There is No Riot Here
On Campus Protests and Radical Hope
About the author: Jane Barter is a Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg. She has published two books of Christian theology: Lord, Giver of Life (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007) and Thinking Christ (Fortress Press, 2011). She is editor of the forthcoming Christology volume of T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology. She also has published extensively in the area of political theology.
Today, I helped pack my daughter’s bags for camping. Like countless times before, there was a long list of needed items—both for her and to share with fellow campers: sunscreen, rain gear, water bottles, flashlights, craft supplies, paints, paintbrushes, Bristol board, etc. Together, we dusted off her childhood craft supplies long abandoned in some dark corner of our basement. But this camping expedition was different. She is twenty-three now, but I am still anxious. The goal of her trip is not happiness; although I am sure there will be happy moments. And whereas I worried before about things like homesickness and wood ticks, my worries today are more profound and serious.
Last night, at another Canadian campus, the University of Calgary, police officers used shield, batons, and flashbang explosives to forcibly remove a peaceful encampment of pro-Palestinian student protestors. As the state forces closed in on them, the students began to chant, “Why are you in riot gear? There is no riot here.” Such scenes have been played out in campuses across the world against students whose only crime was protesting the incessant killing of Palestinian civilians.
Scenes such as these represent a showdown between two very different powers: one of militarized force; the other of persistent hope amid and despite such force. It is a hope that shows the armed police forces with their various powers of intimidation to be naught. For the power of hundreds of young people singing in solidarity with the most powerless and dispossessed people of the world display how all the riot gear, the carpet bombing, the missile strikes, the targeted blockades—are grimly unnecessary, inappropriate, and counterproductive. There is no riot here: there are only students who echo in their tents and tarps a population who has lived all their lives under the terror of militarism and precarity, a population most have never met, but for whom these students are willing to risk their comfort, their futures, and their safety.
While we in North America look far and we look long in the church for signs of sacramental life—of a life pointing beyond itself, of a life poured out for others—these students are willing to take up courageous action for the sake of the neighbour. There is no riot here: there is, in fact, its opposite—the breaking of bread, the singing of songs, the reading of poetry, and the creation of art. Despite the world which we have left them, young people persist in creating spaces of hospitality and creative and determined solidarity, in acts both miraculous and gratuitous.
One is tempted here to evoke Barth’s secular parable—those signs that God “may well have set up in both the outer and inner darkness which Christianity has overlooked in an unjustifiable excess of scepticism, to the detriment of itself and its cause.”1 I would go further: like many of Jesus’ parables themselves, these scenes speak about not just the Kingdom breaking forth in the most unlikely of places, but also just how far off the “faithful” are from its disclosure (Luke 10:2–37; Luke 18:9–14). The faithful overlook such signs not just to their detriment but to their very peril.
The kingdom of God comes not as a riot, and it is certainly not dressed in riot gear. It is heard in the voices of shared prayer and song in Hebrew, Arabic, Anishinaabe, and Cree, and all the languages of those gathered. The Kingdom of God is known in the breaking of matzoh and taboon and bannock in makeshift camp kitchens. Its words are written in crayon and marker and painted on Bristol board that these youth “will study war no more” (Isaiah 2:4). There is no riot here. There is only hope.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3, ed. Geoffrey Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (London: T&T Clark, 1972), 122.
What IS it with Canada and free speech at the moment??