Discerning the Peacemaking Way

Emily Provance on Reducing Election Violence

Emily Provance offers online and in-person workshops, videos, and a newsletter about preventing election violence. Provance is a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York City, part of New York Yearly Meeting, and she is an associate of Good News Associates. She is also a member of Braver Angels, a nonprofit dedicated to political depolarization, and participated in the Braver Angels national convention this past June. Friends Journal staff writer Sharlee DiMenichi spoke with Provance via Zoom on July 18, 2024, five days after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt while he was speaking at an open-air campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. The attacker used a semi-automatic rifle. The interview has been lightly edited. A condensed version of the following appears in the October 2024 print edition.

Sharlee DiMenichi: What have Friends historically done in the United States and other countries to prevent election violence?

Emily Provance: To my knowledge, Friends have not historically done very much in the United States to prevent election violence, although we have certainly been very active in preventing or addressing violence in a lot of other ways. But there has been a considerable history of leadership in Kenya among Kenyan Friends in preventing election violence, and they have done a lot of work: not just in putting best practices into place but in discovering best practices, so that we talk about what can be done here. A lot of research is coming out of Kenya and a few other countries that have been doing this work for the past couple of decades.

SD: What do experts suggest an individual citizen can do to prevent or respond to election violence?

EP: One of the most important things we can do is recognize that election violence comes from the general conditions of the society. Trying to identify a single person or group of people and pin the blame on them is a fundamentally unhelpful thing to do if our goal is actually to prevent violence. It is not the case that all people are equally responsible—that’s not the argument I’m making. But we do need to look at the specific behaviors that cause problems and how we can address them rather than believing ourselves to be uninvolved and powerless.

The first thing we know that causes election violence is an overall tone, especially among politicians, in talking about who is to blame, rather than suggesting specific solutions. That tends to cause violence, because inducing fear and anger and “othering” feelings in people in a country allows for the possibility of mutual dehumanization. We start to divide, and we start to say, Our group is good; that group is evil. And that dehumanization makes it possible to be violent against one another.

It’s actually very hard to be violent with a person whom you recognize as another full person. We interrupt that by simply refusing to accept the narrative that this other group of people is collectively bad. So when we are hearing that kind of blame-based rhetoric and that kind of stereotyping, we can react by saying, I know that this is a politician or a candidate trying to make me afraid. And rather than accepting what they’re saying, I am going to step out and get to know people within this other group and actually build mutual relationships. That’s not political compromise; it’s simply the act of talking to each other and being in relationship with each other. We are not magnifying rumors. And if we know each other, we are able to check in and say, This is going off the rails in our community. So let’s take a minute to breathe together and talk about what we can do so that it doesn’t become violent. What I talk about a lot is disagreeing passionately but without encouraging violent acts.

The second general cause of election violence is recent history of election violence, which the United States experienced to an extent in 2020 and in 2022. Before the attempted assassination of former President Trump, we were already experiencing election violence, because the definition of that includes severe threats and intimidation, and that was happening to our election officials regularly.

The reason why a recent history of election violence tends to lead to future election violence is because we start to develop a narrative in our minds that violence is normal, and that violence may be necessary. That comes from the idea of redemptive violence: They were violent first, so we must be violent in return.

We Friends know that that isn’t true, but it’s a very common narrative in our society. This is also something we can interrupt. We use peace messaging developed locally in order to interrupt the idea that violence is normal. It is not normal.

We can also use voter education, civic education, and training in nonviolent protests. We can make sure that everyone has as many nonviolent options as possible to address their concerns about the government. This makes the nonviolent option as easy to choose as possible, and counteracts the idea that violence may be necessary.

The last commonly recognized cause of election violence is people doubting the legitimacy of the government. This is absolutely something that’s happening in the United States, and it is not only happening among conservatives. We have a lot of conservatives questioning the legitimacy of the executive branch, but we have many liberals questioning the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Both of those are trends that are likely to lead to election violence. I want to name here that this is not about whether these doubts are real; it’s not about whether they’re true. It’s about the fact that people have these perceptions. So the only thing we can do to counteract perceptions that the government is not legitimate is to address people’s real concerns, and specifically, we do that through election reform. But it is not enough to reform elections in the way that conservatives would like us to or to reform elections in the way that liberals would like us to.

What we actually have to do is go through a comprehensive plan that will address the concerns of both sides, which means we have to address both election access and election security in order to create a world where all of us are prepared to have faith in the legitimacy of our government. The best resource that I know for that is something called the Braver Angels Trustworthy Elections Report, a comprehensive plan developed and approved by ordinary people on both sides of the aisle.

SD: What motivated you initially to get involved in preventing election violence?

EP: For me, this began around the spring of 2023. It was what I can only describe as a spiritual concern. At the point that I started thinking about it, I did not know that “election violence” is a technical term with a particular meaning. And I did not know very much about either its causes or what we can do about it. What I knew was that I was feeling a leading to find out. I also knew it wasn’t ridiculous, because I knew that Kenyan Friends have been doing it for many years. So that’s where I started, and then I also did quite a lot of other research from other international practitioners and studies to understand the scope and work of this particular discipline. But it started with just a spiritual prompting that this was something to pay attention to.

SD: Which spiritual practices sustain you in your work?

EP: It’s a lot about worship. It’s about physical movement, walking. I have a support committee that I meet with regularly. One of my most important spiritual practices in the last year has been very intentionally going out of my way to meet people I would not otherwise meet and allowing my assumptions about them to be challenged. If I spend time with a new group of people doing a new thing, I find that I’m stretched and have a better understanding of the complexity and the humanity of everyone in this country. That is an enormously helpful spiritual practice.

SD: How does the work you’re doing connect with your Quaker values?

EP: I don’t normally think about things in terms of Quaker values. I think about them in terms of Quaker faith and the leadings of Spirit, but here’s what I can say: when I look back in our history at a lot of different times of very serious conflict, one of the things I notice is Quakers’ determination to articulate another way—what some would call “the third way” or what I might call “God’s way” or “a peace way”—very often gets us attacked by both sides of the conflict. We are asking if there is an eternal principle that is more important than what is leading to violence at this moment in time. That’s something I resonate with very much, because I do see both sides saying, What you are articulating about this third way cannot possibly be right. I respect that—that’s where other people might be coming from. It also tells me that the peacemaking way is often going to experience that kind of backlash. That’s something I know happened to our Quaker ancestors as well.

SD: What would you describe as the most common misconceptions Quakers hold about election violence?

EP: That it’s somebody else’s fault, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It is not the case that there is a single person or group of people whose fault this entirely is. That simply isn’t true. And it is also not true that there’s nothing that ordinary people can do. There is quite a lot that ordinary people can do. So I’d say that that is the most common misconception.

SD: Given that most people in the United States oppose election violence, why does it still happen?

EP: Because people do not understand that the ways they talk about each other, and their commitment to not engaging with the quote-unquote “other” is actually the force that leads to this kind of violence. People are not doing this intentionally, but they are feeding it. Every time we say, I will not engage with that other, and every time I make assumptions about another group of people—the stereotypes, the dismissing, the ridiculing—that is what drives a society to experience violence. There’s this idea that we need to reach this very small number of people that do want violence, and that is the way forward. In fact, this is not a terribly helpful strategy. The people that we need to be working with are the people who can be influenced one way or the other, according to the conditions around them, as well as the people who are committed to nonviolence but don’t know how to advance that agenda.

SD: How do rumors and guesses about incidents such as the shooting of Donald Trump contribute to an increase in violence?

EP: When we are spreading rumors and making guesses and participating in conjecture, we are feeding that kind of “othering” energy. We are scaring one another and driving each other into a sort of instinctive place where we say, I want to just surround myself with people who agree with me and feel safe and then build up little walls and not let anybody else in. That’s a natural instinct when we’re scared. It’s not wrong to have that instinct. But again, the more that we subgroup ourselves like this, the more we’re operating from assumptions about other groups of people. And again, that’s what goes into that dehumanizing cycle that makes violence possible.

If we speak with absolute integrity at all times, saying things like, I do not know why someone attempted to assassinate Donald Trump because I was not inside his head. But here’s what I know about how I am going to choose to behave today and tomorrow, then that is a way forward. That has a lot more chance of getting us through this without violence and getting us through this in a way that can be making peace.

SD: In your participation with Braver Angels, what methods were used to help people of different political persuasions to arrive at shared values and suggested solutions?

EP: I did not participate in the creation of this report [the Braver Angels Trustworthy Elections Report], but I can talk about what some of those strategies were. It started with a willingness of people to simply sit in a room together and talk about election reform. They discovered that there were a fair number of things they already had in common, that they could already collectively affirm. The really important piece that happened in the progress of the conversations was when people got to the point of being able to say something like the following: I do not believe that this thing you are saying is important, but I do believe that you are important, and I understand that it is important to you. For that reason (because I see how much it matters to you and because I do not believe that it will cause harm), I can affirm the necessity of doing it so that we can walk forward together.

SD: What advice would you like to give to journalists covering incidents such as the shooting of Donald Trump or the January 6 attack at the Capitol?

EP: I think that journalists are in an incredibly difficult position. Part of the reason for that is because so many journalists are being asked to behave in ways that contribute to additional ad revenue, so that they can, frankly, keep their jobs. I think that’s happening to a lot of reporters. And all I can say is it is not the journalists’ fault that those incentives exist. But when a journalist only subscribes to those incentives and does not step back and say, Integrity in reporting is more important than whether or not I keep my job, then at that point, the messages that come out are dividing us and increasing the likelihood of violence. Journalists have enormous power, and exercising the power in a way that can heal may have serious personal costs to them. And I recognize that.

SD: What else would you like to add?

EP: I think it helps to point out that “election violence” is a technical term. We’re talking about physical violence, severe threats and intimidation, and destruction of property if these things are either intended to motivate the election cycle or are caused by the election cycle. It’s important to name the definition because many people either under define it or over define it. There is also this impression that it will only apply to things that happen on election day and that is not the case.