Since early December 2025, Minnesota has been under siege.
Stories and videos have been pouring out of Minnesota — and elsewhere in the United States — of ICE’s violent, illegal and unethical actions. We have seen peaceful protesters assaulted; we have seen children detained; we have seen U.S. citizens murdered.
When confronted with violence, it is only natural to want to respond violently. Our brains are wired to protect us, and under threat they flip into “fight-or-flight” mode, where aggression can feel like the safest or most reasonable option. Add in anger, fear and a sense of injustice, and violent retaliation can feel not just understandable but necessary.
Josh Olds
When you see an invading force dominating through the systemic use of violence, it is easy to believe the solution is bigger and better violence. Our politics, our policing — even our superhero films — reflect this. The winner is the one who is biggest, strongest, most powerful.
Faced with a violent federal government already accusing peaceful protesters of being violent agitators and encultured within a nation that long has normalized violent solutions to violence, Minneapolis — and the United States at large — sits at a tipping point: Can “Minnesota nice” prevail?
For the sake of the nation, it must. Violence cannot be the solution to violence.
In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan collected data on 323 violent and nonviolent political revolutions in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The revolution was considered successful if the goal of the resistance group had been achieved within one year of the resistance’s peak. What they found upended traditional thinking.
Nonviolent campaigns were successful or partially successful 80% of the time.
Violent campaigns were successful or partially successful only 33% of the time.
“Nonviolence is more effective than violence — particularly when facing the forces of empire.”
Nonviolence is more effective than violence — particularly when facing the forces of empire. That’s why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, calls his followers to engage evil through creative acts of protest.
In Matthew 5:39, Jesus says, “Do not resist an evil person.” The Greek word used for “resist” is antistenai, which usually carries military connotations. When Jesus says, “Don’t resist,” he isn’t saying to give up but not to use the tactics of empire, not to respond in violence.
What Jesus describes is not passivity, but a form of mass participation resistance that strips violence of its power.
Instead, Jesus says to turn the other cheek, mocking the enemy; to give the outer cloak, exposing the enemy’s cruelty; and to go the second mile, taking control back from the enemy. These creative acts of protest confuse and confound a system of empire built on control and violence.
And Jesus says we practice these things because nonviolence is the way of the kin-dom of God and because the ways of God work.
Chenoweth and Stephan surmise that nonviolence works because it engenders a sense of community. Nonviolent resistance requires a greater number of people working together — and that makes nonviolence effective. Individual nonviolence is commendable and moral, but it is communal nonviolence that brings change. A nonviolent community lives and breathes a new way of being into the world in the face of authoritarian violence.
Nonviolent resistance can be for everyone. It has a lower barrier of participation. With violence, one can only participate with violence. With nonviolence, one can participate in resistance through any number of ways that fit all ages, talents, and abilities.
“Nonviolent resistance can be for everyone. It has a lower barrier of participation.”
A nonviolent community can be expansive and inclusive. It finds strength in its diversity. Nonviolent unity in the face of violence is a threat to the violent. And while it takes a community, it doesn’t always take as many as you think.
Chenoweth found if only 3.5% of the population engaged in sustained, active, nonviolent resistance, success was nearly inevitable. When the community comes together, the forces of darkness can be repelled.
History bears this out again and again. Organized solidarity disrupts systems of violence not by mirroring their brutality, but by denying them legitimacy, labor and consent. Collective courage, patiently sustained, turns moral authority into political power.
There are about 347,000 adults living in Minneapolis. 3.5% of that is 12,145. By many accounts, Minneapolis has surpassed its 3.5%.
The trick now is to sustain. To keep pressing on. To not give in to the threat or allure of violent action. To continue to expose the empire’s evils to the world. To relentlessly push back against the propaganda and lies. To remain steadfast and demand change from those in power. To not give up or give in, but speak a vision of a different way of living and being in the world.
These are dark times, but they are so very precedented. Martin Luther King Jr., writing in 1963, said a commitment to nonviolence “does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage they did not know they had.”
We can win. This type of political violence can be the dying throes of a desperate system — but only if we have the moral imagination to envision an alternative. When we join together, actively and nonviolently, against the forces of death that inhabit us, we can create a new and better future.
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.