Invisible Violence
“Homeless Jesus” by Timothy Schmalz which we saw at The Portico in Tampa, FL (Dec. 2024)
Erin Dooley serves as co-founder of BLK South. With over twenty years of experience in nonprofit leadership, pastoral ministry, and strategic communications, Erin has worked extensively in faith-based and community-driven initiatives. She has served as a Co-Pastor at Kaleo Phoenix Church, Clergy Engagement & Communications Manager at Corazón, and a brand strategist and content producer. Currently pursuing a Master of Community Leadership at Eden Theological Seminary (graduating spring 2026), she is a scholar in the making, passionate about the intersection of theology, human behavior, and social transformation. Erin’s work focuses on creating spaces that cultivate healing, belonging, and liberation, particularly for historically marginalized communities. Learn More
I recently watched a powerful conversation hosted by Valley and Mountain Fellowship between Rev. Osagyefo Sekou and Rev. Erica N. Williams. The interview invited me into a deeper reflection on the concept of invisible violence. Rev. Williams, a distinguished theologian, social justice organizer, and public intellectual, speaks with such precision about the violence that often goes unnamed and therefore unchecked.
We are so captivated by the violence we can see—gunfire, protests, burning buildings, police brutality—that we have built entire systems of moral reasoning around it. Our collective consciousness creates narratives to explain what we are witnessing. But I wonder if perhaps the solution to the violence we can see lies not in moralizing it differently, but in addressing the deeper violence we cannot see.
Visible violence arrests our attention and demands judgment. It's the Black man’s body lying in the street. It’s the White officer pulling the trigger. It’s the image of a mother wailing behind yellow tape. These are the headlines, the footage, the evidence that sparks outrage, or worse, indifference.
But invisible violence is quieter. It hides in bureaucracy, in budgets, in zoning laws, in school funding disparities, and in militarized policing justified by fear that those harmed by empire will one day fight back. It’s the forced poverty of land, place, and people. It’s the structural design that makes certain neighborhoods food deserts and others Whole Foods havens. It’s how Raleigh, North Carolina justifies a $22 million police budget under the guise of safety while exploiting the poor to meet quotas that disproportionately impact Black and Brown bodies.
Rev. Erica N. Williams and Rev. Osagyefo Sekou at Valley & Mountain Fellowship
Rev. Breana Van Velzen, in a recent podcast interview we hosted, shared something they had learned in seminary—a phrase that’s stayed with me ever since: the “seduction of violence.” They credited someone else with the idea, but it resonated deeply. As I sat with it, I began to recognize how our societal formation has conditioned us to respond to violence with a knee-jerk sense of excitement—an urge that teaches us to crave it, desire it, recreate it, and execute it, over and over again. Even some of our religious beliefs may have led us to subconsciously believe that, for something to be “good,” it must be taken with violent force. Violence has become normalized—even spiritualized—especially within American culture and theology.
And then there’s scapegoating. We scapegoat the person who throws the brick while ignoring the decades of underfunding and neglect that led to the frustration. We scapegoat the person arrested for theft while ignoring the policies that manufactured scarcity and desperation. We scapegoat the father who left his three children unattended in a McDonald's during a job interview, instead of asking why he didn’t have enough money, support, or a community of care to help him pursue work without risking his children’s safety. Scapegoating, as theologian René Girard explains, is the ancient practice of placing communal blame on a singular, often marginalized figure to preserve social order. In modern terms, it means holding individuals accountable for systemic failures. It’s easier to name and punish a person than to dismantle an entire system.
So, we scapegoat visible violence for the invisible violence.
In reflecting on this, I’m increasingly proud of the work my husband Kendall is doing as he prepares for a PhD program focused on Howard Thurman. His independent research is a deep dive into Thurman's hermeneutic as a path toward understanding how African Americans have seen, practiced, and redefined mission. Kendall’s inquiry into Thurman’s work has influenced my own theological journey—especially Thurman’s insistence on the sacredness of what it means to be human.
The self immolation of Aaron Bushnell, an 'extreme protest' for Palestine in Washington
Recently, Kendall shared with me a piece by Peter Eisenstadt which sheds necessary light on Thurman’s strategic theology of non-violence:
“If the shock method fails to achieve its intended result, and if those in power respond with violence, there is always one remaining option, the highest form of nonviolence, what Gandhi told Thurman was the practice of ‘self-immolation,’ using one’s life as an ultimate witness against evil.
Thurman did not think practitioners of radical nonviolence should deliberately seek out personal suffering, but neither should they try to avoid it. It is, Thurman wrote, ‘better to be killed than to kill,’ and ‘when society closes in on an individual and he is forced to compromise his life it is better to die.’ When one ‘has exhausted all of the strategies that are permitted to me,’ it ‘becomes necessary for me to register, with all of my passionate endeavor, my complete disapproval of an evil world.’ This was what Jesus did, ‘without morbidity, without a martyr-complex.’
To take up the cause of social justice and equality without compromise was to ‘enter immediate candidacy for martyrdom on a cross on the hill outside the city wall.’ Any cause worth fighting for had to be one worth dying for. This, for Thurman, was the message of the life and death of Jesus.”
—Peter Eisenstadt, Against the Hounds of Hell: A Biography of Howard Thurman (University of Virginia Press, 2021), p. 180.
That concept made me think about Jesus.
What would happen if we viewed Jesus’ death not as a ‘necessary sacrifice’ but as an act of self-immolation? A deliberate, embodied protest against the logic of empire and death? Jesus bore the weight of visible violence—crucifixion, state-sanctioned execution—but in doing so, He exposed the deeper, invisible violence at the heart of the Roman Empire and religious gatekeeping. He showed us that love is the only force capable of confronting invisible violence without reproducing it.
I’m not suggesting that we all give ourselves over to self-immolation. Rather, I hope Thurman’s powerful point jolts us out of our society’s deeply ingrained tendency toward violence and forces us to imagine a different way—a way shaped by love, courage, and the refusal to mirror the systems we seek to change.
The way of Jesus, and the witness of those like Thurman, Rev. Williams, and Rev. Sekou, suggest that love is strategic, patient, and grounded in an ethic of mutual care and human dignity. Love sees what others don’t see—and it refuses to look away.
Heroes and saints like Dr. King and Oscar Romero were murdered not because they were violent, but because they dared to expose the invisible violence that holds unjust systems together. Their love disrupted the order of empire. Their truth-telling made the hidden visible.
As I sit with all of this, I invite you to reflect with me on two important questions:
What forms of invisible violence have I become desensitized to?
And what might love require of me in response?
R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G
