Across the United States, a profound shift is occurring within activist circles. Organisers from veteran campaigners to young protesters are carrying a weightier, clearer, and more spiritually charged conviction than witnessed in over three decades of social justice work. There is a growing consensus that the nation is confronting unmistakable evil in its public life.
The horrors unfolding both domestically and internationally have sharpened collective sight, creating a deep understanding that resistance must be morally unwavering and spiritually grounded to be effective.
The Unmasked Faces of Modern Evil
This spiritual argument begins with a straightforward conviction: movements must reclaim a moral vocabulary that names evil plainly. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. understood this principle when he identified poverty, racism, and materialism as the "triple evils" devastating the national conscience. Today, we face a similar moment where evil stands fully exposed for those with spiritual integrity to witness.
Three primary forces are driving this clarity: the situation in Gaza, the unmasking of American empire, and domestic militarised policing.
For two years, the world has watched the systematic slaughter of civilians in Gaza—an industrial-scale cruelty executed by one of Earth's most powerful militaries. The devastation has been permitted by the United States and carried out with American weapons, political cover, and immunity. Where once people debated settler colonial frameworks regarding Israel, today such discussions feel like historical artifacts. Israel's leadership has stripped away any pretense about Palestinian humanity, revealing what many now recognise as unvarnished, unapologetic evil that has permanently shaped a rising generation.
Meanwhile, social media feeds display the spectacle of an unmasked empire. The current administration boasts about overriding other nations' sovereignty while pushing policies echoing the darkest chapters of Western domination. The Secretary of Defense bears a crusader cross tattoo, and officials circulate memes casting the United States as Darth Vader on the world stage. The empire now openly declares itself without requiring sophisticated analysis to diagnose its sickness.
On American streets, a third force confronts citizens: a militarised domestic army funded at levels surpassing most global militaries. Agents swarm neighbourhoods with assault rifles, launch teargas into crowds, smash windows, arrest parents before their children, and force people into unmarked vehicles. This evil isn't hidden—it's filmed, livestreamed, and normalised as the new face of American empire's open embrace of domination and dehumanisation.
From Political Strategy to Spiritual Renewal
The Four Ds framework emerged as a strategic response to this authoritarian moment, charting a path from democratic decline to renewal through disrupting fear machinery, delegitimizing moral claims, generating defections from alliances, and developing alternative systems. While politically essential, this framework alone proves insufficient.
Movements require a complementary framework addressing the inner life of resistance—one demanding spiritual clarity and confronting evil without exempting ourselves from its shadow. This necessitates a language of collective repentance, known in Hebrew as Teshuvah and Arabic as Tawbah, both meaning to turn back to divine integrity and the moral centre abandoned when fear or complicity pull us away.
The Four Ds find their spiritually rooted counterpart in the 4Rs, developed as a collective turning toward sacred renewal:
Resonance complements disruption. While disruption shakes domination structures through non-violent civil resistance, resonance rebuilds belonging bonds through music, testimony, sacred gatherings, and storytelling—turning protest into poetry and solidarity into song.
Reignite deepens delegitimization. Beyond exposing systemic corruption and moral bankruptcy, reigniting revives the moral and spiritual flame sustaining organising, multifaith mobilisations, and commitments to justice and mercy.
Reclamation follows defections. As system pillars crumble through moral awakenings, movements must reclaim the sacred centre by bringing forth ancestral traditions and resisting faith distortions long tied to oppressive regimes.
Radical Reimagination advances alternative development. This fourth R remembers that sacred traditions expand our sense of possibility, fueling cooperative economies, creative sanctuaries, and artistic interventions refusing to capitulate to evil.
The Hope of Collective Rising
What sustains hope in this dark moment is a quiet but undeniable truth: the prophetic stories carried by scholars, saints, sages, griots, and sacred storytellers remain vibrantly alive. Even amidst profound darkness, their beauty beats in hearts of people crossing all borders and boundaries to stand, walk, and organise together.
This collective rising, rooted in ancient wisdom and animated by new generations, confirms that a more just and merciful world is not only imaginable but already being born. For many, this represents more than political resistance—it's a movement toward revolutionary repentance, a Teshuvah and Tawbah to repair broken hearts, systems, and our world.
