Is All Protest Work Morally Equal?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Often used as a tool for raising public awareness about issues that are deemed morally dubious, protests have a long and storied tradition in the history of social change in the United States. The recent ubiquity of protesting and counter-protesting in American public life has raised to the problem of false equivalency, leaving bystanders sometimes confused about how to evaluate the respective “protest” movements. In this piece, I briefly root the history and moral meaning of protest work in the Protestant Reformation and outline a set of questions that can serve as criteria for evaluating whether the moral work of contemporary protest movements is morally efficacious or morally destructive.