful about nuclear disarmament. There has never been such an important gathering in history, he said with a smile.

At one point during the ICAN conference, a teenage student asked to speak privately with me. He confided that he was one of the survivors of the massacre a year and a half before, when an insane shooter killed 78 children during their summer camp on an island in a large lake not far from Oslo. My new friend told me how he dodged the bullets and swam far out into the lake and barely survived. He wanted to talk with me about nonviolence and forgiveness. I encouraged him on his journey of healing toward a deeper peace, but was profoundly moved by his connection between the summer camp massacre and the global massacre that can be unleashed through nuclear weapons. He saw now what most people refuse to see. And he was determined to do his part to prevent a global massacre of children.

READ: Where Do We Go from Here?

All of these experiences were so touching and inspiring, but there was something even more powerful afoot. From the moment we landed in Oslo, as we met various dignitaries and longtime anti-nuclear leaders from around the globe, we heard the same statement over and over again: We are going to abolish nuclear weapons.

After a while, Martin and I looked at one another and thought to ourselves: something’s not right with these people. Sure, we do what we can, of course, but we’re not going to live to see the abolition of nuclear weapons. Our new friends were drinking the Kool-Aid.

But we didn’t know who we were dealing with, nor did we yet understand the faith and hope that undergirds lasting global change movements. These were the same people who organized the global campaign to outlaw landmines in 1997. These were the same people who organized the global campaign to ban cluster bombs in 2008. Now, they were telling us calmly, they were setting their sights on nuclear weapons. They intended to use the same tried and true strategy to slowly plot their end. This was going to work. No doubt about it.

All we have to do is get 50 nations to sign a U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons, they said; then we can slowly chip away at every other nation in the world, until all that are left of the nine nuclear weapons nations who will eventually be shamed into dismantling their weapons and signing the United Nations’ Treaty. It was a no-brainer.

“Well, good luck with that,” we said.

And here we are. Today, the treaty goes into effect. Today is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.

For my friends and me, this is a day we never quite believed we would see.

“Right now, the treaty does not legally apply to the United States,” said Ken Mayers of Veterans for Peace New Mexico, “because we have not signed or ratified it. But that does not mean we will not be feeling the moral force of the treaty. All nuclear weapons, including the thousands in the U.S. stockpile, have been declared unlawful by the international community.”

Mayers and others will keep vigil today near the labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, calling for an end to weapons development. Similar vigils will be held across the United States today with banners hung outside nuclear weapons production sites declaring “Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal!”

“The treaty is a turning point,” said Joni Arends, of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. “On the one hand, it is the end of a long process to outlaw nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it is just the beginning of a new movement to confront nuclear weapons states and demand they lift the dark shadow of nuclear annihilation that has loomed over the world for the last 75 years.”

“The U.S. was among the last major countries to abolish slavery but did so in the end,” said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “To modify Dr. King’s famous quote: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards [the] justice’ of abolishing nuclear weapons. This ban treaty is the beginning of that end and should be celebrated as such.”

Every time we have journeyed up to Los Alamos over the years, we offered the same, simple message: Nuclear weapons have totally failed us. They don’t make us safer; they can’t protect us; they don’t provide jobs; they don’t make us more secure; they’re sinful, immoral and inhuman. They bankrupt us, economically and spiritually.

According to the Doomsday Clock, we are in greater danger now than ever. A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan is very possible; an all-out nuclear war would end life as we know it. If we spent billions instead on teaching and building nonviolent civilian-based defense systems and nonviolent conflict resolution programs around the world, to be orchestrated by the United Nations, we could make war itself obsolete.

The work of ICAN and the United Nations to get 50 nations to outlaw nuclear weapons and build a process toward their elimination is one of the most exciting, hopeful — if widely ignored — movements in the world today.

Just before Christmas, Dr. Helfand called me. He continues to work morning to night in a Massachusetts clinic treating COVID patients, but he wanted to talk about the treaty. “How can we push Americans to demand that the United States sign the treaty and dismantle our arsenal,” he asked me? “How can we mobilize the movement to make President Biden and the U.S. Congress do the right thing?”

That’s the question. We talked about various efforts we could make, and agreed to do what we could. “The responsibility lies with us,” he said. “We were the first to use nuclear weapons; we must be the ones to end them once and for all.”

A few days later, he sent me an email with the gist of our message. In addition to climate change, the nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world pose an existential threat to humanity. The threat of nuclear war has never been greater, with tensions rising between the United States, Russia and China. Even a limited nuclear war could kill hundreds of millions, and bring about a global famine that would put billions of people at risk. A larger war could kill the vast majority of humanity.

“This is not the future that must be,” Dr. Helfand wrote me. “Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature. They are little machines that we have built with our own hands, and we know how to take them apart. Nations around the world have come together in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is time for us to move back from the brink and eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.”

And so, the day has come when that long dreamed of future has become a real possibility. Our task is to make the possible probable, and then actual. Time to get back to work. We need to call President Biden and Congress, write letters to the editor, mobilize the movement, tell the nation: Let’s abolish nuclear weapons now, once and forever, and use the billions of dollars we spend on these weapons to vaccinate everyone, rebuild our nation, protect the environment, abolish war and poverty, and welcome a new culture of peace and nonviolence.

As I learned in Oslo, anything is possible if you believe.

This piece first appeared on wagingnonviolence.org. 

On Tuesday, Jan. 17th, 18 of us climbed the steps of the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. to protest the death penalty. We unfurled a huge thirty-foot long banner that read “Stop Executions!” We also dropped dozens of red and yellow roses all over the steps (representing all the executed and their victims). Hundreds of supporters watched and sang as the police arrested us. It was beautiful.

Our nonviolent direct action marked the 40th anniversary of the modern death penalty era. Organized by the Abolitionist Action Committee, our number included leaders and ministers from Black Lives Matters, Sojourners and Red Letter Christians, as well as the anti-death penalty leaders, including members of “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, ” people whose loved ones were killed but are against the death penalty.

READ other testimonies from SCOTUS action for life.

One was Sam Sheppard, whose father was wrongly convicted of killing his mother, who spent ten years in prison before being freed (you might know his story from the TV show and Hollywood movies, “The Fugitive.”)

We were remembering January 17, 1977, the day the State of Utah shot to death Gary Gilmore, who “volunteered” to be killed in revenge for his murder of Ben Bushnell and Max Jenson. This state-assisted suicide was the first execution after the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision to uphold the death penalty. Since then, there have been 1442 more executions. Make that 1443. The day after our protest, Virginia executed Ricky Gray. Nearly 3, 000 prisoners are currently on death rows in 31 states.

Another friend arrested was Randy Gardner, whose brother was executed in Utah, like Gilmore, by firing squad. “My Brother Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed in 2010 by the same state and by the same method as Gilmore, ” Gardner stated. “I believed then, and I still believe now, that the death penalty is morally wrong. I never condoned what my brother did, but when the state executes someone, they create yet another family that is damaged and grieving. We don’t have to kill to be safe from dangerous criminals and hold them accountable. It is time to abolish the death penalty.”

At the center of our group was one of the sweetest and bravest people I’ve ever met—Derrick Jamison—who spent twenty years on death row, came close to being executed six times, and 11 years ago was released after DNA proved he was completely innocent. He was arrested with us!

A word of encouragement from Sister Helen Prejan

Though our witness was beautiful, we paid for it dearly. The police put the cuffs on as tight as possible, and we heard the commander say, “Put them through the system.” For me, the officer pulled my right hand back and pinched the nerve on my thumb deliberately; I was sure he was going to break my hand. We thought another friend did have his hand and shoulder broken, so he was hospitalized. We were chained by the ankles, waists and behind our backs most of the time, and it was very painful. During our two horrific days in chains and jail, we had very little water, and for me, two pieces of wonder bread.

On Tuesday night, we were put into very tiny cells with steel metal to lie on and bright lights on us. Welcome to D.C. Central Cellblock, a place I know well. Once you lay down, you were surrounded by cockroaches. Not one person in the group slept and we each went through an unexpected, terrible ordeal. (Several of us, for example, were nauseous the entire time.)

On Wednesday, we were moved into the main cells of D.C. Superior Court, all chained together—ankles, waists, and wrists–and there met hundreds of guys awaiting court. We were arraigned at 5 p.m. on Wednesday night, pled not guilty, but if found guilty could face sixty days in prison and a $5000 fine.

The government is clearly going after us for daring such a public spectacle at the Supreme Court. We have a hearing in late February, but instead of backing down, we will work to put the death penalty on trial sometime in the Spring.

As we go forward into this new administration, we keep on resisting every form of violence, come what may, including the death penalty, racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, poverty, corporate greed, war, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction. We go forward in a spirit of nonviolence in pursuit of a new culture of justice and nonviolence. And so, the struggle continues!

READ statements of support from other faith leaders at On Faith.

A few years after I was released from jail, while running an inner-city community center for disenfranchised women and children in Richmond, Virginia, I was confronted by a charismatic, young priest whom I greatly admired. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Tell me really: why did you do it?”

I could have explained how in our own history, every major movement from the abolitionists to the suffragists to the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, had its breakthrough when good people broke bad laws and accepted the consequences.

I could have spoken about Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail, ” where he urges us to obey just laws and disobey unjust laws. I could have pointed to international law and the Nuremberg Principles, as I have in many courtrooms before many judges, and explained that it is our duty to resist governments and break laws when they legalize mass murder or preparations for mass murder—as our government does it with its illegal nuclear arsenal.

But I said simply: “I am trying to follow Jesus. Jesus was nonviolent and practiced civil disobedience and was eventually arrested, jailed and executed. I’m supposed to be his follower, and in this world of total violence, injustice, poverty, war and nuclear weapons, it seems inevitable that I, too, must engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Most of the saints and martyrs were arrested and jailed—up to Dr. King, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Tutu, and the Berrigans. They probably won’t kill us, but they sure will arrest and jail us if we work for justice and peace and resist war and empire, but the main thing is—I want to keep following Jesus all the way to the cross.”

My friend looked at me in stunned astonishment. His mouth hung open. He was speechless. Eventually, he just whispered, “Okay, ” and walked away.

Civil disobedience, in a world of total violence, war, poverty and nuclear weapons, is a way for me to follow the nonviolent, civilly disobedient Jesus. I agree with Gandhi, that great practitioner of civil disobedience, that Jesus practiced perfect nonviolence, was the greatest nonviolent resister in history, and engaged in regular civil disobedience.

Twenty years ago, I published a book called The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience (Fortkamp Pub., 1994), in which I tried to look thoroughly at its theory, practice and theology. I examined civil disobedience in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, in U.S. history, in the lives of our great teachers such as Gandhi, King, Day and the Berrigans, and in its details—how to prepare for civil disobedience, what to expect from arrest, trial and jail, and so forth. I also shared many of my own trouble-making experiences—from my first arrest at the Pentagon in 1984, to arrests at military bases around the country (such as West Point, the SAC base, Livermore Labs and the Concord Naval Weapons Station, the Trident Base in Florida, the Nevada Test Site, to name a few).

But as I reviewed the history, theory and practice of civil disobedience, I remember I kept coming back to Jesus and the question of our discipleship. For years, my friends and I asked each other: What does it mean to take up the cross and follow Jesus? We came to the conclusion that the cross is nonviolent resistance to the culture of war and empire; it was the natural public consequence from the state for our nonviolent civil disobedience to war and empire.

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John Dear with Tony and Shane at Greenbelt 2012

I came to the conclusion that Jesus engaged in civil disobedience every single day of his public life, that nearly everything he did was illegal, that his mere nonviolent presence was a threat to empire. I used to joke that Jesus was “a one man crime wave, ” walking through the Roman empire. Actually, he was even more threatening—he was a movement organizer, building a community and a movement among poor people to nonviolently resist the empire and the unjust religious system that backed it in the name of God.

As I studied the Gospels, I discovered nearly a dozen types of civil disobedience that Jesus practiced–such as his prophetic proclamation of the coming of God’s reign in general, and his reading from the book of Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue in particular, as subversive truth-telling which threatened the empire; touching and healing lepers, which they thought would threaten everyone’s health; dining and associating with “public sinners, ” outcasts and the marginalized;  repeatedly breaking Sabbath laws;  violating the cleanliness laws and eating codes;  visiting “enemy” territories and associating with the enemy (such as the Samaritans) and with violent revolutionaries (the Zealots);  engaging in symbolic action and political street theater (riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and fulfilling Zechariah 9:9, about the coming of a king of peace who will end war forever);  and urging people not to pay their taxes (one of the “capital crimes” for which he was “capitally punished.”)

Certainly the climax of his public work—even his life—was his nonviolent civil disobedience in the Temple, where he turned over the tables of the money changers and prevented people from engaging in the profitable big business of organized religion. The Synoptic Gospels tell the same basic story line: Jesus marched from Galilee to Jerusalem on a campaign of nonviolence like Gandhi going to the sea or Dr. King marching from Selma; entered the Temple where the religious authorities worked in conjunction with the empire and forced the faithful to pay a hefty sum to visit God; and engaged in nonviolent direct action. He did not hit anyone, hurt anyone, kill anyone, or drop any bombs—but he was not passive. He was active, provocative, dangerous, illegal, and civilly disobedient, a disturber of the peace, a troublemaker, a nonviolent revolutionary who broke the unjust laws and mores of an unjust society.

This is the person we claim to follow!

The Gospel of John, written many years later, puts Jesus’ civil disobedience in the Temple right up to the beginning of the story (just after the wedding at Cana). There, it says he made a whip of cords and drove everyone out. That is the only place in the entire Bible where this particular, obscure Greek word is mentioned; it was a specific type of rope used to lead the thousands of sheep, cattle and animals up into the enormous Temple structure. He took that rope and led the animals back out of the Temple. Fifteen hundred years later, El Greco painted Jesus with a twenty foot whip hurting people; that is not at all how I read the text. If anything, Jesus saved the lives of the animals as well! But the real point of placing the story at the beginning of the Gospel is its allusion to resurrection: “Destroy this temple, ” Jesus says pointing to himself, “and I will raise it up in the three days.”

So the Synoptics make it clear that Jesus’ final civil disobedience in the Temple led to his arrest a few days later, his jailing, trial and brutal execution. This is a great challenge to anyone who seriously wants to follow this Jesus. Are we willing to give our lives to resist empire, injustice, and the oppression of the poor? How seriously do we want to follow him?

But turns out–there was one more final act of civil disobedience left to come: The Resurrection!

The Resurrection is the greatest act of civil disobedience in all of human history.

As Daniel Berrigan once said, just as the crucifixion of Jesus was perfectly legal, so the resurrection of Jesus was totally illegal. Matthew’s Gospel emphasizes this point: the Roman authorities placed guards at his tomb with the imperial seal saying, in Dan’s words, “We’ve killed you and we put you in the tomb and now you’re dead! So stay there!” But Jesus rises from the dead, breaks the imperial seal, and indeed, breaks the law which says “Once you’re dead, you’re dead.” His resurrection is the perfect nonviolent revolution and changes everything.

To this day, the illegally risen Jesus remains at large, out and about, forming his underground movement of nonviolence, organizing for the abolition of war, poverty, empire and nuclear weapons, and the coming of God’s reign of nonviolence! Wherever people are resisting injustice and giving their lives for justice and peace, he’s there.

I’ve written much about my own experience of civil disobedience, including my prison journal, Peace Behind Bars, (available from Sheed & Ward/Rowman & Littlefield). I’m fundamentally interested in practicing the nonviolence of Jesus, proclaiming his reign and practice of nonviolence, and trying every nonviolent means possible to help end war, poverty and nuclear weapons. That means, writing, speaking, lobbying, preaching, organizing, marching, praying, fasting–and occasionally crossing the line. For me, this is all part of modern-day, post-modern discipleship.

For the Christian, working for peace and justice, and thus resisting war and injustice, means sooner or later sharing in the nonviolence and civil disobedience of Jesus.

I remember what my friend Sr. Joan Chittister wrote to me while I was in jail: “I suppose you are showing us that the only way peace and justice and social change happen is through our participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus.”  Amen, Sister.

That’s a hard teaching, but a helpful reminder. If we want to follow the nonviolent Jesus, then we’ll want to make the journey from baptism to community, to understanding the Sermon on the Mount, to serving those in need, to working for justice and practicing nonviolence, and eventually, sooner or later, in such a world of war, empire and nuclear weapons, to crossing the line, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and risking the cross and the resurrection.

I can think of no greater blessing.

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John Dear is a longtime peace activist and the author of 30 books, including Jesus the Rebel, The God of Peace, The Questions of Jesus, Living Peace, Transfiguration, Disarming the Heart, You Will Be My Witnesses, Lazarus Come Forth, and his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. He writes a weekly blog at www.ncronline.org. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. See: www.johndear.org

Photo Credit: Karl Mondon