What could break the endless cycle of injustice? The prophetic myth of Judaism and Christianity, both of which required “the spiritual discipline against resentment.” Such a discipline discriminated “between the evils of a social system…and the individuals who are involved in it.” Niebuhr, for example, pointed to the ways in which the South had been galvanized against abolition when the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned slaveholders as sinners. “But individuals,” Niebuhr argued, “are never as immoral as the social situations in which they are involved and which they symbolise.” In making this distinction, we find profound and ultimate unities by recognizing the adversary’s humanity. Solidarity can be found not in common interests but in an awakened sense of common human frailty. “The evil in the foe is also in the self.” This, together with the concomitant “appreciation of all human life as possessing transcendent worth, created attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties. It binds human beings together by reminded them of the common roots and similar character of both their vices and their virtues.
The spiritual discipline against resentment also entailed the counterintuitive renunciation of resentment on the part of the victim. Victims of injustice were entitled to resent their treatment but, lest it confer a claim of moral superiority that permitted them to seek revenge, they needed to repent every bit as much as their oppressors. None of this would bring an end to conflict, but it would “mitigate its cruelties.”
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 167.