We have a practical framework for American resistance. Now we need a spiritual one | Rami Nashashibi

10 hours ago 3

Across the country, organizers are carrying something heavier, clearer and more spiritually charged than anything I have seen in over 30 years of this work. From veteran freedom fighters to young activists, there is a growing alignment around the unmistakable presence of evil in our public life. The horrors unfolding before us have sharpened our collective sight and deepened the understanding that our resistance must be morally unwavering and spiritually grounded.

The spiritual framework for this argument begins with a simple conviction. Our movements need to reclaim a moral vocabulary that names evil plainly. Dr King understood this. When he named the pain of poverty, the sickness of racism and the excess of materialism, he called them the “triple evils”, speaking with unflinching clarity about the devastation that this collective evil was inflicting on the country, on our conscience and on our very souls. We are living in such a moment again. The evil is fully out, and anyone with spiritual integrity can see it. Among the forces driving that clarity are Gaza, empire and ICE.

For two years, the world has watched the systematic slaughter of civilians in Gaza, an industrial scale cruelty carried out by one of the most powerful militaries on Earth. The devastation was not only permitted by the United States; it was carried out with our weapons, our cover and our political immunity. Not long ago, people still debated the nuances of settler colonial frameworks regarding Israel and its violence against Palestinians. Today, those debates feel like artifacts. Israel’s leaders stripped away any pretense about the humanity of people in Gaza. For those of us who pleaded for restraint or simply tried to name the horror for what it was, the clarity now burns. This was evil, unvarnished and unapologetic. And it has permanently shaped a rising generation and spiritually anchored communities across the globe.

Meanwhile, our social media feeds are filled with the spectacle of an unmasked empire. We see a president boasting about overriding the sovereignty of other nations and pushing policies that echo the darkest chapters of western domination. The secretary of war mocks his own generals and bears a tattoo of a crusader cross. This administration openly embraces imperial imagery, with one official even circulating a meme casting the United States as Darth Vader on the world stage. One no longer needs a graduate seminar to diagnose the sickness. The empire declares itself.

And now, on our own streets, we are confronted by a third force: a militarized domestic army funded at levels surpassing most of the world’s militaries. Agents swarm neighborhoods with assault rifles, launch teargas into crowds, smash windows, arrest parents in front of their children and force people into unmarked vehicles. Again, the evil is not hiding. It is filmed, livestreamed and normalized. This is the new face of the American empire, an open embrace of domination and dehumanization.

The Four Ds framework emerged as a strategic response to this moment, seeking a collective U-turn away from authoritarianism and toward democratic renewal from below. It charts a path from authoritarian descent to democratic regeneration by disrupting the machinery of fear, delegitimizing its moral claim, generating defections from its alliances, and developing the world to come. While the Four Ds remain essential, they are not enough. Our movements also need a framework that speaks to the inner life of resistance, one that demands spiritual clarity and calls us to confront evil without exempting ourselves from its shadow. We need a language of collective repentance.

In Hebrew and Arabic, the words for repentance and atonement share the same root. Teshuvah and Tawbah both mean to turn back, to return to the Divine, to integrity, and to the moral center we abandon when fear, cynicism or complicity pull us away. The Four Ds have a spiritually rooted corollary that I have developed into the 4Rs. I offer them here in the spirit of that collective turning.

To disrupt. Authoritarian regimes depend on control. Disruption interrupts the machinery of oppression through non-violent civil resistance, collective non-cooperation, and public actions that expose contradictions within the system. Spiritually, disruption is a sacred refusal, the prophetic act of saying no to Pharaoh and grounding protest in spiritual discipline. With this in mind, I offer the first R: resonance. While disruption shakes structures of domination, resonance rebuilds the bonds of belonging. Resonance awakens the heart of the people through music, testimony, sacred gatherings and storytelling. It turns protest into poetry and solidarity into song, tuning our hearts to the same divine frequency.

To delegitimize. No authoritarian system survives without legitimacy. Delegitimization exposes corruption, violence and moral bankruptcy at the system’s core. Its sacred roots lie in truth-telling, naming false gods, stripping power of its sacred disguise and asserting that divine authority belongs to justice, not domination. To deepen this work, I offer the second R: reignite. To reignite is to revive the moral and spiritual flame that sustains organizing, multifaith mobilizations and our commitment to justice and mercy.

To cause defections. Systems collapse when their pillars of support crumble. Strategic defections persuade insiders to withdraw cooperation and shift loyalties. Spiritually, defections are moments of moral awakening that transform insiders into allies of justice guided by conscience rather than fear. The third R is reclamation. As pillars fall, movements must reclaim the sacred center. Reclamation brings forth ancestral traditions and resists the distortion of faith that has long been tied to oppressive regimes.

To develop alternatives. Resistance must not only dismantle tyranny but cultivate the world that comes after it. The work of building alternatives is itself a sacred act, rooted in love, compassion and the prophetic imagination. The fourth R is radical reimagination. To radically reimagine is to remember that our sacred traditions expand our sense of what is possible. Radical reimagination fuels cooperative economies, creative sanctuaries and artistic interventions that refuse to capitulate to evil.

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Together, the Four Rs call for a sacred renewal. They urge us to resonate with the people’s pulse, reignite the moral flame, reclaim the sacred center and radically reimagine the world to come. For many, this is no longer merely an act of political resistance but a movement toward revolutionary repentance, Teshuvah, and Tawbah, to repair our broken hearts, systems and world.

What’s giving me hope now

What sustains me in this moment is a quiet but undeniable truth: the prophetic and universal stories carried by our scholars, saints, sages, griots, hakawatis and sacred cypher keepers are as alive now as they have ever been. Even in the shadow of so much darkness, their beauty still beats in the hearts of people who are crossing borders and boundaries of every kind to stand, walk and organize together. This collective rising, rooted in ancient wisdom and animated by a new generation, reminds me that a more just and merciful world is not only imaginable but is already being born.