Pilgrimage through a Burning World: Spiritual Practice and Nonviolent Protest at the Nevada Test Site

Preface

For over two decades the Nevada Desert Experience has organized nonviolent direct action at the Nevada Test Site as part of the global movement to end nuclear testing. Nevada Desert Experience (NDE), a Franciscan-based organization, consciously integrates religious ritual and political action at the gates of the United States government’s primary nuclear proving ground in a remote corner of the Great American desert. This book explores NDE’s activity as a contemporary form of desert spirituality grappling with the interwoven religious and political challenges of an institutionalized and internalized nuclearism. In the fourth century C.E., the father and mother founders of Christian desert spirituality fled to the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts to engage in transformation of the self and reconceptualization of Christian discipleship in the face of the challenges posed by Roman late antiquity . In the twentieth century, the Nevada Desert Experience developed a contemporary desert spirituality of peacemaking, politics, and prayer at the gates of the U.S. government’s nuclear test site in southern Nevada in response to the spiritual and political crisis posed by atomic weapons. This study examines this contemporary religious movement and a number of its key practices contributing to personal and social transformation , including antinuclear pilgrimage, faith-based civil disobedience, and the Stations of the Nuclear Cross. The design, testing, and deployment of nuclear arms have been fueled for half a century by their proponents’ presupposition that weapons of mass destruction safeguard peace and security by deterring aggression. In an age of unimaginably colossal threat, it is held, only counterthreat keeps the world from plunging into the abyss of extermination . To reason otherwise is to retreat into misguided and dangerous fantasies of wishful thinking and appeasement. Those opposed to the development of nuclear weapons, it is argued, do not understand power and evil and their lethal combination. Over these same five decades a growing worldwide nuclear disarmament movement has emerged. The persistence and ubiquity of this effort attest not only to its steadfastness but also to its fundamental outlook . This movement, which has flourished on every continent in many ix Preface different forms for over fifty years, is not primarily animated by the stereotypical motives ascribed to it by pronuclear forces. Generally speaking, it has been neither isolationist nor fancifully pretending that a perfect world is just around the corner. It has been as much concerned with power and evil—and their deadly fusion—as have those who have built and maintained the world’s nuclear weapons systems. The difference between these two positions is not that one side is cognizant of reality and the other is unaware of it. The difference lies in orientation. While nuclear proponents have maintained that such weapons increase security, nuclear opponents hold that they threaten it. Fear lies at the heart of the interlocking social, political, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of the regime of nuclear weaponry which, following the work of Robert J. Lifton, has been designated “nuclearism.” This fear provokes vertical and horizontal arms races between states. This fear stimulates attempts by states to win a clear advantage in this competition by seeking to develop first-strike weaponry. This fear can catalyze miscalculation and nuclear accident. And this fear puts the world on a new footing—a debilitating sense that there is no way back from the precipice, and that the world will forever be mired in the politics and culture of nuclearism. Beginning in the early 1980s a worldwide movement emerged to complete the task begun by the antinuclear testing effort of the 1950s and 1960s that had ended most above-ground testing by achieving The Partial Test Ban Treaty. Now, the modern antitesting movement sought a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Many organizations, networks, and communities took nonviolent action at the Nevada Test Site—where over 900 nuclear bombs were detonated between 1951 and 1992—to dramatically call for a worldwide end to the testing of nuclear weapons. In addition to the Nevada Desert Experience, key grassroots anti-nuclear organizations included Greenpeace, the Nuclear Freeze Campaign, the American Peace Test, the Global Anti-Nuclear Alliance (GANA), the National Association of Radiation Survivors, the International Alliance of Atomic Veterans, and Abolition 2000. In addition, the preeminent inhabitants of the terrain on which the test site is situated—the Western Shoshone nation—have played an incalculably important role in resisting nuclear testing on the land it has never ceded to the U.S. government. Many organizations, networks, communities, and individuals have performed important service in...